Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisAutostraddle's “Books Relevant to Your Queer and Feminist Interests in 2020” and Latin Post's “Must Read Books by Latin Authors in 2020”In elegiac and fervent poetry, Lara Mimosa Montes writes across the thresholds of fracture, trauma, violence, and identity.Thresholes is both a doorway and an absence, a roadmap and a remembering. In this almanac of place and memory, Lara Mimosa Montes writes of her family’s past, returning to the Bronx of the 70s and 80s and the artistry that flourished there. What is the threshold between now and then, and how can the poet be the bridge between the two?Trade ReviewThe Paris Review, “Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2020”Harvard Review, “Eight Books by Latinx Poets”Ms. Magazine, “Best Poetry of 2020Remezcla, “Latino & Latin American Authors to Read in 2020”Refinery29, “Best New Books”Autostraddle, “Books Relevant to Your Queer and Feminist Interests in 2020”Latin Post, “Must Read Books by Latin Authors in 2020”“The circles, the titular ‘thresholes,’ mark the thresholds between fragments. . . . In Montes’s work, these labels seem to say, don’t skip the white space—the gaps between language are part of the language. . . . It’s a trick that never stops feeling like magic, the intimacy of nothing but black marks on white paper.” —Elisa Gabbert, New York Times“I felt as though I was being beckoned into the book’s orbit. . . . [THRESHOLES], which is classified as poetry, parses grief through the language of holes—‘a not knowing,’ ‘a surge in reverse,’ ‘the white noise of the shore,’ ‘somebody (an abstraction) sitting next to your ghost.’ I can’t wait to read it again.” —Aisha Sabatini Sloan, The Paris Review“[A] drifting, yet driven, meditation on grief and healing. . . . Fragmented and emergent, THRESHOLES draws together an expansive range of topics on death, the body, trauma, knowledge, healing, oppression, language, and art. Yet the book feels cohesive, bound together in Montes’s percipient vision. . . . THRESHOLES fearlessly explores what it means to come close to formlessness.” —Rachel Carroll, Los Angeles Review of Books“With its aphoristic lines and longer paragraphs, [Montes] is constructing a sort of anti-monument: to events in her own life that resist description; to the past and present of the Bronx; to contemporary artists and writers and friendships; in the spirit of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark; against death but not without deep engagement with loss.” —Lucy Ives, BOMB Magazine“A cascade of distinct, one-line stanzas that navigate the present moment, the fallibility of narrative, the violence of living, and the mystery of the body and the Other. . . .The book evoked much else in me, such as delight over the concision and clarity, wonder over the intangible concepts [Montes] makes felt, fascination at the references and artworks detailed in her research, and constant surprise at the turns the lines take.” —Tyler Barton, TriQuarterly“Alongside [Montes], we tunnel through a series of hollow points, pressure positions, aesthetic snapshots. . . . A taxonomy of holes, but also of their edges, where they end and meet” —Trisha Low, The Believer“Testifies to the fierce, brave determination of one Latinx writer to write through struggle. . . .Montes graces us with a unique ability to foresee how time may empower artistic utterances through the breakage.” —Kara Laurene Pernicano, Full Stop“Presented clearly and in a seemingly improvisational and unrestrained manner, Montes acknowledges that her journey is simultaneously created and ‘undone by [her] own animal hand.’ Her commitment to its forward movement results in a book-length epic about trauma and loss.” —Ruben Quesada, Harvard Review“A book we need during this time. Revealing Montes”s vast intellect as she draws from subject matters such as art, dance, linguistics, and beyond, THRESHOLES moves through time and place, specifically her birthplace of the Bronx, and takes readers through the death of her dear ‘R.’ THRESHOLES is a perfect book for this moment where time is experienced differently. . . . an unleashing of our identities trapped between the past and our becoming.” —Diane Seo Hyung Lee, Degree Critical“[Montes] returns to the expansive arts scene of the Bronx in the ‘70s and ‘80s, looks at the potential vibrant and artistic future of her neighborhood and questions her own role as a bridge between both. The book delves deep into the forces moving through a neighborhood often seen as peripheral and an artist living in it: gentrification, loss and a wild hope.” —Remezcla“Montes is reconciling something within these pages, or with something, but she won’t spell it out for the reader—her words will make you feel it. . . . Holes stretch between past and present, between the Bronx and Minneapolis, between reader and author. Montes is making connections, reconciling, in these pages, and it’s beautiful to bear witness.” —Jessica Maria, The Book Slut“[A] powerful, beautiful work. . . . some kind of ancient universal equation that brings Montes to a place where she can traverse time and space and other once-meaningful boundaries, all in order to tell her story. It’s a story of the Bronx of the ’70s and ’80s, and of the body and art, of entrances and exits, of life.” —Refinery29“Montes’s anticipated second book. . . .[an] exploration of body memory.” —Poetry“Thresholes is a training manual for grief and desire, for which no remedies exist except this one: running towards what will burn you up anyway, like a star. ‘How do you come back from that for which there are no words?’ Lara Mimosa Montes asks us, producing a new form of silence that does not, as even the most provisional form of sound must, decay. Instead, in this powerful and beautiful work, absence becomes an artifact, the only thing we get to touch. ‘I was there,’ as Montes writes, ‘and yet I have no memory of that performance.’ This is a line that moved rapidly through my own organism, like pink lightning, changing and charging my own cells. It turns out that this is the only thing I want from poetry, but I didn't remember it until I read this book.”—Bhanu Kapil“Lara Mimosa Montes is the powerhouse these troubled times need. A true heir of Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector, Montes writes with ferocious intellectual energy and emotional pungency, and she never takes the cautious path. Here, she has composed a felicitously broken threnody filled with optimistic openings wherein new possibilities for vision can take root. Poetry, documentary, critique, song, and passion play: these modes join hands in Thresholes, and the result is an inspiring demonstration of what she calls ‘the rigorous, unpredictable sanctity of study.”—Wayne Koestenbaum“Thresholes is brilliant in its associative inscription of the Bronx as a crux of art and memory and wreckage. The book resists narratives and undoes the verb’s hold on constructing histories with an acute and glistening eye as formed by community as the body itself. Lara Mimosa Montes interrupts genre/gentrification in a thrilling book that brings to bear the notion of a ‘body I can in language throw,’ a most welcome disruption to lyric autofiction modalities.” —Carmen Giménez SmithPraise for Lara Mimosa Montes “Lara Mimosa Montes is a startling and powerful poet, who opts for vertigo, and whose greatest virtue may be her ability to perform flamboyantly while abstaining from histrionics—to recuse herself, with the exercise of a triumphant minimalism, from her own virtuoso spotlight. Braiding together numbness and desire, she brilliantly demonstrates, in the close-miked fashion of a cabaret Maurice Blanchot, the weirdness of being a witness, a quietly divulging voice." —Wayne Koestenbaum "The strange and compelling beauty of The Somnambulist lies in its 'savvy circumlocution' of multiple stories in language that the poet herself alternately embraces and fears, loves and reviles. 'If I look for language to find you, if I let it, language finds me everywhere,' she writes, and the line is as much of a promise as a threat. The Somnambulist tells, in fragmented parts, the story of the poet's hustler uncle alongside her own story of becoming a poet. This is a new kind of writer's memoir—or true crime story, or coming-of-age narrative, or family autobiography—one that navigates the tricky territory of multiple sub-genres with extraordinary skill, sly wit, and subversive splendor." —Laura Sims "Sleepwalking backward and forward through time, Montes' language refuses poetic adornments, opting instead for a minimalist clarity that attempts to repair the obfuscation created by memory, fragmented narratives, regret, and mystifying criminal records. Rooted in the body, and aware of the stakes involved in this telling, language itself becomes figurative in the fact that it arrives to us at all." —Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

