Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisThe first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poética Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica’s global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica’s art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.Trade ReviewAs this book reveals, Oiticica was interested in language as early as 1964—a discovery that will undoubtedly lead Oiticica scholars to reevaluate established perceptions of his development as an artist. -- Antonio Sergio Bessa * Author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing *Penned during the crucial years of Oiticica’s artistic and personal coming-of-age, these secret poems reveal a lyrical and intimate counterpoint to the transgressive interventions the artist staged in public during this same period. -- Irene V. Small * Author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame *As this elegant volume reminds us, the experience of language as an event is key to the not-so-secret poetics Oiticica’s work so staunchly enacts. -- Mónica De La Torre * Author of Repetition Nineteen *

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Book SynopsisThe five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid.Table of ContentsCONTENTS The Victorious Ones You Surround Me White Meadows The Shore Last Glimpse

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Book SynopsisLONG LISTED FOR THE 2021 POETRY BOOK AWARDThe second full-length title to award-winning poet and former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles Rhiannon McGavin.If the word stanza means “room,” then this book is an orchard. Former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, Rhiannon McGavin crafts poems with scraps of the everyday, from dream diaries to postcards. She integrates the facts of daily life into lyric verse, switching out traditional forms easily as trying on new sweaters. Led by emotions “real as the mosaic air between screen and projector,” McGavin explores what it means to become your own calendar.Trade Review"Rhiannon McGavin guides us on an emotionally rigorous excursion into the reflexive nature of language, powered by the voice of a seductress, taunting the senses with spell-binding imagery, at once engaging and mesmerizing." —James Ragan, poet and author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude. Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California

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Book SynopsisVia both associative lyrics and disjunctive narratives, Aflame looks to the intersection of T/time and experience, sex and fatherhood, husbandry and the cosmos, and whether the experiences Aflame dictates are quotidian or ecstatic, these poems stabilize and arrest.Trade Review“Gary McDowell writes “light can travel so fast/ but observation happens immediately” which is probably insight into his great gift as a poet: McDowell’s ability to see into the world of things and work with them or against them. Alfame takes this level of observation and puts it to work in both sinuous and staccato’d lines about the body and breath of his wife; his children; suburbia; a state park; aging; our political rights; and the city of Nashville where he lives. These poems move fluidly between narrative and fragmentation, between the body and the spirit’s flame. These are serious poems which seek to find, particularly in the long title poem, something about existence. This is poetry as ontology. Poetry as love letter. Something meandering between prayer and praise. It may sound corny but if not that ambitious, why even write? The stakes are always high in McDowell’s poems. Or how he tells us, “My daughter’s hand: how I know God is.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty, Judge 2019 White Pine Press Poetry Prize “Reading these poems, I am more than myself. I am etymology and egg, am the mysterious rabbit hole of fact, am as massive and tiny as a star. This book has the patience of a stone and the urgency of a library on fire. It is the prayer I wish could be written in cursive on God’s ear.” —Traci Brimhall on Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016) “Not one line in this collection of dispatches does less than delight and amaze. McDowell’s poems are wise and hilarious. I couldn’t stop reading them.” —David Dodd Lee on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014) “Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral has done the impossible—made an odyssey of the mind that is just as compelling as the eponymous one, only McDowell never leaves home. His ships and sorceresses and capricious gods are domestic. In this amazing undertaking, the poet regards his life, addressing his imagination,…thrilling us with aphorisms that pierce and pervert. ‘Pigeons cant’ tell the difference between night and a vision of night,’ McDowell writes. The difference makes no difference, he suggests, and that’s what makes this book, which is both odyssey and tapestry, poetry at its best.” —Larissa Szporluk on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014)Table of ContentsI. Desire and Keep Quiet / 7 Binary Code / 9 Sorrow from Far Away Is a Kind of Power / 10 Miranda Rights / 11 What If There Are Deer in the Afterlife? / 12 Upon a Concussion / 13 History Repeats Itself, As Seen from My Hotel Room Window / 15 Marriage, Ten Years In / 18 II. Aflame / 21 III. Long Hunter State Park, Late Winter / 39 Follow Me, Dear / 40 The Lazarus Reflex / 42 Sometimes Spilled Spices on a Countertop Look Like the Night Sky / 43 First Image of the Moon / 46 The Itch / 48 Reading Plath in Early April / 49 First Celestial Body / 50 Entrance to the Underworld / 53 IV. By Age 60 We Lose 200,000 Things / 57 Prayer Is Not Asking / 58 Palindrome / 60 Church / 61 Suburbia / 63 They All Chatter Mouthful / 64 Don’t Shoot the Messenger / 66 Winter in Nashville / 68 The Stars and Our Response / 70

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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 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 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 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 SynopsisA Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2020. A Review 31 Book of the Year 2020. With The Barbarians Arrive Today, Evan Jones has produced the classic English Cavafy for our age. Expertly translated from Modern Greek, this edition presents Cavafy's finest poems, short creative prose and autobiographical writings, offering unique insights into his life's work. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863-1933) was a minor civil servant who self-published and distributed his poems among friends; he is now regarded as one of the most significant poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an influence on writers across generations and languages. The broad, rich world of the Mediterranean and its complex history are his domain, its days and nights of desire and melancholy, ambition and failure - with art always at the centre of life.Trade Review'Do we need another Cavafy, the most translated of modern Greek poets? Surprisingly, Evan Jones shows us that the answer is a resounding 'yes.' Cavafy famously left behind a body of 154 'canonical poems,' a number corresponding conveniently with the number of Shakespeare's sonnets. But he also left us with 37 'repudiated' poems, some of which were composed in the synthetic literary 'katherevousa' register of Greek, 75 'hidden' poems, and 30 'unfinished' or 'imperfect' poems. Cavafy also wrote prose about some of the same subject matter, and that explored his ideas about poetry. Jones does not attempt to give us a complete overview of Cavafy's work, but by putting poems in thematic categories, and allowing 'hidden' poems to brush up against 'canonical' ones (one could note that the manuscript of 'The Horses of Achilles' and of the much less well known 'Priam's Night March' are written on two sides of the same piece of paper) we see them in a new, revealing light. Jones is sensitive not only to the sense, but the sound of the Greek, rhyming where the original does, and his afterword, while wearing its considerable scholarship lightly, reorients Cavafy's oeuvre for the reader. It is a great pleasure - one of the most important Cavafyian words - to have these poems and prose writings in one volume.' - A.E. Stallings; 'Evan Jones merits the rewards of modesty; not improving what needs no improvement, nor trumping the ace with jokers of his own, lean and keen he ghosts cleverly along, oddly angular Poet of the City on his arm.' - Frederic Raphael

