Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisHighly anticipated poems from beloved contemporary poet Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier).In her latest collection, Dara Barrois/Dixon brings generous attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and the ways in which our stories around them help shape our sense of being.With the same tender honesty found in all of her poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express "love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage."Trade Review“Her directed and charged language is a reminder of how vital and vivid poetry can be.” —American Poet"Without pedantry or obfuscation, Wier’s lines cohere into a philosophical discourse about the poet’s relationship with the world." —Publishers Weekly, starred reviewTable of ContentsContents Part One If You Are Lucky Being Nervous Is Only Human Taking Sunset’s Sex Comes Where Inanimate Objects Have the Sturdiness of Intoxication Momentarily Evanesced Telepathic Kinesis Part Two Things Art Can Do, Part One and Part Two Simile for Its Own Sake Perfect Imitation of Something Familiar Thru Capitalism Waiting During the Time You Are Deceased A Few of the Crimes You’ve Committed Against My Heart Part Three Wanderlust, Heartache, Nostalgia, Burning Desire Trance of Sorrow Dusty Rabbits in Cosmos Borders I Feel Sorry for You Someone Said to Me Over and Over Again This Is What There Is I Have a Little Extra Mercy Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina Notes & Evidence Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisPart protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.

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Book SynopsisPart protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.

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Book Synopsis"Without the copying process," the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, "there would be no life, no reality." Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person's disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

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Book SynopsisIn her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.Trade Review"[Wolff’s poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they’re unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."— Bookforum"Wolff's [poetry has] nervy, controlled lyric bursts....Nearing yet swerving from bathos, [she is a poet with] a gift for shrewd summings-up."—Chicago Tribune"In a space where "It all happens so fast—/ ovulation, creation, cremation," a variety of poses, or figments, may seem all that is left. Wolff's poems manage to make embracing them seem like a genuine possibility."—Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsContents1The character of somethingexperiment in voice and character #1Experiment in Divination: Voice and Characterexperiment in voice and character #3Experiment in Voice and Character: “In the absence of general literacyExperiment: Institutional CritiqueThe Narrative of Their Execution/The Execution of Their Narrative2On Sunday I Water the Plantsif I were more orderlyI am the _____________Objective Reality Can Take Care of ItselfLike all my enthusiasmsRaga You BetThe Big Pic is a Total Art ShotScales have fallen from my eyesThe Singing RevolutionThe Lens of PorcelainSlight Return3Corrective: A CompanionWhat’s with the arid groundcontext is everythingThat’s not how my imagination worksAusterity Rabbit CageWill you disassociate with me?Political AnimalsHalloweenThe supernatural4rock heartThis was almost more excitementThis = ThisThere is Nothing Like a Good ShitUp Close & PersonalCheerful whistling of the kettleWhy do you inspirePeak ExperienceOkay, soMinus the SupernaturalReincarnationsClass ClownI know what I’ll do I’ll pretend you’re deadI am always trying to amuse youYet another perfect example of how it’s not all about me 645Institutional Memory: check your headProtecting my interestsIn your recent campaign against meAn Insult to BiologyMy Lawyer Said That I Should Call HerI was, objectively, a happier person, when I was with you.Visiting Friends6Shame on you for thinking people can’t changeIf I wanted something exquisiteDear JenWhy don’t you go down to Florida and look for your daddyHow do you objectify the dayYou are perfect for meWas It HubrisIt’s like kissing a dead manWhy I am not a BuddhistWizard of the Western WorldStart A BookAnt Life

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize LA SYRENA. For me home is in the water. When I go to the sea I want to swim forever and never look back. But I know I would die and the earth needs me on shore. My home is Syria and Syria for me is like the sea. I want nothing more than to jump in and swim around forever. In Syria I am declared wanted, like so many of us displaced lunar divas. The longing I feel is the deepest kind. It could crack the whole earth open. I am a Lumerian from Ancient Sumeria, a southern space creature in a northern world, LA SYRNENA, zhe is my destiny. In this collection, each poem flows like water on the page. The author weaves in stories و mantras و revolutionary messages و the movement of arabic letters و the memory of Sumerian cuneiform. This book is a hybrid creature between poem-story-form that crosses genres like it crosses dimensions. In this work, you are the mermaid. You are the forever migrant, a traveler between the oceanic and the extraterrestrial, across continents and planets. You are a time traveler, and you speak many languages. You are LA SYRENA, conjuring your own space to feel free.