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Book SynopsisLustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality on the ribs of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.Trade Review“The elegiac fourth collection from Mathys (Null Set) draws on the associative powers of gold: fake cures, busted boom towns, fracking sites, and goldfish (live and edible). . . . In these imaginative and linguistically impressive political poems, Mathys excavates with ironic wit while addressing untapped American fears.” —Publishers Weekly “The poems in Ted Mathys’s marvelous and riveting new collection pass a momentary blade across our vision so that we see again with renewed sight.” —Arthur Sze “From the mythical excesses of El Dorado, to the goldfish crackers his daughter hoards, Mathys’s Gold Cure takes his reader on an emotional journey through the perplexing landscape of contemporary America, where all that glitters is not, well, you know. . . . Syntactically dense, bright with topic-specific diction and surprising similes, these narrative poems—in both line and prose—explore the way desire crashes into the material world. Thanks to Mathys’s skilled image-making, you may find yourself trapped in the bottom of a mineshaft, or catapulted up to the stars.” —Jennifer Moxley “In this expansive and deeply moral book, Ted Mathys performs an extended meditation on gold’s long relationship to colonialism, capitalism, and our baser human instincts, the way they fuel empire’s ruthless expansion and economic exploitation. From mythic El Dorado to today’s frack pads, our poet tracks greed, decries the accrual of power, and foils gold’s capacity to enchant, all while also acknowledging the amplitude of its lure. True to the commodity culture it surveys, Gold Cure’s glutted with the stuff of witness, an excess of objects that run the gamut from the ecstatic to the abject, an excess of inequality and injustice that leave our ‘poet unable to sustain / the Blakean conviction that all subjectivities, / predator and prey, are holy.’ A thorough diagnosis of our moment, this bold book shivers with the fevers that have seized the demos and attempts a purgative cure of its imperilment.” —Brian Teare “In this glittering collection, Ted Mathys embarks on an intimate, artful, and urgent transvaluation of values for our failed utopia. Mathys adopts gold—in all of its economic, formal, and historical modes of circulation—as a medium for the alchemical search into what underwrites ‘the gold standard, the golden ratio, the golden hour.’ Wherever this inner El Dorado may be, Mathys reflects, ‘it passes through me / like wind through a screen, leaving only / a vague remainder, this dull glow— / hard to locate in the body—that aches / for an answer just out of reach.’ —Srikanth Reddy Praise for Null Set: “[Mathys] seeks meaning within the bounds of the absolute while simultaneously reaching toward the unknowable, even via negation and denial.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Somber, surprising, pitch-perfect, and carefully intelligent, the poems of Null Set infuse me with renewed faith in poetry's powers. I can almost feel new folds of my mind growing as I follow Mathys's images, logics, and deep reckonings with language, world, and soul.” —Maggie Nelson “A said thing is only a said thing—though it may be true—but you can just as easily say the opposite. What if the opposite sounds just as convincing? (What if you were to negate the most famous lines in poetry?) [Ted Mathys] negates and reverses exhilaratedly, ending up somewhere near happiness, which may be a verbal state...” —Alice Notley “Algebra and geometry: Mathys touches us by triggering our intellectual memories, reminding us of what we dutifully learned long ago, in school. It’s deceptively cerebral, Mathys’s way of moving us.” —The Rumpus “Spiritual crisis in the face of past and present ruin might remind us of Eliot, but here the stained glass windows of Christianity are broken.” —Rain Taxi “As I read Null Set, I watch Ted Mathys steer again and again between the Scylla of Yes and the Charybdis of No, the clashing rocks of Something and Nothing, Thesis and Antithesis, and sail straight through to a third thing: a swerve, a surprise, which is one of the tells that this book is alive. . . . We in turn tell books how we incline to read them, surprising them with analogues of which they’d never dreamed. It must be abstract; it must change; it must give pleasure—Ted Mathys, Null Set.” —Bennington Review “If you’re a poet, [a null set] can become a place to list numbers from 0 to 100, or a portal for the messiness of real life to break though even the most neatly constructed equation. That’s exactly Mathys’ aim in this book—even in poems with titles such as ‘Hypotenuse,’ the cold, logical nature of math is never allowed to crowd out the human (or a sense of humor).” —St. Louis Magazine “Null Set’s task is to join the exactness of geometry with the messiness of poetry. While difficult to say which discipline fairs better from this partnership, it is refreshing to see the metaphorical transformation of math and the mathematical rigor of poetry.” —St. Louis Post Dispatch

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Book SynopsisEleni Sikelianos, “a master of mixing genres” (Time Out New York), further bends time and space in Your Kingdom, an ode to our more-than-human animal origins. As she studies the wild roots of our past, present, and future, Sikelianos, one of our foremost practitioners of ecopoetic exploration, finds solace in the complexity of our natural lineage as we face the environmental precarity of the present.Our shoulders and hips were invented by salamanders. Hidden motives bind us to cuckoos and caterpillars. Our faces form biological maps while our organs trace the shapes of our animal ancestors. From the cellular to the celestial, Your Kingdom inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to “let the body feel all its own evolution inside.”Trade ReviewPraise for Your Kingdom: “This is a book of hearts. . . . In a time of ecological doom, there is gorgeous comfort—if only momentary—in Sikelianos’s deep histories and epic sensibility.” —Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation “I am utterly awed by Eleni Sikelianos’s Your Kingdom. These poems spread their mammoth wings across a singing, rhythmic soundscape of language and into a layered timescape of evolution, wherein ‘each you is a metaphor for us,’ and us = human, plant, animal, earth / land / its waters, and even the stars as relatives. This is a celebration of our forever-connectivity, our collective beauty, strangeness, messiness, vibrant color, morphing, and seemingly infinite names. Thank you, Eleni, for this book—inside which I have never felt more present in the story of this world.” —Layli Long Soldier “A sound of two black holes on a collision course excites the scene of writing for Eleni Sikelianos in these poems made to luminesce in expansive multicellular reach and from the great intimacies of our animal kin and ken. Your Kingdom proliferates, whether by symbiosis or descent, whether by variation or ‘traces of this ravaging,’ into a visionary horizon beyond human selfhood—’chimera, cobbled / together from bits of genetic trash’—when at last we face the mirror of species relation. Sikelianos seeks first the chemical kisses of the cosmos to reanimate the pieces of us Darwin called the ‘wreck of ancient life.’ The outcome is a poetry of origin-affinity and light, a language of life forms thronging a ‘paradise / before we / killed or / breathed.’” —Roberto Tejada Praise for Make Yourself Happy: “Haunted by the 20th century’s dismal record of global species extinction and an uncertain world-historical future ahead, this book uncovers new forms of resistance to apathy and despair through a return to the etymological root of ‘poet’ as ‘maker.’ Whether Sikelianos is writing about making a paper globe, making a family, making a statement, or making yourself, she surveys the field of human endeavors to find new prospects for care amid precarious political contexts.” —Srikanth Reddy, BOMB “Sikelianos’s classic style always shows that she is the master of the line, especially the enjambed line, and she is able to write adeptly about this moving toward death that is hidden from her reader.” —Laura Carter, VIDA “Enhanced by its illustrations and well researched, Make Yourself Happy is committed to seeing language in all its vibrancy make a plug for the universe.” —Linda Lown-Klein, Rain Taxi Review of Books “This book is your invitation to the post-human pool party of the future.” —Rae Armantrout “Besides the pleasure we feel, we see here a moral endeavor, an invitation to make ourselves happy. [Sikelianos’s] journey finds its energy in her perfect ear for language and immense generosity of heart. Her openness lets in the sinuosities and cracks of what we may well end up calling ‘being,’ in her great project of telling us, in these worst moments of actual history, to be (urgently) happy because we are . . . happy.” —Etel Adnan Praise for You Animal Machine: "A wonderfully strange and inventive book . . . The writing pulsates with such life force, reckless and a little giddy, as the author surveys her family’s female history, the immigration of Greeks to America. . . This is writing and reading as adventure, where every page can bring a different sort of revelation." —Kirkus, starred review "Through artifacts-lists of songs, newspaper clippings, photographs, film posters, staged interviews, poems-the poet Sikelianos assembles a textual chimera that keeps sliding through her fingers . . . The text, as a result, is tough as nails: you can feel Sikelianos at work, forcibly stitching it with catgut string, only to watch it fly apart again" —Jenny Hendrix, The Believer "As feminism reaches the height of the hashtag, Sikelianos instead drums forward a woman's experience with other words . . . Here lies Sikelianos' prowess: she gives readers the power to imagine and inquire and be ridiculous as we do so." —Aileen McGraw, Huffington Post “Sikelianos is a shamanistic denizen of the desert and the dark, but her journey is laced with irony as well as wisdom and beauty—expect lazurite to coexist with KFC bones stuffed under a mattress, expect a narrator as tough and hard-assed as her fascinating, fugitive subject. No matter how one summarizes its scope or achievement, You Animal Machine will surpass it.” —Maggie Nelson “This is Sikelianos at her most rapturous and hallucinatory, a gravestone rubbing that captures the smudgy mess of language and summons with it a fantastical map of what makes us human, what makes us feral, and what still has the ability to make us tremble in wonder at a time when the world has convinced itself that it knows enough already. Held together by dream, by luck, by chain link and goat weed, this is an essay that gets it right: ‘Let me try to do this thing. Please get the fuck out of my way.’” —John D'Agata

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Book SynopsisPart poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement. In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.Trade ReviewPraise for Village: “Diggs has found ways to sing out through hardship. . . . This is a dazzling and impressive work.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “The macaronic poems in Village . . . revel in cacophonous cascades of raucous soundplay and the visual arrangement of linguistic fragments from over a half-dozen languages—primarily Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Portuguese, but also German, Latin, Arabic, Quechua, Diné, and Yoruba—which litter the page in crisscrossing zig-zags and rigid squares, like city blocks. . . . Unconventional choices add to the originality of Diggs’s composition, which borrows from public and visual arts in exciting ways.” —Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation “Part instruction manual, part celebration, part dance party, part garden tour, Village refuses compartmentalization, demanding engaged and engaging ways of looking at and talking about difficult shared experiences. . . . In English, Portuguese, Tsalagi, Māori, Arabic, Yoruba, and more. These poems by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reveal the richly diverse ecosystem of what a limited imagination might sideline as a ‘marginalized’ life.” —Camille Dungy, Orion Magazine “LaTasha out here singing in tongues again, and I gotta sing her praises. This Village is a family history, a biomythography, a sensory tsunami: a documentary poetics composed in the languages Diggs needed to get at her truth, all of them getting stretched, chopped, spat, crooned, and retuned to a lower frequency. Hard, tender, witty, and elegiac, these fully populated poems are portraits of the human condition—and the conditions that shape and haunt some humans more than others.” —Evie Shockley “Buzzing with song-sound, poetic music, multiple languages, mad word love, intergenerational multiplicities of wisdom and harm, constant rearrangement of and searching for formal expansion that can channel all of it into shapes that keep moving, all these lives on the line, proposals and testimony and lists and saved documents—Village is a vast, searing, funny, and ultimately incredible book.” —Anselm Berrigan “In Diggs’s hands, under her bone plectrum, which seems plucked from the Milky Way at night, sound becomes pliant, extensive, ecstatic, specific, omnilinguistic, sluicing, and moody. Sound reveals and conceals its faces, calls for and sends away its devotees, entails a velvety fabric that can be seamed, stitched, furled, unfurled, burnt till it converts to sight and smell, melts, wicks out. Scatters. Swerves to the verge. The term virtuosic seems too mean and stingy for the magnitude of Diggs’s star.” —Joyelle McSweeney Praise for LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs: “I want to write nearby. . . . LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, who recombines Black slang, Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, and Tagalog into a remastered Afrofuturist song.” —Cathy Park Hong “More poets are dissecting the personal and shared experience of a post-global United States battered from decades of war and polarizing politics, contesting the offhand and sometimes facile liberal humanism in poems meant to address racial difference. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s TwERK is a multilingual performance of linguistic personae.” —Carmen Giménez Smith, Boston Review “Diggs is a language connoisseur. . . . [She] navigates Standard English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with ease, weaving Japanese, Cherokee, and Quechua into her work to bring to the surface issues of forced migration and the surviving remnants of colonization.” —Ashia Ajani, Sierra Club “WARNING: After reading TwERK, you may experience vibrant, dancing colors like when you close your eyes and stare at the crazy shifting shapes behind your eyelids. LaTasha’s brilliant poems vibrate me back to that unbridled youth of boundless madness, love and joy. TwERK testifies that LaTasha is not just a poet but an anthropological myth-making DJ whose words will have your imagination on the dance floor kicking it till your goosebumps start to sweat! This is a must-read for real for real! Oh, did I mention she speaks like 10 different languages?” —Charles Stone III “This long-awaited compendium of works by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs will blow your mind with its delirious play of signs, its cultural repurposings and reclaimings, its endlessly spinning polyglot wheel, and its breezy repertoire of ribald, faux-naif cyberfolk myth-science. With dazzling rigor and imagination, Ms. Diggs shares with us a view from Harlem that shines a knowing light on every place in the observable universe. To read these works is to feel the world in mid-transformation.” —Vijay Iyer “Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TwERK’s non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an animé-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn’t come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca’s Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don’t even realize you’ve been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!” —Maria Damon “From this time forward, TwERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TwERK—is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs’ fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English’s frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn’t so much “find” culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates—download now!” —Rodrigo Toscano “Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TwERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!” —Terrance Hayes “If the genre Black-American cosmopolitanism exists, Diggs is at the helm. Putting a new twist on an Ezra Pound-like gaze, Diggs approaches Black-American Orientalism with a coy wit and jovial approach that does not absolve – yet joyfully disarms both author and reader. Above all TwERK is a delightful celebration, word-play born out from the rigor that finally speaks our language (even if we don’t know it yet). I’ve been Twerked and contrary to my worst fears, my wife loves the results!” —Mike Ladd

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Book SynopsisIn his first collection since Fancy Beasts, a book that "slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter" (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles us again with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs that nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. It's a distinct brand of edginess that readers of Lemon will once again applaud. A lean and muscular collection, The Wish Book marks a new high in this poet's unstoppable career.Trade ReviewAdvance Praise for The Wish Book "Lemon...writes tough, visceral poetry with broad appeal. In this new collection, the author, winner of a literature fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, energetically examines the self in a pop-cultural world." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Pre-Pub Alert, "Ten Essential Poetry Titles for Winter 2014" "This book arrived like a storm, with an almost physical sense of Alex Lemon as a doom-tinged ecstasy engine. He's so aware of death and so eager to refuse its dominion that the breath of his poems drives a blade into the reader's mind that cuts a new window to both see and feel through. 'We feed ourselves to the fire/One inch at a time to prove it--//Everything here is a gift we can't/figure out how to open.' Maybe we can't, but these poems know how to lift the lid and show us what we have and how briefly we have it. The great rhythmic vitality of his work is surpassed only by the pulse of Lemon's need to convey his love for the world and our place in it. To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." --Bob Hicok "The fourth installment in Alex Lemon's series of field guides to the new, weird normal, The Wish Book covers its lenses to neither birth nor death, which is to say that while it might not get you what you want, it offers up vivid wide shots of where you are, along with close-ups of your options therein, thereafter. Read it and look, leap." --Graham Foust "The Wish Book is a glorious spectacle. Jazz and jibber-jabber collide. Ghosts, umbrellas, jellyfish, and 'glittery dirt' woo the eye. Kaleidoscopic phrasing underscores awe and dark humor. 'Everything tastes/electric' in one poem. The light waltzes in another, then is retooled as 'a sunset of painkillers.' At the heart of the spectacle lies an astonishing awareness of illness and death. Alex Lemon's imagination is dazzling and empathic. He's a ringmaster of the highest order." --Eduardo Corral Praise for Alex Lemon "Sometimes the poet seems like a descendant of Jeremiah and the speaker in Eliot's The Waste Land, a disgusted spectator of the dance of Eros and Thanatos in a contemporary culture that has become startlingly inane... and a Swiftian proposal with its tongue tucked firmly in its cadaverous cheek." --Kevin Nance, Poets & Writers (from an author profile) "In the world of poetry, as hermetic as it is elusive, Lemon, thirty-one, is already a star." --Nick Flynn, Esquire (from the introduction to an excerpt of Lemon's memoir) Winner of The Literary Review's 2011 Charles Angoff Award for Poetry Praise for Fancy Beasts Recipient of a 2011 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for Previous Finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize "A master of negative empathy, Lemon spelunks through the brain's darker convolutions and clearly enjoys testing the reader's limits. This book will likely appeal mostly to twenty-somethings with an emo/hipster bent, but even older readers will be impressed by Lemon's calculated audacity." --Library Journal (starred review) "Once again, Alex Lemon dazzles us with his ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter." --Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars "Full of raw energy, up-to-date in its slang and its jump cuts, effervescent with the playfulness and sometimes the angers of youth, [Fancy Beasts] conveys a likeable, outsized personality." --Publishers Weekly "Reading Alex Lemon's poems is like listening in on the thoughts of one of the most imaginative minds you've ever encountered ... Fancy Beasts is a terrific book by one of the best younger poets at work today." --Kevin Prufer "Life cleverly and joyfully rages in Alex Lemon's poems because everywhere in his explosive stanzas is the dry-boned conviction that we are more than a collection of lonely selves seeking aesthetic relief from the great bewilderment of existence--that occasionally that utter silence on the inside is really a dance party, operation: get down." --Major Jackson Praise for Hallelujah Blackout FINALIST FOR THE PATERSON POETRY PRIZE "[A] sprawling, varied, and ambitious second collection. Thoughts of joy and pain, eros and death, not to mention references from Van Gogh to 'half-scratched lotto tickets' collide in these unclassifiable, rapid fire poems." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Alex Lemon's Hallelujah Blackout is a blowback fireball of a book. Think Ezra Pound's inscrutable 'Cantos' lightning-charged with a twisted wick. Experimental but rigorous, an incantatory frenzy spirals around the freewheeling narrator... The title poem pounds us with relentless invention peeling off in blazing lumps ... echoes of Keats, Lorca, Crane, Ginsberg, and the Dylans (Bob and Thomas) ..." --The Brooklyn Rail "Alex Lemon's poetry veers away from ... predictable responses and comes to regard the body in pain with a passionate and complex combination of acceptance and defiance... Witness the casual aplomb with which Lemon refashions language having a vaudevillian or carnivalesque air into, unexpectedly, epiphanic ends... Lemon's language is often comic, acrobatic, dazzling, and poignant all at once... Lemon has earned the comparison to Berryman. He has yet to produce the substantial body of work that Berryman did, but the same daring and flair for shaping popular idiom into poetry is there. He's one of the great performers--one of the great jugglers--in the circus tent right now." --Free Verse "Imagine Hart Crane in the mosh pit or William Blake singing in the psych ward, and the reader will get a sense of the visionary, pantheistic, blackly humorous, and guardedly hopeful speakers in Hallelujah Blackout. Negative epiphanies abound; they bleed, flower, and implode with violent beauty at every trapdoor, house of cards, box-squatted city corner, and cornered shadow of the mind." --Virginia Quarterly Review "Each moment is sheer and yet vaulting to the next; almost simultaneously occur the philosophical, visceral, violent, self-destructive, ambivalent, quotidian, alienated, gorgeous and over-blown. In this apocalyptic wonderland engendered by 'the violation of identity,' it seems simple acknowledgement is the only consolation to be had." --InDigest "What makes Hallelujah Blackout such a fun read is Lemon's way of winking over his shoulder just at the moment a poem veers into pompous-land. Like John Lennon's sing-song wit or Lewis Carroll's dreamy silliness, Hallelujah Blackout illustrates a modern, aggressive poet who knows how to have fun." --Hippo Press "The energetic journey in this book refuses to let the dust settle and the reader is constantly on the go, stimulated by the persistent use of surprising language, syntax and imagery. Indeed, there is little respite for either speaker or listener--it's the furious music that keeps everyone awake." --Critical Mass, (National Book Critics Circle blog) "Alex Lemon is an unstoppable phenom. He gets so much into a poem: so much world, such rich human voice, and he gets so terrifyingly close to both the self and the overwhelming Everything Else. He does this while making us look at the smallest, loveliest, worst, or plainest details at the oddest moments ... Lemon's art is transformative, staggering, and in the end, compassionate." --Brenda Shaughnessy "The only thing more remarkable than Lemon's linguistic muscle is the blood singing up from his gut." --Terrance Hayes "A Chaplinesque vaudeville, both mirthful and moving; a pure-gospel shout to the vaulted heavens; a hatful of abracadabras with a wink and a smile: Hallelujah Blackout is a muscular, vibrant book. Painful without being pitying, inventive without being showy, this is an astonishing, masterful collection of poems." --D. A. Powell Praise for Mosquito "Broken and brilliant, protean and written in blood, these poems are missives from the other side, the should-have-almost-died side, the burning-but-not-consumed side, and all Alex Lemon offers to console us are 'the nails on [his] tongue.' Mosquito introduces a thrilling new voice in American poetry." --Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City "'When I say hello, it means bite my heart,' begins one of the poems in Alex Lemon's startlingly raw and raucous first book. Speakers declare, 'I am Hi-Fi, all of me is surround / sound,' and describe a painting of the self as having 'eyes like megaphones.' Reading these poems is like having your five senses turned up to an almost unbearable volume. Sight: 'I could see the patch of hair you'd missed shaving / glow on your calf like a gold brick in an Iowa cornfield.' Sound: 'What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz from light bulbs.' Taste: 'I eat fr'zen strawberries.' Touch: 'Maybe, the surgeon said, / caressing my head like a hurricane.' Lemon's ardent search for beauty and mercy in Mosquito is transformative and true." --Matthea Harvey, author of Sad Little Breathing Machine: Poems "In these days of vast changes in American poetry, it is a joy to read the work of Alex Lemon. His poems pull the reader into a world of familiarities, while they confront daily experience in totally surprising ways. Mosquito means there is something there, so you better grab it before it disappears or becomes something else. It also means the vibrancy of these poems comes from the union between the microscopic and the panoramic--that focus of vision most poets spend a lifetime exploring. To show this kind of confidence and sense of direction means we have a major young poet on our hands. And, for poetry, that is the most vital gift it can receive." --Ray Gonzalez, author of Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems "In this edgy, energetic, even frenetic debut from a rising star of the Midwest, Lemon's jagged, commanding voice both charms and shocks: 'Voice, be amazing/ circling the river bottom,' his leadoff poem instructs. The first section (of four) stuns with accessible yet intense language, and also with the events it appears to describe: brain surgery and the poet's slow recovery from it. 'Tomorrow my head opens,' he says; 'If I am still/ here, someone let me know what I am.' Subsequent poems steer clear of medical topics in favor of sparkling, slightly diffuse cascades of images: 'It is the year of the dismembered horse/ Bury me with bones instead of eyes.' Crackling extremes court melodrama knowingly, challenging readers to say when enough is enough. Lemon's rawness and intelligence have a fine, in-your-face excess. Physical violence--'chipped-teeth,' 'kicked-heart,/ dried blood'--recurs as experience and symbol, as do a series of crime novel and film noir backdrops: 'always, I'm decapitated,' Lemon claims, '& feel as though someone is tracing/ The zippers of my self-inflicted bites.' Above all, these poems make strong impressions, using their verbal surprises as confrontational flirtations, or else tiny explosives." --Publishers Weekly "The poems in Alex Lemon's striking first book document the experience of undergoing brain surgery, an agonizing recovery, and the sudden discovery of Eros, who finally emerges as the ultimate emblem of survival. Careful yet raw, the fresh sutures that comprise the lines in many of these poems sing of pain so sharply as to verge on ethereal. Yet, in other poems, Lemon approaches recollection as a butcher does a carcass, bludgeoning necessarily harsh and decisive strikes in order to determine the boundaries of his experience. Here, we have the body as poem: as Lemon so beautifully describes, 'Melodies drill deep wells in the chest.'" --Cate Marvin, Ploughshares

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Book SynopsisFrom one of our finest poets comes a collection about time—about memory, remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. Called “the poet of things” by Richard Howard, Don Bogen understands the ways objects hold history, even if they’ve grown obsolescent, even when they’ve been forgotten. So objects—rendered in cinematic detail—fill these poems. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography. Hospitals: the patients who have passed through, the buildings that have crumbled. And, in a longer view, the people who survive in what they left behind: Thom Gunn, Charles Dickens, and the pre-Columbian architects who designed the great earthworks of Ohio two thousand years ago. Songs, ephemeral by nature but infinitely repeatable, run throughout the collection. “What did they tell me, all those years?” Bogen writes. Immediate Song offers us a retrospective glance that is at once contemplative and joyous, carefully shaped but flush with sensuous observation: a paean to what is both universal and fleeting.