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsA. America, you are so big, I feel endless What is the difference Light without her body Stained Glass Butterflies America, do you remember So much depends upon America, what do you hide Sus-toss The Country Who no Longer Wanted Her Children America, I visited Visit Conversation The Way I Pray to St. Catherine America, you made me in your image He Catches a Magic Fish A Man and a Woman in a Bedroom Once America, you watched me change Honey, this is the scary truth To the Foreign Woman... in the Post Office Dear Numbness America, here is the answer Dear One There once was a woman who wanted to be a better mother America, there will be nothing left Shame is a private punishment I Shame, Therefore I Am Wasn't it easier with less awareness? America, I love doing stupid things At some point you stopped The entire day I loved someone It's a Great Day to Burn, the Man Said Some Catastrophes Approach Slowly America, It's complicated 8th Floor Balcony Ghazal So, You Miss Your Depression I don't know America, if your eyes are dry Better Darling Everybody needs a pen America, what you have You'll be given everything, twice By the end of your life You look for proof America, if there were a rule The Body, the Collateral and in the morning, we saw a moth America, now I know We Must Be Very Careful When Using the Word Home Black Stone Over White Stone America, I don't know The Apple Who Wanted to Become a Pinecone A Dream America, would you be a part of me Imagine a raw egg Creative Spurt As I'm writing this America, I dally Bo from the Choctaw Nation What Happens to the Prophet B. Theorem: America is the greatest country in the world. Proof Conclusion Alternate ending Alternate conclusion Acknowledgements and Notes Brief Bio

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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 Synopsis“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” --Louise Gluck A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise GluckIn the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand

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Book Synopsis‘Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' Olivia Laing In this, her second anthology of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet’s enmeshment in a beloved city—New York—before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love.Trade ReviewNelson's writing is fluid – to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts * Praise for The Argonauts, Huffington Post *Maggie Nelson writes like no one else on the planet * Praise for The Argonauts, Jezebel *One of the great gifts of Nelson’s writing is how it embodies the process of her mind at work * Praise for The Argonauts, Los Angeles Review of Books *Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker * Praise for The Argonauts, Washington Post *Nelson’s poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts of humor; glamor and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time. * Elaine Equi *Maggie Nelson [is] so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time * Praise for The Argonauts, Karl Ove Knausgaard *I read The Argonauts in one breathless, tearful, mind-blown day and I'm still recovering * Praise for The Argonauts, Miranda July *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year""Provide[s] valuable context for Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece."---Michael Dirda, Washington Post"Stimulating. . . . Rasula's account wonderfully traces the evolution of literary thought, and his syntheses feel fresh and exciting. The result is a refreshing reappraisal of a classic." * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *"[What the Thunder Said is] adding more weight to the headstone that marks Eliot."---James Matthew Wilson, New Criterion"The book demonstrates [Rasula’s] uncommon ability to compress highly complicated artistic, cultural, and intellectual histories into accessible and enjoyable prose."---Daniel Kraft, On the Seawall"Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem."---Marshal Zeringue, Campaign for the American Reader"Rasula makes the case for The Waste Land‘s lasting revolutionary impact in his engaging and insightful, if occasionally discursive, study."---Peter Keough, Arts Fuse"The book is much more than its title suggests, sympathetically conveying a whole complex literary world marked by revolutionary intensity." * Paradigm Explorer *"[What the Thunder Said] confirms Rasula's position as the US's most wide-ranging and aculturally astute historian of modernism." * Choice *"What the Thunder Said is an energetic book bristling with ideas and arguments."---Jason Harding, American Literary History

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The magnificent work of one of the most important contemporary novelists, essayists, and poets in the field of what we in Europe and North America call postcolonial literature."—American Book Review"Reading or re-reading these texts, published over half a century, one is struck by the power of this poetry, the extraordinary persistence in its original inspiration and the manner in which it announces and then exemplifies the theories developed in Poetics of Relation or Caribbean Discourse."—Literature and Arts of the Americas

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Book SynopsisA Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as "artifacts." These are poems in hindsight.Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry's "natural" inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees—and the relations they make possible—suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings. What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror?Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species—but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playingwith Bees covets what's left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.Trade ReviewIn the introduction to this new collection of poems, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, RK Fauth tells us that the subsequent verses are 'artifacts' of a fictional world. The book itself is more of an assemblage of testimonies that support the imagined environment—a group of artifacts (poems) uncovered in the same archeological (fabled) context. In the aftermath of this chimerical calamity, the writer finds a space of infinite reflection wherein the intrinsic values of these precious creatures are examined in hindsight. The poetry doesn’t follow the literal echoes of such a loss as much as the infinitude of metaphorical and cultural ripples, growing the more they spread through our dreams, our language, and our identities. In Fauth’s brilliant collection of unearthed, lyrical artifacts, the poetry is volcanic and mesmerizing as it exposes the truth about our language—that it needs to be expressed to and for someone who can act, and that it exists in that space between and among things, in the relations between us. Fauth’s poems guide us through the work needed to be done to reach out simply by looking in."—Mikal Wix, West Trade Review (January 2024)