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Book SynopsisThe Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.Table of ContentsInto Night I The Unseen Spotlight Safe Route Abscission PTSD Birthday, 1956 Shine The Dark Age of Providence Caesura Mam Recounts Family History This Morning, In the Mist The Time I Stole Dancing in the Stars Pocket Money Night Music Ode on an Onion Persimmons II Notes from the Forgotten Year Closed Hold Shadows Lair What I Learned Mississippi, 1964 Haiku Take This Leaf Longing Jack Higgs Walks Alone at Hindman Kept Things Persist Pyburn Creek Safety of Small Things Follow After Chemo #2 Neophyte Tobacco An East Tennessee Parking Lot III Remnants of a Saving Life Communion Drawn Cumberland Gap Above the Furnace The Farmer's Son Begs Relief Changeling Eclipse Solstice Bird Boy Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap Buick Reverie Menagerie First Morning Publications Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisThe Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.Table of ContentsInto Night I The Unseen Spotlight Safe Route Abscission PTSD Birthday, 1956 Shine The Dark Age of Providence Caesura Mam Recounts Family History This Morning, In the Mist The Time I Stole Dancing in the Stars Pocket Money Night Music Ode on an Onion Persimmons II Notes from the Forgotten Year Closed Hold Shadows Lair What I Learned Mississippi, 1964 Haiku Take This Leaf Longing Jack Higgs Walks Alone at Hindman Kept Things Persist Pyburn Creek Safety of Small Things Follow After Chemo #2 Neophyte Tobacco An East Tennessee Parking Lot III Remnants of a Saving Life Communion Drawn Cumberland Gap Above the Furnace The Farmer's Son Begs Relief Changeling Eclipse Solstice Bird Boy Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap Buick Reverie Menagerie First Morning Publications Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisA master of documentary poetry, Erika Meitner takes up the question of desire and intimacy in her latest collection of poems.In her previous five collections of poetry, Erika Meitner has established herself as one of America’s most incisive observers, cherished for her remarkable ability to temper catastrophe with tenderness. In her newest collection Useful Junk, Meitner considers what it means to be a sexual being in a world that sees women as invisible—as mothers, customers, passengers, worshippers, wives. These poems render our changing bodies as real and alive, shaped by the sense memories of long-lost lovers and the still thrilling touch of a spouse after years of parenthood, affirming that we are made of every intimate moment we have ever had. Letter poems to a younger poet interspersed throughout the collection question desire itself and how new technologies—Uber, sexting, Instagram—are reframing self-image and shifting the ratios of risk and reward in erotic encounters.With dauntless vulnerability, Meitner travels a world of strip malls, supermarkets, and subway platforms, remaining porous and open to the world, always returning to the intimacies rooted deep within the self as a shout against the dying earth. Boldly affirming that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, Useful Junk reminds us that our selves are made real and beautiful by our embodied experiences and that our desire is what keeps us alive.Trade Review“Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk is composed of poems that are tragicomic-erotic-nostalgic with a twist of existential dread and a cherry of wit on top. Meitner’s speaker is most comfortable, or most able to endure her discomfort, when she’s on the move, in airport terminals and on subway platforms, between the domestic present tense and the erotic subterfuge of memory, sex, and poetry, between selfhood and the selfie. These daring poems exist at the intersection of usefulness and junk, where I, you, and we are tenuously twined ‘together like an interrobang’ until we drop anchor or disappear.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets “There are so many layers of revelation embodied in Erika Meitner’s Useful Junk, and so many selves allowed to speak and shine here. This book is more than I thought a book could be. Sharp and funny and horny and transcendent and generous and human as hell, it is the very book of poems all my selves have been waiting for. ‘Listen,’ the poet says here, ‘we are making art because we want to inhabit everything / and not fear it.’ Done and done, Erika Meitner. Done and done.” —Carrie Fountain, author of The Life “Useful Junk is indisputably addictive, graced by the poet’s signature clutch on quirky, her dazzling and exhaustive range, and a dexterity with lyric that consistently upends the ordinary. An Erika Meitner poem is not only enviable art—it’s a loosening of what ties us to the ordinary. And the long-anticipated arrival of this new work is cause for unbridled celebration, a necessary reminder that great poetry always arrives just when we need it.” — Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art: Poems