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Book SynopsisNamed a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry Society of Midland Authors Honoree in Poetry In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50. In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the disaster. Here we meet its survivors and victims, from a pearl-catcher to a mild-mannered father to a drove of mindless pink robots. And here, too, we meet Roripaugh’s unforgettable Tsunami: a force of nature, femme fatale, and “annihilatrix.” Tsunami is part hero and part supervillain—angry, loud, forcefully defending her rights as a living being in contemporary industrialized society. As humanity rebuilds in disaster’s wake, Tsunami continues to wreak her own havoc, battling humans’ self-appointed role as colonizer of Earth and its life-forms. “She’s an unsubtle thief / a giver of gifts,” Roripaugh writes of Tsunami, who spits garbage from the Pacific back into now-pulverized Fukushima. As Tsunami makes visible her suffering, the wrath of nature scorned, humanity has the opportunity to reconsider the trauma they cause Earth and each other. But will they look?

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Book SynopsisAn Electric Literature “Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2021”From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s newest collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.“‘You tell me how I was born what I am,’” demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley—of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless.With astonishing formal range, Dēmos also documents the intolerance that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger, violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news website, Dēmos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American—and it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude erased.Dēmos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of the most intriguing new voices in American letters—a voice singing “long on America as One / body but many parts.”Trade ReviewPraise for Dēmos“In a superbly inventive collection, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s work explores living under the dominance of whiteness in America and the history of violence, particularly against Native communities. These poems ask: is racial violence in this country’s DNA? How far will it go, how long will this go on? It is a bold inquisition into the damage that has been done, accomplished with creative risk-taking.” —Electric Literature, “Most Anticipated Poetry of 2021” “Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley brings together Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures to investigate multiracial dislocation, American intolerance, and the question we all ask—who am I?—in the teeming Dēmos: An American Multitude.”—Library Journal "Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's book Dēmos is a powerhouse collection of poems by a powerhouse poet. Dēmos showcases the range of the poet—one who can write lullaby lyrics and in the very next poem mold words out of fire. The energy in these poems is electric as Naka-Hasebe Kingsley explores and condemns the many injustices towards Native Americans and other marginalized communities throughout our short history. Naka-Hasebe Kingsley's poems are unflinching, unrelenting, disarming, and brilliant in their range, form, and language. This is a necessary book of ferocity and strength during a challenging time. "—Victoria Chang “With this latest collection, Kingsley writes an encompassing work that’s thematically wide-reaching and formally and linguistically playful, boasting poems that change in style, perspective, and temperament from one to the next. Kingsley proves an engaging, cerebral guide through it all.”—Library Journal “How do you secure a sense of self and home when those things are bloodied? In poems of visionary protest and tender restoration, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s Dēmos proposes answers to that distinctly American question. In Dēmos, place and body are like palimpsests inscribed over and over again by the violence of history and the violence of contemporary racial brutality. As one poem laments, ‘I was born what I am in ash.’ And yet, out of a scorched and brindled self, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley presents a lyric voice that is as powerful as any we now have in our poetry.”—Rick Barot “These poems are like found object sculptures—but the rivets are words, wordplay, and the invention. From Punnett squares as form to leftovers as metaphor for tri-racial identity, Benjamín Naka-Hasbey Kingsley presents a sensibility born out of multiple histories of oppression that asserts survival and demands understanding.”—Heid E. Erdrich “With language as his pigment, with poetic form as his palette knives, Kingsley creates layer upon intimate layer as he uncovers multitudinous selves, simultaneously exploring just who is this WE in this ‘We the People.’”—River Heron Review “Recommended for readers eager for nonquaint novels about seniors.”—Library Journal

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for PoetryA boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing—and inviting us—to “expand our relationship / with Death,” and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.Trade ReviewPraise for We the Jury“One of the most outstanding American poets of his generation . . . Miller’s poems face the unvarnished truth of racism and inequality with unsentimental and intriguing utterance.” —Sunday Independent (Ireland) “These entries candidly showcase the complexity of human contradictions, and the many forms of grief, doubt, and joy on offer. Moving between specific moments in history and ripe lyrical musings, these poems embrace the unanswerable, offering a deep and satisfying look at selfhood.”—Publishers Weekly “A sharply conceived and exquisitely written collection . . . It’s especially striking to read these poems now, because they feel perfectly suited for our fractured times, but a collection this assured, this perfectly rendered, will remain fresh and equally resonant for future readers.”—Los Angeles Review “Astute and timely . . . Many-minded and formally diverse, [We the Jury] guides its reader through a gauntlet of American moments, personal and political, past and present, en route to what amounts, for this reader, to a sort of reckoning with the American identity and, within that identity, a speaker finding their place.”—D.S. Waldman, Poetry International “We the Jury is a good-hearted testament to not only the intricate treading of history but also to enduring love, and the radical strength required to thrive in a ravaged world . . . What Miller does with the expression and capacity of love is magnificent and indeed, memorable. The poems enlarge its concept, open it up in a way that is not a vague, distant thought to the reader, but rather, a real outward force, a gentle beckoning to every wild and quiet possibility.”—Southern Indiana Review “Miller—skeptical, exact, yet not entirely without hope—is one of the best. ‘On History,’ about the poet’s relationship with a convicted murderer, is surely one of the most nuanced explorations of justice (criminal or otherwise) that you are likely to read this year.”—California Review of Books “Poetry can transform the imagination, and the kind of changes Miller offers are ones we might shy away from. But the book itself is brave, and it makes me feel brave enough to face even the griefs and losses I have yet to encounter.”