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Book SynopsisFROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYWhen My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.Stolen cowboy boots, violins on fire; a mariachi band playing in the bathroom, a black bayonet carried between the shoulder blades; the beauty of busted fruit, the sight of hellish visions - Diaz both revels and reveals through her distinctive use of language and imagery, bringing to life every intimate and communal encounter, blooming abundance from scarcitTrade Review'She is a poet who understands tradition but is not beholden to it. She is a poet who will help us write into the future as she excavates the past and interrogates the present.' - Adrian Matejka, Poetry Society of America'Her work is a kind of confession, but also an assertion.' - Spectator

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1928, The Tower was Yeats's first collection published after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923, and it is perhaps the major work that most cemented his reputation as one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century. The titular poem, 'The Tower', refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917, and which formed the basis of the original cover design - evoked in the cover of this edition. The collection also includes some of his most inventive and profound work, and develops deep themes regarding life, love and myth. With explanatory notes, this edition seeks to bring the collection to a greater readership and to offer a more profound understanding of the great poet’s work.Trade Review'His verse is inspired, his poetic persona is magnificent.' (Peter Ackroyd, The Times) 'Together with Joyce, Yeats made modern Irish poetry possible.' (Timothy Webb)

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDSBeautiful, haunting, thought-provoking A book I will return to again and again' Bernardine EvaristoA gorgeously produced, hugely original examination of Black Britishness in the 21st centuryWhat is Black Britain?In 2021, award-winning poet Roger Robinson and acclaimed photographer Johny Pitts rented a red Mini Cooper and decided to follow the coast clockwise in search of an answer to this question. Leaving London, they followed the River Thames east towards Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948. Too often, that is where the history told about Black Britain begins and ends but Robinson and Pitts continued out of London, following the coast clockwise through Margate to Land's End, Bristol to Blackpool, Glasgow to John O'Groats and Scarborough to Southend on Sea. Here, the authors found not only Black British culture long overlooked in official narratives of Britain, but also the history of Empire and transatlantic slavery to which everTrade Review’This beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking fusion of poetry and photography offers us layers of society, the self, the subconscious and Britishness from a Black perspective. It’s a book I will return to again and again’ Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other ’Home is Not a Place has echoes of The Sweet Flypaper of Life but to compare them would do this work a disservice. It is a thing of brilliance, with its own immersive energy, pulling the reader in and allowing them to wander around the world of Black Britain created on these pages. In the authors’ hands, the quotidian becomes transcendent. Robinson’s words are as careful as they are masterful; Pitt’s casual gaze is warm and conversational. This is a book I have been waiting for’ Caleb Azumah Nelson, Costa Book Award-winning author of Open Water ‘Rich and evocative … Pitt’s photos capture the beauty of Black British culture’ Dazed – Praise for Afropean by Johny Pitts Winner of the Jhalak Prize 'A revelation' Owen Jones 'Afropean seizes the blur of contradictions that have obscured Europe's relationship with blackness and paints it into something new, confident and lyrical' Afua Hirsch A Guardian, New Statesman and BBC History Magazine Best Book of 2019 – Praise for A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson WINNER OF THE TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE 2019 WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020 'Ranging from the most breath-taking poems about the Grenfell Tower fire to the most exquisitely moving poems about the premature birth of his son, who had to fight for his life in an incubator. His poems are deep, mature, moving and inventive.' Bernadine Evaristo for New Statesman

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Book SynopsisA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.Trade ReviewPraise for Meltwater "Wahmanholm delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review“Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting… Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planet’s forecast”—Racket“Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva“Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is ‘a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.’”—Allison Flory, Arkansas International“Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.”—Monica Youn“In Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s ecology, and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything that is ‘us’: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that ‘you are grass,’ I know it.”—Éireann LorsungPraise for Redmouth“Claire Wahmanholm’s book, Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she ‘can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.’ There’s simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where ‘mountains have unraveled into sand’ to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang“Redmouth is singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: ‘I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me.’ This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.”—Shane McCrae“Redmouth is a book of lush privacies, of ‘lamb-lioned’ promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). ‘The doe [is] a torch in the garden,’ she writes at one point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.”—G.C. Waldrep“‘Let all / Headlong fall from this / song,’ Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems, Redmouth, which blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s absence, which ‘clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides.’ There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven ‘to the edge of a cliff’ and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, ‘crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws.’ But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: ‘If of sunflowers.’”—Nomi StonePraise for Wilder “Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going. And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making. As the speaker of one poem says, ‘We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.’ And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.”—Rick Barot“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”—MAYDAY Magazine “Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell “Wilder is a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journey—continuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.”—Sun Yung Shin“Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.” —Maggie SmithTable of ContentsO HungerYou Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill YouGlacierMeltwaterMIn a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I DiedMeltwaterMetamorphosis with Milk and SugarIn a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an AutotomistPoem That Cries WolfGlacierMeltwaterStarlingMore RabbitsPrimerThe Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the TreeMeltwaterThe New HorticultureGlacierApotropaeiIn A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting ItThe Sun, the ShipMeltwaterAt the End We Turn Into TreesGlossary of What I’ll MissThe New FearThe New LanguageGlacierMeltwaterPDeathbed Dream with Extinction ListIf Anyone AsksIn Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth ChildrenPoem With No Children In itMeltwaterThe FutureMeltwater:The Empty UniverseXYZ NotesAcknowledgments