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Book SynopsisAgainst a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body— we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal “flare,” which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet’s attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real. In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive.Trade Review“Who knew the apocalypse could be so fun? Jeannine Hall Gailey, that’s who. Our trenchant speaker, who ‘wrote a nuclear winter poem when I was seven,’ now in mid-life finds herself smack dab in the eye of a perfect storm: a mistaken terminal cancer diagnosis resolves itself into an MS diagnosis accessorized with a coronavirus crown. Yet these poems are deeply life-affirming, filled with foxes and fairytales and fig trees. Flare, Corona is a surprising, skilled, and big-hearted book.”— Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs and Poet Laureate of Mississippi“Everything really is connected is what I kept thinking as I read Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Flare,Corona. In it, the ecological crisis we face is felt in the marrow of the body, and ‘chronic illness’ becomes a phrase to characterize not only a human condition but our global one. Yet Hall Gailey faces personal and societal illness with characteristic deep feeling and humor, and I was struck by the search for hope and optimism undergirding these inviting, image-rich poems: ‘Look to the future—perhaps that glow you see isn’t fire, but sunrise.’” — Dana Levin, author of Now You Do Know Where You Are “The milieu of Flare, Corona, is at once literal and metaphorical: what blooms in the water and soil of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, ultimately blooms in the bodies of those who grew up there. This collection effortlessly toggles between what feels endangered in the macro-political scale of contemporary American society, and in the micro-medical reality of our speaker: ‘My first flare came on the week of the solar eclipse / when the shadow fell cold over us, and the birds stopped singing.’ What’s astonishing about this collection is how the poet showcases her trademark dark humor and vivid hyperbole—all the while pulling the reader in close to consider, frankly and with earned insight, the experience of chronic illness. Crafty uses of parallel structure and self-portraiture elevate personal narratives into poems that will outlive any apocalypse. This is an immersive, terrific read.”— Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode“We all have bodies that we know will fail on us, and we live in a world we know is riven by troubles. But how few of us really reckon with the body’s—and the body politic’s—failures until disaster strikes—for us or for a loved one. Flare, Corona is full of these dark facts, as Jeannine Hall Gailey grapples with her own illness and with an America, maybe a world, that seems to be falling apart. Yet in poem after full, fast, lush poem, Gailey keeps turning disaster into light, not at all to falsify the very real darkness, but to turn ethical, engaged attention to what is. This book is full of a life insisting on its own richness, carried out in spite of what can’t be avoided.”— Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied

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Book SynopsisFence poetry editor and rising star Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents is a must-read for poetry lovers and newbies alike. This is a useless Almanac. There’s no seasonal data, only poems good for leaving the club in haute couture with mid-level poets, for ambiguous sex, mouthy seductions, shoulder-turns of cold cock disrespect.Part confessional, part experimental, and completely original, Chang is a poet read in classrooms and on phone screens with equal fervor. Each poem deftly deforms self into outrageous performance. This poetry snaps and twists so fast you’ll miss things: the intricate formal craft, the bitchy wordplay. A dopamine rush delving into desire’s throbbing networks of flesh and circuit, identity, relationships, Aznness, queerdom, and more that would arouse Ashbery envy, Chang’s playful style is edgy, surprising, and delightful. In Chang’s world, sentiment is décor: come face the amusing ever-ache of our desires or go ahead and try to outrun them.Trade Review“Irreverent, immediate, and delectably shady.”