—Meridian “The poems are dramatic but understated, quiet in the way a bassoon can fill a room without alarming the audience; they are gifts of steady language—unpretentious, unambiguous—in a world swarming with hornet-tipped voices . . . The poems are quiet like an iris bulb. If a reader puts her ear close, she’ll hear the ground rumbling.”—Colorado Review “An introspective call-to-action like no other . . . We the Jury delivers the informal findings of our conflicted and always-evolving existence and exposes the heart.”—RHINO “In We the Jury, Wayne Miller asks probing questions about joy, grief, mortality, and understanding others.”—Library Journal “At times heartbreaking, but always beautiful, We the Jury is a collection that does not shy away from the realities of life—those of aging, of politics, of violence, or of loss.”—The West Review “Simultaneously devastating and stunningly beautiful . . . [Miller’s] is an unflinching, steady gaze, and he clearly feels and sees deeply, attending to the world around him through a lyric that manages to unpack complex ideas across a handful of carved, crafted lines.”—Rob Mclennan, on his blog “We the Jury is a book of dark and sometimes surreal love poems from the heart of a man to his wife, his children, his nation, and his past. ‘Marveling at the age of things,’ Miller writes with an understanding of community and the knowledge that any one understanding must be questioned: ‘we will come down upon us with the weight of our entire existence // even then not one of us // will truly understand what we have done.’ It’s the subtleties and vulnerabilities of these poems that move them from a good look at recent history to a leap of lyric exploration.”—Jericho Brown “We the Jury is incisive and deeply personal, plumbing complex human questions (how do we belong, who decides what we belong to, how do we contend with the evidence of our mortality) in ways that feel both current and enduring. These poems are succinct, the line breaks taut and attentive, and the narratives profoundly compelling. Rich in image and full of the unexpected, We the Jury offers glimpses of a nation, a family, a life, and a mind at work piecing together (and picking apart) the stories that shape our individual and collective experience. A truly moving and meaningful book.”—Rebecca Lindenberg“There is no didacticism in We the Jury because the paradoxes, quandaries, and trespasses of our age are not presented for predetermined consumption. Through Miller’s wisdom and fearlessness, these spare, incisive lyrics drop us into a stark world. They bare what we fail to remember or what we fail to understand about our pseudo-productive, throwaway existence. Whether Miller implicates his speaker in our false economy or resists an indictment, he pays chilling attention to the present. That is, his curiosity is both passionate and disinterested. Moments of suspended wonder abound. In We, the Jury, every poem, measured and flawless, says, look with open eyes.”—Martha Serpas “We the Jury is a startling, radiant book. Miller dangles the hope to be ‘lifted // into the purity of our politics’—and then yanks it back with truth. The truth? Cell phones buzzing in the pockets of massacred gay men is ‘the best image we had / of what made us a nation.’ I admire so much, including Miller’s elemental gift for metaphor: the ‘lit-up silence’ after a miscarriage; the vacant houses of the rich ‘mute and clear, like still water.’ No American poet interrogates the ways our center cannot hold—middle class, age, west, rage—better, and more humanely, than Wayne Miller.”—Randall Mann “In his latest collection, We the Jury, Miller looks out at his world as a husband, a father, a citizen, and asks with honesty and rapture: ‘What is this America, what is this life?’ A keen observer, Miller is not disheartened by past atrocities and current struggles, but is compelled to hold them in front of him and be candid about what he sees . . . Throughout the book, Miller tackles plenty of tough topics—miscarriage, heroin addiction, housing crisis, middle age, war—but all with a measure of gentleness and abundance. As he observes wisely, ‘Bomb craters’ with time become ‘ponds / exploding with lilies.’” —Ben Groner, Parnassus

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Book SynopsisWinner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive.“You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd.A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.Trade ReviewPraise for North American Stadiums “[Chambers] records vivid details and creates an engrossing urban pastoral. . . . These distinctive poems deserve a wide audience.”—Washington Post “A book of landscape and memory, of travel and grit, North American Stadiums is more like the act of penance than anything else I have ever read. . . . Smokestacks and forges, winter and jackknives, bodies broken, exhausted and fragile—these images, repeated throughout the collection, insist upon an interrogation of beauty, savor the hard details, speak always with a tang of blood. . . . Above all, these poems seek to remember, record, and perhaps be forgiven along the way.”—Kenyon Review “Fabulous . . . Each page is a breathing scene. . . . If memory serves anyone it certainly serves Chambers best, because it’s impossible to stop reading this work. This should be the start of something big.”—Washington Independent Review of Books “An exceptional debut collection about miracles, memory, and wanderlust . . . [Chambers is] a promising voice.”—Colorado Review “The collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places ‘bleached / pale by time and weather’—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces.”—Poets & Writers “Exquisite . . . Chambers executes a kind of magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation. . . . A crackling first act by a promising new poet.”—Booklist “These are poems of memory and longing—compelling, lyrical, and unsettling. The furniture provided to memory is of the vistas, subway cars, and closed windows of different cities. The unsettling feeling comes with the revelation that for all the urban inventory, this is an American pastoral. A spacious glimpse of an old adventure: a poet pushing toward his own frontier. And Chambers is a wonderful poet, equal to the task.”—Eavan Boland “This powerful, absorbing first book has the sound and feel of a younger generation. Brilliant language, intelligence, and feeling make North American Stadiums matter. Factory lights, border patrol, gin, handguns, smoke stacks, and war are the geography of many of these eloquent poems, but the solitary poet is always scrutinizing the world with the eyes of a lover.”—Henri Cole “You can tell from the opening notes that Chambers has chops. He can be rhapsodic—a Midwest rhapsody that includes light from port cranes and train horns in the Twin Cities. He can be elegiac—he’s a genius at departures and fingering the bones in the reliquaries of the open road. He’s got the traveler’s wandering [wondering] instinct and the [in] dweller’s intimacy. At work is a severe moral imagination and a filmic imagination ‘shining with something living / while it burns.’ What a privilege it is to receive the dispatches of this exceptional book.”—Bruce Smith “The poems of Grady Chambers fill me with so much pleasure. Intimate histories that never shy away from their speaker’s complicity in sorrow but also in wonder. These are poems rooted in an idea we call America that understand what cost that naming comes with. What does it mean to make a pastoral of work you’ve never done? Chambers drives a stake into the heart of the patronizing pastoral we make of backbreaking work and unforgiving labor. What he comes up with? A poetry of the next chapter in our country’s search for meaning.”—Gabrielle Calvocoressi “These poems reminded me in the best way of Denis Johnson, Walt Whitman, Philip Levine, and even Jack Kerouac. Reading North American Stadiums reminded me that there is always room, infinite room, for another great new poetic voice, a young soul searching for emotional truth, probing with sensitive emotion the hidden American places. As a matter of fact, I’d say we need this book right now. We need this new voice.”—David Means