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Book SynopsisIn these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities. Trade ReviewPoetry translation is such tricky and unappreciated work—“translation is impossible,” Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick declare in their introduction to a volume of Ernst Meister's work in which they've performed that exact miracle. —Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry ReviewLike his subject matter, Meister’s writing is ominous, intangible, and inescapable. —Publishers WeeklyMeister compacts a meditation on the nature of space, nothingness and our interaction with the two in the work’s sparse, dense lines. —Lindsay Choi, The Daily Californian

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Book Synopsis'A la lumiere d'hiver' (1977) is a central work in the writing of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). Written in middle age, it forms a bridge between the poet's intricate early lyrics and his more expansive and meditative later work. Starting from a direct confrontation with the raw facts of mortality, its three poem-sequences strip away further layers of illusion until a glimmer of meaning starts to appear in the 'winter light' of the landscape of the Drome area of northern Provence, where Jaccottet made his home from 1953 until the end of his life. Tim Dooley's translation, 'In Winter Light', is the product of a long relationship with the original, which he first read at the time of its publication. His English version mirrors the tentative, scrupulous exploration of being he finds in Jaccottet's French, both its hesitancies and circular movements and, finally, its 'unblinking eyes'.Trade Review'In this fine translation of Phillipe Jaccottet's elegiac three-part collection Tim Dooley wonderfully combines the grace of his own attentive poetics with a clear intimacy of understanding. In his hands, In Winter Light relays Jaccottet's lucidly charged journey through loss and mourning in language that's as close to the ear as it is to the imagination and the heart' - Jane Draycott; 'Philippe Jaccottet often employs a negative theology in which attempts at simile are discarded in the imperative to arrive at the mot juste - considered both as language and as philosophical position. Tim Dooley is alert to this ascesis, and his translations seem to me quite excellent: they are chaste, rhythmically sound, and retain the constant decorum that is a chief quality of this quiet, essential voice' - Stephen RomerTable of ContentsIntroduction: 'In the old days it would be called song' The Lessons Songs from down there In Winter Light

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Book Synopsis''Extremely funny'' Sunday Telegraph _____________________________A poet is a rock star without the sex''n''drugs, or the rock''n''roll. But that never stopped Simon Armitage dreaming, and in Gig, he explores how music and the muse intertwine in work and in life. Crammed with stories, anecdotes, jokes, absurdities, the odd informal homily, pitfalls and pratfalls (not all the author''s own), Yorkshire life and death, Gig is about the dream and reality of what you are, and what you might have been._____________________________''One of our most entertaining authors'' Independent''Very, very funny'' GQ''Witty, terrific, stupendously funny'' Daily Telegraph Trade ReviewI read this book in one sitting. It moved me to tears, to shouts of laughter, and made me look at even the most mundane things in a different way * Sunday Times *Extremely funny, brilliant * Sunday Telegraph *Engaging, eccentric, hilarious, incredibly good company. A wonderwall of moments and memories . . . one of our most entertaining authors * Independent *Very, very funny . . . the kind of book you'll want to press on your friends * GQ *Witty, terrific, stupendously funny * Daily Telegraph *Warm, funny . . . wonderfully accurate and evocative . . . we close the book wanting more * Times Literary Supplement *Pitch perfect * Financial Times *Funny, perceptive, thought-provoking. Armitage has a poet's eye for the poignant detail and the bigger theme * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisIn a photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation and, for perhaps a singular moment, assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing.Trade Review“In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place.” CBC Books

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Book SynopsisExpansive poems connect personal, national, and global historiesIn her wide-ranging third book, poet Kathleen Flenniken undertakes the difficult task of re-seeing what is before us. Post Romantic fuses personal memory with national and ecological upheaval, interweaving narratives of family, nuclear history, love of country, and a dangerous age moving too fast. Flenniken takes these challenging momentsbits and pieces of childhood, marriage, cultural touchstonesand holds them up to the light, seeking comfort in a complicated world that is at once heartbreaking, confounding, and dear.Trade Review"Concerned with nostalgia, masculinity, and the state of America, the 2014 Washington State Poet Laureate’s latest collection holds a magnifying glass to the personal and political past to understand how it shapes our present." * Ampersand Magazine *"Post Romantic explores and weaves together the politics of country and self... clear, straightforward yet nuanced poems." * Poetry Northwest *

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Book SynopsisNew collection of poems from prizewinning poet and translator.

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsSHELBY COUNTY ALABAMA THE INVITATION ROSTRUM BOOKISH GIRL SWEEPS THE SANCTUARY THE BLACK BOOK A REVOLUTIONARY LOVE STORY WATER WILD CHILD JUBILEE THE PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT WISHING TREE FOR YONDER COMPOSTING MAKING SOAP DISAPPEARANCE THE RULES HOW TODAY WILL LOOK WHEN IT'S HISTORY I LEARN TO LOVE THE BODY SHE LOVES A TREE GETS IN THE WAY THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHRISTINE BUCKET BRIGADE HARVESTING HOW SLEEP FINDS US SOMETIMES MOLASSES GOVERNMENT NAME WHAT WE TALK ABOUT IN OUR COTTAGE WHEN SHANDA SAID NO THE SCENT OF HER GROOMING IN DEFENSE OF DEVOTION SPIT SHINE ALGEBRA MAKESHIFT DADDY FOR JUST PENNIES A GLASS [REDACTED] EARNS HIS WINGS IMAGINE, FIRST, A GIRL AS FOR DANCING AFTER THE GAME LOOKING THE CAMERA IN THE EYE WARREN FETUS HOUSE ON STILTS A MEDIC MISTAKES ME FOR DEAD SEPIA AFTER AN NBC INTERVIEW I MISSED YOU MORE MARROW OIL DRUM NOTES ACKOWLEDGEMENTS