—MARK BIBBINS“Take a multitude of hyperkinetic punchlines, excise all connective tissue, ('Most poems should be no words / Most poems too long & too explainy'), and all the old news images like horseshoe crabs, bone dust, and marrow, then 'suck & fuck / shop like Michael Jackson,' and caffeinate until its 'little bunny heart is pounding,' and you’ll have something resembling Michael Chang’s breakneck masterpiece Almanac of Useless Talents. I love Chang’s lexicon of text abbreviations, Chinese characters, smiley faces, and pop culture frippery which seed and aerate the undercurrent of lyric yearning with spontaneous typographic mini-bombs. Romanticism is blown up, as is romance— 'you said all of our love, could fit in a tiffany box, you meant this in a good way, i said so can a turd.' Beneath the delicious judginess and the literary criticism delivered with the energy of gossip is a foundation of political and literary acuity, rage, yes, and yes, pain, but in a dismal time, this book refuses to be dismal. 'Every day I live in fear of being misidentified as another Azn poet but then I realize there’s no one like me,' Chang writes, and it’s true. The ferocious brag is real, and it’s a helluva pushback on the forces of disappearance.”—DIANE SEUSS“Here comes Michael Chang’s superb Almanac of Useless Talents, sampling from our absurd and dangerous zeitgeist, daring you to say 'poetry shouldn’t talk like that' (or about that), hilariously insulting to various po- and show-biz celebrities, withering about white people’s antics, journeying way beyond 'sex positive' into a territory where sex is ubiquitous, omnivorous, fun(ny) (sometimes), ridiculous (often)—but still here, as in the old poetry about desire, not getting what one wants in the way one wants is a frequent source of pain. Radically non-dual—praising the most solicitous lover, who turns out to be Satan—and 'Always remembering not to give a damn,' Chang pulls the rug out from under sublimity, but equally from irony. If I’d had access to this wise book when I was 10, I would have been happier, and queerer, quicker.”—PATRICK DONNELLY“In case your motto is 'If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me,' save a seat for Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents. Irreverent, immediate, and delectably shady, Chang’s poems spare no one, whether they’re clocking celebrities or exes or poets (who all pretty much deserve it). This book isn’t just a whirlwind of spirited invective, although I’d still be fully entertained if it were, given how deftly Chang works in that mode. Look closer and you’ll find moments of tenderness and vulnerability too: 'Honesty is not a special place / But you would be there with me.'"—MARK BIBBINS“Michael Chang’s poetry collections are praised for their biting wit and humor, for their critique of injustice, for their juxtaposition of highbrow and low, for their velocity, their leaps, their sense of scale, for their sweeping range of style and subject and tone. The praise is well-earned and accurately describes Chang’s newest book, Almanac of Useless Talents. With stinging banter and righteous indignation, Chang calls out a system rigged against queerness, against people of color, drawing desire’s obsessive nature and its inevitable pain into sharp focus. Chang reminds us that the bawdy, the blunt, the quip are as much a part of poetry as the romantic, the eloquent, the aphoristic. Chang’s poems inspire us to critique what we love, not in spite of that love, but because of it.”—BLAS FALCONER“Overflowing with sass and razorsharp attitude, Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents sashays on the runway into a whirlwind world that’s part bacchanal, literary carousel, interrogation, TMZ, court proceeding, and carnival with a cast of plenty: Azns, 'white ppl & their holiday stories,' and boys, boys, boys as lovelorn love objects. If only dissatisfaction, jealousy, comeuppance, glee, and ennui can more often be rendered this decadently delicious!”—JOSEPH O. LEGASPI“Michael Chang writes, 'have to warn u tho / i kiss & tell,' and Almanac of Useless Talents proves that confession true. In this wonderfully horny book, Chang braids self-deprecation and self-confidence into short, sharp, and playful poems on sex, asianness, romance, pop culture, and queenery. In this book, we see a performance of fierce pride and the demand for the reader to submit to Chang’s will. But we also see, in all of these poems, a more subdued, more urgent request: so, can we be friends now?”—GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUÉ“An almanac, yes, but also a camp catalogue, a queer inventory, meteoric in its pace and opulence. It’s less of a reading experience and more of a dazzling trajectory. Buckle up.”—ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS“Michael Chang’s poems are unstoppable, electric and hyper-energetic. Almanac of Useless Talents is delightful and humorous, crafted with Chang’s unique way of queering languages, cultures, and literary tradition.”—NICHOLAS WONG

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Book Synopsis "I’m Always so Serious is brilliant.” —Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to Night,'” If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”Trade ReviewThe New York Times Book Review, "Editors' Choice"The New York Times Book Review, "9 New Books We Recommend This Week"The New York Times Book Review, "From Newcomers and Veterans, Four New Poetry Books Worth Your Time"Library Journal, "Black History Month: 10 Books To Add to the Collection and Share with Readers"Library Journal, "Celebrate National Poetry Month"Featured on "The Slowdown Show" with Major JacksonMs. Magazine, "The Best Poetry of the Last Year"The Poetry Question, "TPQ Best Poetry Collections of 2023"Southern Review of Books, "The Best Southern Books of February 2023”Brown Girl Collective Book Club, "Favorite Poetry Books""[R]ich with aphorism and rhetoric. . . .Starting and ending in her native New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, spanning many generations and stories, and folding in several spiky, multi-page forms, Karisma Price turns her first book. . . into an exciting start for what might be a stellar career."—Stephanie Burt for The New York Times Book Review"[C]an we recommend Karisma Price’s debut collection, I’m Always so Serious? To poetry lovers her title might seem to evoke Christian Wiman’s marvelous epic Being Serious (also worth reading!), but Price is very much staking her own ground here, on Southern soil blessed and haunted by the ghosts of forebears; her book summons everyone from James Baldwin to Gwendolyn Brooks to Beyoncé. I think you’ll like it."—Gregory Cowles for The New York Times Book Review, "Editors' Choice""This formally innovative collection rewards readers with its memorable and incisive reflections."—Publishers Weekly"In a distinctive debut illuminating Black life in the United States, Price offers a startling number of taut, to-the-point aperçus, working not so much by lyrical turn as by the captured moment, the homed-in-on truth of 'overworked fathers and damaged mothers,' the 'commonwealth of hooded children,' the murdered, the enslaved whose burial sites are unknown, the 'bodies [that] have been thrown away.'. . .An assured debut from a writer to watch."—Library Journal, "Celebrate National Poetry Month""Karisma Price’s debut, I’m Always so Serious, is an address to and through various beloveds."—Harriet Books through Poetry Foundation"Lyrical, ample, beloved."—Ms. Magazine, "The Best Poetry of the Last Year""The book is a tender but powerful thing, something you want to cradle and not drop."—Christopher Louis Romaguera for Ploughshares"To put it simply, Price offers a collection that should be in the running for every poetry award available this year. She writes with incredible precision, yet every poem feels impossibly natural, almost inevitable, as though the words were only ever meant to exist exactly as Price arranges them. I’m Always So Serious is among the best debuts in American poetry, and Price has established herself as one of the most preeminent voices of her generation."—The Poetry Question"Incredible. . . . I see myself returning to this touching book again and again."—Connie Pan for Book Riot, "Poetry Books for Nonfiction Lovers""Such a vivid, sui generis project!"—Julie Marie Wade, Tupelo Quarterly"I’m Always so Serious is a collection that will stun you, that will haunt you, that will leave you in tears but also with the courage to move on, with the knowledge that the poet cares that 'you are cared for.'"—Tiffany Troy, Tupelo Quarterly“Karisma Price speaks with a wink, a sigh, a knitted brow when she says she’s always so serious. She speaks as someone raised on a gumbo of James Baldwin and James Booker, Buckjumping and Brooklyn. She speaks as your phone’s autocorrect, your remixed song lyrics, your friendly neighborhood fortune teller. Price speaks directly to and for you while speaking distinctly for herself. These are the masterful portraits, mercurial testimonies, and verbal inventions of our imminent poet of the new school/south, the next generation. I’m Always so Serious is brilliant.” —Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead “In I’m Always so Serious, Karisma Price takes an unflinching look at personal, familial, racial, historical, and national violences in order to celebrate her survival of them. But Price is honest about the cost of that survival: ‘I refuse to make either of us cry in this poem so//I’ll just tell you that the willow weeps.’ These poems are intimate in ways that enlist our inclusion as readers in every line and scene. And yet, they are bold enough to mark and make clear a city as romantic and mythologized as New Orleans. This is a brilliant debut by a poet we should continue to watch.” —Jericho Brown, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Tradition “I’m Always so Serious is, naturally, bursting with humor. it laughs in the dark. It plays in the cemetery. In this stunning first collection, Karisma Price has crafted a voice that’s blunt and sharply observant, witty but earnest, and excitingly flexible. Whether lyrical, formal, or experimental, these poems approach language masterfully, with intimacy and adventure. Wry and introspective with painterly description and enormous heart; this book absolutely shines. It flaunts its black aliveness and revels while in anguish. It’s the tender part in conversation with the hard edge.” —Morgan Parker, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Magical Negro “‘Each of my days is a failed manifesto,’ Price writes in this fearless, bristling debut, and happily for us, this falling short of declaring herself conclusively means that her days yield poems instead of platforms—lyrics alive with striving and open to discovery, full of idiosyncrasy, insight and surprise. This isn’t to say that where the poet stands (politically and otherwise) is ever anything less than clear as day, but what she finds there is existence in all its telescoping complexity—the public sphere, the intimate; the minute detail and enormous truths; history’s voices still audible in the present; and above all, the saving grace of music and life’s ‘little sugars shining’ amid the pain of loss, loneliness, and injustice. As formally inventive as it is fully inhabited, I’m Always so Serious does what a first book should—it introduces us to a voice at once new and familiar, satisfies us deeply, and leaves us aching to hear what more the poet has to tell and eager to see how she tells it.” —Timothy Donnelly, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Cloud Corporation “In her vital debut I’m Always so Serious, Karisma Price assembles a choir. On the first page, Oppen duets with André 3000. Later, Homer and Baldwin croon. Throughout the collection, Price’s casts dazzle—Douglas Kearney, Ella Fitzgerald, Cher, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Ocean, and Ringo Starr all make important appearances. Price summons these titans to harmonize with her own singular and unforgettable voice, rendering a blooming bouquet of lyric moments I will never forget—lines like, ‘There is ample. / Ample is here.’ Like, ‘My father was a soft violence taken by a softer violence.’ Like, ‘Baby, I have broken the trees for you.’ I’m getting goosebumps just typing them now. These poems are better than good; they’re undeniable.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell “This book is the radiant debut of a true blues poet. Stitching together everyday objects, cherished wreckage and embodied memories, Karisma Price doesn’t have to raise her voice higher than a rich hum for us to hear the howl seething under every line in I’m Always so Serious. Be warned, though: in the precise and devastating moments that she does decide to unleash that unbridled rage, you will have no choice but to join her howl.” —Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to Bruise “Karisma Price’s poems are detail rich like a memoir that always exceeds comfort by letting things have their own true size and fact and if these deft poems were a government (and we lived ‘under’ it) we would be the lucky citizens of the only wild and just place on the planet.” —Eileen Myles, author of For Now “The poems in I’m Aways so Serious shimmer with formal dexterity, brim with literary innovation, and sing a new song of the South. There were times reading this book when I would finish a poem, look around, and audibly say ‘how did she just do that?’ Karisma Price is an astonishing writer, and this book is a fantastic debut.” —Clint Smith, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America “There are poetry collections and then there are poetry collections. I’m Always so Serious, Karisma Price’s striking debut, is the latter. If you’re a poet, you’ll wish you would’ve written ‘God watches me through a viewfinder whispering, It’ll be worse next time. It’ll be your mother.’ If you’re a reader, you’ll wonder, ‘how did she know “we are as lonely as every room/without a piano”’? I’m both a writer and reader of poems, and so am doubly floored. Price has written one hell of a first book.” —Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary Beast “Karisma Price has given us a phenomenal collection—inventive, exhilarating, and crackling with honesty—that is deeply worth our time and attention. But the real magic of I’m Always so Serious is its exquisite balance of tough questions with gorgeous pockets of hope. A breathtaking debut.” —Jami Attenberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Middlesteins “A book that navigates several locales and mythologies: Greek, New Orleans, and New York. Price is a technician of the intimate and the nuanced. She depicts the streets with as much genius as she revels within the fractured realm of the remembered. Poetry lovers should rejoice at the breathtaking inventiveness to be found on each page. I’m Always so Serious heralds the arrival of a brilliant voice that has come to dissect, reinterpret, and clarify. And this book will be dissected and paid homage to. I’m Always so Serious is a book of poetry that begs to be reread after the last page is turned. Gift I’m Always so Serious to your friends. They will thank you.” —Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You “Karisma Price’s I’m Always so Serious is an absolute force. With language so deftly selected, it’s a book where the self maintains its place gloriously at the center of the story, always insisting on its truth as its heartbeat drives the poem. Abundant with graceful language that speaks to life’s joys and sufferings, I’m Always so Serious tells the tale of a self that has lifted itself into a new sort of existence—one where poetry is within the heart of everything. The book resounds, ‘I wanted to hold your voice/ to my ear like a secret.’ You will find yourself holding the music of these poems to your ear like a prayer. I love this book and this poet, and you will, too.” —Dorothea Lasky, author of Animal “Karisma Price has written the book I've needed at every stage of my life. I’m Always so Serious brought me home and lifted me to those Black southern abundant places that raised and razed me. Rarely, if ever, do we get this much stylized wonder in one singular book. It’s incredible.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir “How does one begin to speak about poems that continue to speak, that continue to challenge, so long after the page is turned? I’m Always so Serious is a book of immense teachings—a stunning, tender debut that gathers us (in the Black sense) by the ear. Poems that can’t help but signify. They peer out from one vantage point and escape into another. Even now, I hear them ringing in my neighbor’s throat. This is the power of Karisma’s Black Southern poetics, and her rendering of adolescence where we learn so early that ‘everything is measured in blood.’ This book shows us what language can do, how it leaps in and against our favor. That’s no easy task, a testimony fueled by introspection where even the poet isn’t off the hook. This is what I mean by haunting work. We already know the facts. Karisma gives us the truth of the matter.” —Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow “In the opening pages of I’m Always so Serious, chairs appear frequently, which may be a subtle way of suggesting you ought to be sitting down as you read these wholly original poems that will undo you as you enter Karisma Price's acts of witness, love, protest, tenderness. The world of these poems is both familiar and strange, a world where domestic details take on the numinous, harrowing truth of her compassionate witness. Reading Price, who in one poem braids Baldwin and Homer together, you might recall Baldwin's words about empathy, a quality that pulses through these poems: ‘It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive.’ I am glad to be alive in the same space-time as Price, who is guide, companion, emcee, absence, love, pure audacity rowing us through Katrina’s floodwaters, through ‘the blue suede of the casket,’ ‘the clack clack of movement,’ and the rest of America, asking ‘In what way would you like to be devastated?’” —Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours “I’m Always So Serious honors its name with enduring elegies; love songs for the vulnerable; and fantastically formal verses that pinpoint what aches after the water has resolved its hunger, who bucks to the sound of their own clarion. Here, ‘History almost unchained itself/ from my weaker clavicle./ Everyone looked’ and instead of shying away, these poems navigate through an Odyssey of its own making: Black, tragic, and lit up from the inside with the possibility of family. ‘I tell you I want to exist/ without interference,’ she writes, and who are we to interfere with such an impressive debut?” —Phillip B. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior “Karisma Price’s poems unfold—like hands lifted in praise, like a sharpened pocket knife—into expansive litanies that catalogue and exalt Black life amidst so much loss. Everything I love, Price writes, stands with death. The exquisite self-portraits rendered here are shaded and contoured in relation to cherished communities of the dead and to the operations of white supremacy that have wrought such devastation: I exist with white / and static stars bursting in the center of my vision. This remarkable volume expands and contracts across home and displacement, across broken levees and Brooklyn sidewalks, across historical and surreal temporalities, charting the pulse of an American story so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.” —Deborah Paredez, author of Year of the Dog