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Book SynopsisThis poetry collection offers insight into life in Appalachia and hope for the members of the LGBTQ+ community that live there.Table of ContentsPreface Minnie Mouse Toy Supermodel (You Better Work) Goodbye First Crush Clean Room Found Kitten Biscuit Girl Self-Hating Preacher Creek Cornmeal and Water Pancakes Neckbones Embarrassing Thank You, Jerry Springer Library Hard to Take Seriously Clubhouse Character Food Stamp Holiday Song Waiting for God Gay Road Home Salt-Free Funeral Power of Ain't Josh A Guy Named Casey Who I Had Never Met I'm Sorry, Chris The Space Under the Pews Mountain Learning Charisma Scientist Promise Ramen Noodles Bluegrass Moon Trombone Cogitating Builder Someday Child Reassurance Family Dollar Orange Drink Product and Beef Jerky Take a Seat The Truth will Stand Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisEvie Shockley''s new poems invite us to dream - and work - toward a more capacious we In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious we. How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley''s poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.perchedi am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting my soul in the discouraging world.under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

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Book SynopsisSpring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.” In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being “heartless” and “cruel,” of producing “positively repellant” works of art in order to “make fun of humanity,” Williams doesn’t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed “[t]o the imagination” itself; it seeks to break down the “the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.” When he states that “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,” he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisA powerful collection from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Annie Freud. Hiddensee represents Annie Freud’s most ambitious work to date, not least because it is a book about ambition and its necessity, the need to go beyond oneself, and to do what one cannot: Freud dives into other ways of thinking, other art forms, the taboos of illness and desire, and – spectacularly – other languages. This ambition has also emboldened Freud to pursue and confront the complex truth of herself: her German Jewish inheritance, her teachers, the remarkable minds of the exiled individuals who raised her – and the exiles she herself then pursued. The book also celebrates the work of the French-language Swiss poet Jacques Tornay, whom Freud identifies as a spiritual brother – and a route back into her own French and symbolist influences. These astonishing and generous versions of Tornay remind us that our voices should not and cannot be uncomplicatedly our own. Hiddensee is named for the Baltic island where Annie Freud’s grandmother spent her summers before the war (and its famous artistic community, whose members included George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz). In its unselfconscious internationalism and breathtaking cultural range, Hiddensee offers a radically European and multilingual perspective to counter the cultural narrowness and closing borders of the current age, and again confirms Freud as one of our most essential poets.Trade ReviewOften witty and light-hearted, sometimes worried and sad, Freud’s poems are highly evocative of the complicated life she has led. * Guardian *Modest, gentle and universal, these understated poems are a small masterclass in the art of synthesis * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisBefore becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure. What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland. Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside. They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen.Written with a balance of clarity regarding America's shortcomings and empathy for her subjects, Another America is a luminous book of poems, a deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with great compassion.With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country separated by those with privilege, those without, and the lives that are lived in between.

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Book SynopsisPoems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best. Past Praise: “This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice “On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi “The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet “I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage “Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist HatchetTrade Review“I love the ease with which these poems overturn and half-describe things, out-doing industry with their mouthloads … Also when the global romantic registers a crack in the globe – Babstock does this on a dime, and often. The crack of course is the revelation (I don't think he would like the use of this word, or 'global romantic' for that matter), but it’s what all his weird geography always leads to … Swivelmount has come out from under something dark and brittle (see On Malice) to dance with a literally sick world. Or maybe not dance, but dazzle and hold.” —Dan Bejar, Destroyer“To experience his poetry is to feel, suddenly, while falling from a high place, a firm hand on the scruff of your neck. Startling, pain-filled, life-saving.” —Miriam Toews“I have never read anything quite like Swivelmount. The poems in this book are lapidary yet expansive. They are highly polished yet quirky, erudite - drawing on art, biology, geology, and history - yet utterly unpretentious, impersonal and then, suddenly, personal after all. As Babstock puts it, ‘… I’m never/sure if it’s agency/or deep structure that wants/what it wants.’ In other words, this work is delightfully resistant to categorization. Babstock is an original.” —Rae Armantrout