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Book SynopsisFlower and flour. Coral and choral. Lashes and luscious. Frost & Pollen is a poetry collection in two acts: "Bloom & Martyr" is a sensuous walk through a menacing garden of flowers and desire, while "Foliage" retells the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the point of view of the Green Knight, the mysterious figure who teases and torments Gawain. By turns earthy and lush, and punctuated by dark and unsettling undercurrents, these poems converge into an engaging yet evasive feminine exploration of nature and sexuality.Trade Review"An impressive entry in Hajnoczky’s already quite impressive body of work."—Winnipeg Free Press "Composed with a wonderful lyric flourish and flow driven by a texture of gymnastic sound and cadence."—periodicities “Part eco-poetry, part Arthurian fan-fiction in verse, Frost & Pollen unfurls as a sustained meditation by a mature poet’s hand. At once erotic—imagine Georgia O’Keeffe’s floral paintings—and deliberately in dialogue with the earth, Hajnoczky presents a poetics that centres female pleasure and luxuriates in foliage, in imagery and language. Told partly from the perspective of the Green Knight, this work is mythical and imaginative, well-researched and deftly crafted. A delightful read.”—Klara du Plessis, author of Ekke and Hell Light Flesh “Frost & Pollen is a verdant efflorescence of words blooming over an understory of myth, the lush foliage of its language, of desire and the garden, nature and humankind, balanced between Eros and Thanatos, between intimacy and danger, power and libido. It is a delight and a rich satisfaction to stray in the remarkable life and beauty of its lines. This is poetry filled with the force (and music) that drives the green fuse.”—Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates and For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe “Hajnoczky’s language flowers with whorls of sonic splendour. In this embodied and ecological exploration, letters unfurl, and time collapses as medieval and millennial mysteries mingle in a forest of swerves that will leave readers enchanted. Touching her tongue to the roots of language, Hajnoczky deracinates exclusionary practices of listening, syntax, and meaning-making in a topology of rapture.”—Suzanne Zelazo, author of Lances All Alike and Parlance “Frost & Pollen continues Helen Hajnoczky’s spectacular interrogation of language and her experimentation with the porous boundaries between body and earth. Much like the language play of Gertrude Stein or Lisa Robertson, Hajnoczky’s text gives language an intimate flavour but also transmutes the familiar into the foreign. Her open questioning brings in subjects as diverse as female desire, botany, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tense with desire, these powerful poems show once again, that Hajnoczky’s poetic eye is impeccable and her voice is one of the most assured in Canadian poetry.”—Sandy Pool, author of Undark

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Book SynopsisIn Little Estuaries, Daniel Kramb goes in search for what’s fleeting between the shores. Amid a constantly shifting sense of what can be seen, sensed, experienced, the poet probes the estuary as sphere: an opening up, a possibility. Whittled down, like sea to stream, his poems emerge, in their own distinct form, estuary-shaped on the page. Intricate, at times playful, always open, these unassuming, small pieces reach beyond the confines, always returning to what’s undeniable, as body. Silt-smeared and salty, this is poetry not on landscape, but through it: formed not by what exists, but from what’s washed up within.

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Book SynopsisWritten over the course of a year in response to the National Gallery Singapore’s exhibitions, Madeleine Lee’s volume of ekphrastic poetry enacts the ways in which language may relate to art. Each poem is a vignette of a show; words compose, question and revision the visual in novel forms of their own making. The sum of this interplay between word and image is more expansive than its parts, and speaks to the generative force of intersecting mediums.

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