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Book SynopsisJoin Chris Martin for a poetic walking tour of hell—or is it heaven? In this wickedly clever collection, Martin asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones. Martin’s poems pick at the tender scabs protecting our national and individual identities, and call for more honest healing. Things to Do in Hell channels 2016 anger into 2020 action with sophisticated, rhythmic verse that compels us to beat our swords into ploughshares and join the fight.Trade Review“Masterful, breathless, and prescient, Chris Martin’s fourth poetry collection, Things to Do in Hell, is both antidote and screed, reliquary and reckoning. In this diatomic opus exhuming the most intimate aspects of our human[e]-ness, Martin probes capitalism, toxic masculinity, fatherhood, and whiteness to inventory the disasters and desires that have fueled our perilous consumption toward impending collapse. And yet there is hope—for love endures. Retooling language like molten metal—letting its fire snake then seethe into new realms of syntax and meaning—this poet at the height of his powers reimagines a deliberate, unflinching future ensconced in wisdom and tenderness from ‘the circle whose center is everywhere.’ There’s no turning back.” —Su Hwang “Chris Martin’s poems in Things to Do in Hell are like people grabbing anything they can find and beating it until a new, found music comes forth. Isn’t that what we do these days when the humdrum of flogged, dead horses is not enough to awaken us? Cacophonous raps full of improvisation, these meditations ricochet somewhere between Rimbaud, Huidobro, Stein, and Borzutzky, expanding and contracting in their syntactical agitation, unraveling and unpeeling, since ‘I don’t care I’m going to love you until my name reverts to a word.’ Hell is Earth, these poems seem to proclaim, inside the mind, inside the television, within the simulacrum, through language itself: ‘All day clinging to ghastly seaweed on the naked internet ocean.’ Where does one find meaning when meaning is tired of us? What can the ‘difficult words / in the crowded mouth of hope’ even teach us ‘if everything’s a mouth’? Things to Do in Hell brings all these contradictions together, suggesting that even if all we have in the end is our restless inquisitiveness, we take it and we run!” —Roy Guzmán “The opening incantation to Chris Martin’s new collection causes a tear in the very fabric of our ritualized quotidian. Lyrical disruptions shock the imperatives as the speakers in the poems pursue the ordinary in a miraculous time. But the miraculous resides within the uncertainty of our contemporary state of being, humming in the low thrum of background noise. In singing and singeing lines, Martin critiques and adores. The multitudinous riches presented in this engaging book are vast and stretch deep into our psyches. Pleasure is a deep and syncopated virtue in Things to Do in Hell, while the wisdom of this collection provides a constant and needed nudge.” —Oliver de la Paz Praise for The Falling Down Dance: “To read The Falling Down Dance from cover to cover—and it’s best read that way—is also to see a dad start separate and strive for connection, catching the baby when he falls down, or feeling like a welcome but slightly distant addition to a maternal dyad. . . . Martin makes the clearest example for the new American poetry of fatherhood.” —Boston Review “Martin’s poems traverse expansive concepts while confined to the space of an apartment, where new parents in ‘the shipwreck / of fatherhood, of motherhood’ are cloistered during a brutal winter.” —Star Tribune “In this spare, poignant collection, Martin invites readers into the microcosm of new fatherhood against a wintry backdrop that produces isolation and intimacy in turn. . . . Martin encourages his readers to see parenthood in all its contradictions; the beautiful addition and the nexus of complication.” —Publishers Weekly “Martin’s attention is tender, even when it is dark. In the end, though, [The Falling Down Dance] is a book that closes in on domestic moments, moments of the physical body’s experiences, and these attentions manage to feel somehow profoundly political. For what is more political than the effort to create a space of love?” —FIELD “The Falling Down Dance is a book of poetry so tenderly, playfully, and, often, still, sorrowfully in tune with the modern world. Ranging from Frank Ocean to fatherhood, from modern love to modern sadness, Martin’s poems tilt and turn down the page, full of dance and momentum. . . . The Falling Down Dance is a pulsing joy of a book. It feels so full, its slim lines bursting at the edges, trying to get out.” —Full Stop

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Book SynopsisIn Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.Trade Review"In one of the late poems included in this generous selection of his work, Frederick Morgan refers to 'life’s daily chances.' Every preceding page in the book proves that from first to last, Morgan was fully alive to those chances and able to respond to them in ways that turned vigilance into a form of self-affirmation. In the more reserved formalities of his early work, and the comparative freedoms of his later poems, readers will find a consistently marvelous generosity of spirit—one that allows the work to explore personal matters as dexterously as it investigates matters in the wide public world. Epilogue may collect a lifetime’s writing, and therefore inevitably contain a good deal of remembering, but one of its many distinctions is to retain a strong appetite for beginning—for seizing on those 'daily chances' and turning them into brightly-seen and durable actualities." —Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate (1999–2009) "Two features tie all the poems in Epilogue together: their limpidity of style and their tireless effort, through memory, dream, story, and fable, to tell the truth. The candid clarity of Morgan’s voice, consistent through changes of experience and mood, is precisely what enables the poet and his readers to apprehend that truth."—Rachel Hadas, author of Poems for Camilla "This final work —not always 'safe for work'—reveals a poet still full of life, but a life 'faced as honestly as Morgan faces our morality,' notes David Mason in his insightful introduction. All the while, 'Morgan’s poetic is that of an ordinary man, albeit a thoughtful and cultivated one, among other things a body in time.'”—James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion

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Book SynopsisThe North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.Trade ReviewPraise for Dreaming the Mountain“[Dreaming the Mountain] is a collection of great depth and longing. Sy is attuned to the gossamer impermanence of clouds and dreams, of all that we know shifting, disappearing, returning. He names what goes and comes across a thousand years.[. . .] If there’s loneliness in these poems, it’s the loneliness of a soul aware of his small place among a mysterious immensity, an immensity that includes the butterfly wing, the bending grass, the wet eyes of a love. And it’s the loneliness that somehow, powerfully, makes one feel less alone.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe “Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life.”—Rachel Abrams, Tricycle Magazine“[Dreaming the Mountain] embodies the Zen view that everything we experience is simultaneously present and evanescent. [. . .] the best way to describe anything, physical, emotional, or spiritual is to shine light on it from more than one direction. Which is what Tuệ Sỹ does luminously—Lola Haskins, On the Seawall “Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible.”—Poetry Foundation, Harriet BlogPraise for the Seedbank Series“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books“Through its cultural-linguistic contribution to narrative diversity, Milkweed's Seedbank series is a vital tool in imagining the futures possible for humanity beyond the anthropocene. Bringing works from Greek, K'iche', German, Russian (and more!) whose authors are deeply rooted in their homelands, each voice encountered has resonated with me on a seemingly cellular level—shifting and changing both who I am and can be. I will continue to press these books into the hands of compassionate readers and cannot wait to share the forthcoming titles in the project!”—Erin Pineda, 27th Letter Books"Milkweed as a publishing house has long been championing literary works both fictitious and true to life centered around culture, nature, and environmentalism. The Seedbank series serves as both a marvelous introduction to the books Milkweed provides and as a collection of essential stories that ought to be on everyone's radar. The words behind these front covers highlight life-changing experiences, knowledge, and ways of life from communities that are seldom otherwise heard from in the publishing world through an authentic cultural lens. What I've read from the Seedbank line is phenomenal, and I look forward to spending time with future works in the series."—Andrew King, Secret Garden BooksPraise for Martha Collins’s Translations“A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century in supple and complex poems.”—AWP Chronicle“Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap [in Black Stars], movingly translated by Martha Collins and the author. . . . We, as readers, are enriched.”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines“A delightful aspect of My Da’s poetry [in Green Rice] is the surprising way it summons human feeling from the ancient landscape, from river and field, from fruit and fragrant tree, culling a contemporary self from timeless images. In carrying this across into English, My Da could not have found better translators than Thuy Dinh and Martha Collins.”—John Balaban, author of Empires“[Nguyen Quang Thieu’s The Women Carry River Water] is both timely and necessary for those who are interested in learning more about contemporary Vietnamese culture, literature, and poetry. The translations are perfect.”—Ngo Nhu Binh, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction xiOn the Translations xixKhung Trời Cũ 2A Piece of Old Sky 3Cánh Chim Trời 4Bird Wing Sky 5Hương Ngày Cũ 6Scent of Past Days 7Mưa Cao Nguyên 8Rainy Season in the Highlands 9Tóc Huyền 10Black Hair 11HoàiNiệm 12ARecollection 13Hận Thu Cao 14NobleAutumnRancor 15Mộng Trường Sinh 16Dream of a Long Life 17Kết Từ 18Last Words 19Những Năm Anh Đi 22The Years Away 23Một Bóng Trăng Gầy 24ASlenderMoon 25Phố Trưa 26Street at Noon 27Tự Tình 28Reflection 29Chân Đồi 30Nightmares in the Forest 35Một Thoáng Chiêm Bao 36Fleeting Dream 37Những Bước Đường Cùng 38End of the Road 39Bóng Cha Già 40My Father’s Shadow 41Ước Hẹn 42Promise 43Cây Khô 44Dried Tree 45Những Phím Dương Cầm 46Piano Keys 47Bên Bếp Lạnh 48By a Cold Fire 49Tống Biệt Hành 50Leave-Taking 51

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Book SynopsisThe chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy. Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.Trade Review"Urges, observations, memories, directions, and aspirations scissor, smear, and echo one another within and between verses demarcated by austere, unbroken dashes. The book is filled with carbonated queries—philosophical, literary, homophonic, ontological—that burst and fizz on ultramarine’s oceanic, auratic surface. When Koestenbaum asks, 'Isn’t art / a transcendent category?,' the answer can only be an emphatic yes."—Artforum"If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and ’70s would predictably fall for... they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, 'the hurt, pocked portion / of being.'"—Harriet"Koestenbaum, unflinching as he observes and notates his interior, brings a heroic quality to this poetic feat.'"—Rain Taxi"Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another."—[PANK]"This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons... Each collection of trance notebooks reflects the degree to which Koestenbaum is attuned to real-time realities while he composes."—The Brooklyn Rail"The final volume of his 'trance trilogy'—preceded by The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018)—the collection is both a joyful language game and a bracing reminder that queer play is serious business."—The Yale Review"In Ultramarine, Wayne Koestenbaum sifts through four years of trance notebooks to stitch together a revealing collage."—Library Journal"Koestenbaum delves into paintings and the artistic process, using color as a metaphor through which to consider desire and memory."—Read Poetry"There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience."—Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisA book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual; struggle and resistance.Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.Trade Review"Pink Noise is delightfully attuned to the living complexity of language, an experience that Holden renders as both conceptual and tactile."—Michael Martin Shea, Colorado Review"In Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An on-coming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for."—Fanny Howe"These poems are flecked with quartz and risk, love and dejection, pink and blood-red ecstatic brooding. Kevin’s line redirects consciousness to the magic of forgotten minutia and overlooked associative deliverance 'from cypress to pine before / fierce queen on a blank stage.' His language sets that stage for a tenderness that is in no way meek, for a sense of divinity found where life is. His is one of the voices that sets the bar for what poetry can do in this world."—Harmony Holiday"A queer lyric—like a queer body—holds within itself culture’s dueling impulses. In Kevin Holden’s singular poetics, libido’s lavish disordering resists rationality’s drive toward 'the war and reality / of our clear / civilization.' What results is a “rose tone row,” a nonce musical system he calls Pink Noise. Here queer experience sings alongside angular, abstract phrases sampled from math and science. Beautifully resisting conventional beauty, Holden makes atonal music whose fine phrasing 'glints, glitters, shines, shimmers, glows.'"—Brian Teare"This book is like a vardøger. I felt it before it arrived—'a former ghost.' Holden’s formations come together, crystalline and spinning, into consummate shape. Geometry, mathematics, gay sex, earth, cosmos, mysticism, and skepticism are held together in these pages as in a polyhedron, semi-transparent, where each facet is visible at a certain angle but from another angle disappears to show a facet on the shape’s opposite side. Beautiful and distinct, this work is filled with discrete infinities."—Edgar Garcia

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Book SynopsisOsip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on the TextOsip Mandelstam: “Centuries encircle me with fire”On Translating MandelstamОсип Мандельштам (1891–1938)Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)Из книги «Камень» (стихотворения 1908–1915)From Stone (poems of 1908–1915)Дано мне тело—что мне делать с ним . . .I am given a body—what should I . . .Я ненавижу свет . . .I hate the light . . .Паденье—неизменный спутник страха . . .The fall is a constant companion of fear . . .Айя-СофияHagia Sophia. . . На луне не растет . . .. . . Not a single blade . . .ПосохThe WandУничтожает пламень . . .The fire destroys . . .Из книги «Tristia» (стихотворения 1916–1922)From Tristia (poems of 1916–1922)ДекабристA DecembristКогда в тёплой ночи замирает . . .When a feverish forum of Moscow . . .Прославим, братья, сумерки свободы . . .Hail, brothers, let us praise our freedom’s twilight . . .TristiaTristiaНа каменных отрогах Пиэрии . . .On steep stony ridges of Pieria . . .Сёстры тяжесть и нежность, одинаковы ваши приметы . . .Sisters, heaviness and tenderness, your traits are akin . . .Вернись в смесительное лоно . . .Go back to the incestuous womb . . .Веницейской жизни, мрачной и бесплодной . . .The meaning of fruitless and gloomy . . .За то, что я руки твои не сумел удержать . . .Because I could not hold your hands in mine . . .Из книги «Стихотворения» (1928 г., стихотворения 1921–1925 гг.)From Poems (1928, poems of 1921–1925)С розовой пеной усталости у мягких губ . . .With the pink foam of fatigue around soft lips . . .ВекThe AgeНашедший подковуThe Horseshoe FinderГрифельная одаThe Slate OdeЯзык булыжника мне голубя понятней . . .Clearer than pigeon’s talk to me is stone’s tongue . . .А небо будущим беременно . . .And the Sky is Pregnant with the Future . . .1 января 1924January 1, 1924Нет, никогда, ничей я не был современник . . .No, I’ve never been anyone’s contemporary . . .Я буду метаться по табору улицы тёмной . . .I’ll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street . . .Из Новых cтихотворений 1930–1934 гг.From New Poems of 1930–1934Армения1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12Armenia1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12На полицейской бумаге верже. . .On the police laid paper the night. . .Не говори никому . . .Don’t tell it anyone—forget . . .Колючая речь Араратской долины . . .A prickly speech of the Ararat Valley . . .Как люб мне натугой живущий . . .How dear to me are those people . . .Дикая кошка—армянская речь . . .A wild cat—the Armenian speech . . .Я скажу тебе с последней . . .I will tell you this, my lady . . .За гремучую доблесть грядущих веков . . .For the thunderous courage of ages to come . . .Нет, не спрятаться мне от великой муры . . .No, I won’t be able to hide from a great mess . . .НеправдаUntruthПолночь в Москве. Роскошно буддийское лето . . .Midnight in Moscow. A Buddhist summer is lavish . . .Отрывки из уничтоженных стихов1 | 2 | 3 | 4Excerpts from Destroyed Poems1 | 2 | 3 | 4Еще далеко мне до патриарха . . .I am far from being as old as patriarch . . .Сегодня можно снять декалькомани . . .Today we can take decals . . .ЛамаркLamarckИмпрессионизмImpressionismБатюшковBatiushkovДайте Тютчеву стрекóзу . . .Give Tiutchev a dragonfly . . .АриостAriostoНе искушай чужих наречий, но постарайся их забыть . . .Do not tempt foreign tongues—attempt forgetting them, alas . . .Квартира тиха как бумага . . .An apartment is quiet as paper . . .Давай же с тобой, как на плахе . . .Let’s start preparing for the scaffold . . .Мы живём, под собою не чуя страны . . .We live without feeling our country’s pulse . . .Восьмистишия1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Octaves1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11Стихи памяти Андрея БелогоTo the Memory of Andrei BelyУтро 10 января 19341 | 2 | 3The Morning of January 10, 19341 | 2 | 310 января 1934 [вариант 2]January 10, 1934 [version 2]Из Воронежских тетрадей (стихотворения 1935–1937)From the Voronezh Notebooks (poems of 1935–1937)Из Первой тетрадиFrom the First NotebookПусти меня, отдай меня, Воронеж . . .Let go, Voronezh, raven-town . . .Я должен жить, хотя я дважды умер . . .I have to live though I died twice . . .Лишив меня морей, разбега и разлета . . .Having deprived me of seas, flight, and space . . .День стоял о пяти головах. Сплошные пять суток . . .The day was five-headed: five unbreakable days . . .Еще мы жизнью пóлны в высшей мере . . .We are still sentenced to life . . .Римских ночей полновесные слитки . . .Solid gold bars of the Roman nights . . .За Паганини длиннопалым . . .They run like a gypsy throng . . .Исполню дымчатый обряд . . .I’ll fulfill a dim rite . . .Из Второй тетрадиFrom the Second NotebookНе у меня, не у тебя—у них . . .Not I, not you—but they . . .Улыбнись, ягненок гневный с Рафаэлева холста . . .Smile, angry lamb from Rafael’s canvas, don’t rage . . .Дрожжи мира дорогие . . .World’s golden yeast, our dear . . .Еще не умер ты, еще ты не один . . .You haven’t died yet. You are not alone . . .Что делать нам с убитостью равнин . . .What should we do with murdered plains . . .Вооруженный зреньем узких ос . . .Armed with the vision of narrow wasps . . .Из Третьей тетрадиFrom the Third NotebookСтихи о неизвестном солдатеVerses on the Unknown SoldierСквозь эфир десятично-означенный . . .Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes . . .Для того ль должен череп развиться . . .Should the skull develop its brow . . .Для того ль заготовлена тара . . .Is the packaging of charm stored . . .Я молю, как жалости и милости . . .I beg like compassion and grace . . .Я скажу это начерно, шёпотом . . .I will say it in draft and in whisper . . .Может быть, это точка безумия . . .It might be the point of insanity . . .Не сравнивай: живущий несравним . . .A living man’s unique: do not compare . . .Чтоб, приятель и ветра и капель . . .To help a friend of rain and wind . . .Гончарами велик остров синий . . .A blue island, green Crete is extolled . . .Длинной жажды должник виноватый . . .A guilty debtor of a long-time thirst . . .О, как же я хочу . . .Oh, how I madly crave . . .Нереиды мои, нереиды! . .My nereids, oh, my nereids! . . .Флейты греческой тэта и йота . . .Greek flute’s theta and iota . . .На меня нацелилась груша да черемуха . . .I’m under fire of a bird cherry tree and a pear tree . . .[Стихи к H<аталии> Е. Штемпель]1 | 2[Poems for N Е. Shtempel]1 | 2AbbreviationsBibliographyPublications of Works by Osip E. MandelstamTranslations into EnglishTranslations of Osip Mandelstam’s Poems into Other LanguagesCriticism

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