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Book SynopsisWhat is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.”Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.Trade ReviewPraise for Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes“Beer populates the book’s pages with a cavalcade of pleasantly deceptive voices . . . But Beer’s playful embrace of such strange subject matter conceals darkly complicated speakers whose ultimate deceptions fool only themselves . . . Clever, kaleidoscopic, and powerfully profound.”—Booklist, Starred Review"From magic shows to drag shows, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes applies a queer sensibility to some of life's strange mysteries and pop-culture icons with simultaneous wackiness and intellect."—Shondaland“Electric . . . Readers are asked to look past first impressions in this imaginative and spirited collection.”—Publishers Weekly“A mix of delightful humor and deep, delicate sadness. Real Phonies is critical of the facades we choose to believe in, sure, but underneath it all is Beer’s genuine love of performance and the transformative, healing power of suspending disbelief in the right moments.”—Lavender Magazine"To read Nicky Beer's third collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, is to experience poetry as pageantry. In Beer's hands, the poetic form is a staging place for spectacle, replete with provocative imagery and a brash cast of characters . . . Her formal shape-shifting and penchant for performance make this a magnetic collection."—BookPage, Starred Review"The cheeky poem titles and subjects she chooses to inspect within clue you in to the fact that this is performance, with Beer controlling the show . . . Veering between full-on jokester, esoteric performance artist, and masterful dramatic actor delivering a gut-wrenching monologue, she lands somewhere in the middle, a generous magician who lets us see the mechanics of the tricks and of herself."—Southwest Contemporary“‘The sky is one long drink,’ Nicky Beer writes in this much-anticipated third collection, serving as a most welcome resource for people who seek imaginative illumination—and who could use a good old-fashioned chuckle. This book shimmers with Beer’s trademark wit and wildly inventive takes on pop culture, history, and humankind. Listen for the thump in these pages—this book has a bonafide heartbeat.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil“A brilliant, rollicking collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes illuminates the strange wonders and abiding mysteries that surround us. Beer is an exceptional writer, capable of mingling intellectual depth with humor and sharp poignancy. A wonderful book.”—Jasmin Darznik“‘Beauty should always taste a bit of its own blood / and blame in its teeth,’ Nicky Beer writes in her triumphant Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. Here is a collection of poems so funny they’ll break your heart and make you glad for it. Take these lines that comprise ‘Sawing a Lady in Half’: ‘they want it to be true / and don’t want it to be true / that they want it to be true.’ Or take the witty wordplay on the Dark Knight's name in ‘Dear Bruce Wayne,’ in which Beer imparts this wisdom: ‘The bruise / wanes. Every woman / is Batman.’ Nicky Beer is the superhero we need, and these poems are the invisible jet she has sent to save us. Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is by turns lyrically burnished, subversively funny, and astonishingly beautiful. Beer says it best when she writes ‘what’s needed / now is a tongue with the chill of steel.’ Dear reader, look no further.”—James Allen Hall“Nicky Beer’s Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a bonafide triumph––beginning with the table of contents. Just a few of her knockout titles: “Drag Day at Dollywood,” “Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs,” Dear Bruce Wayne,” “Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf.” Unless you’re a pig or a cow, how could you not read on? Beer’s intoxication with language combines with drop-dead wackiness and wisdom, and she uses fabrications to get at the truth: how disconnects connect us, how distortions, in concert, undo illusion. Via magicians, impersonators, forgers, plagiarists, liars, screen stars and two-bit actors, Beer delivers dark truths with humor and surprise. The poem “Elegy” begins: “I never liked the dead boy.” It’s a statement that feels less like confession than blunt instrument. Throughout the collection, the poems do a cannonball through the appropriate or expected into deeper waters. In “The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts,” Beer writes: “she believes death is God’s/apology for suffering.” And in “Drag Day at Dollywood,” she gives us a zany fun house of Dollys that morphs into a tender and sad eternity (or illusion thereof) in which: “Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses/onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly’s breast,/who rests her head on Dolly’s breast, who rests/her head on Dolly’s breast on Dolly’s breast.” If that isn’t mother’s milk, what is?" —Andrea Cohen“Reading Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes felt like a dream. Each of Nicky Beer’s poems is blurred around the edges, swirling with hairspray, Marlene Dietrich, and magic tricks. The collection is funny yet emotional, blunt yet reverent, and illuminating. Each poem wraps readers in a soft blanket, but also fits them for a teased wig and sits them down in Dollywood. The story told is one of queerness, which is: a John Hughes movie, Batman, David Bowie, penicillin, and a stereoscope. Beer‘s work reads like a love letter, asking readers to embrace queerness in all its glam and tackiness.” —Nikita Imafidon, Raven Book Store Praise for The Octopus Game “I can’t help but ‘succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw’ of these poems. I love their horror and humility, their playfulness. Implicating me in the mysterious beauty of the universe, Beer connects the reader to the octopus, connects the octopus to the reader, and connects us all to her poems’ surprising subjects. Drawing insights from least predictable places, these poems are ‘a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood.’”— Camille Dungy “Clever and arresting . . . [Beer’s] energy for collecting trivia can equal the verve of her syntax: a group of eight danseurs photographed a century ago are a ‘pubescent octet in sepia wash, symmetrically poised / in borrowed frocks’; in the eponymous game, ‘[t]wo people sit side by side / And become each other’s arms.’ Beer’s insistence on using octopuses (and squid and cuttlefish) as metaphors does not keep her from exploring—and, at times, flaunting—marine zoology, such as when she writes, ‘[T]he thousands of real / octopus corpses washed / upon’ a Portuguese beach years ago. Nor does her attention to the links between human and nonhuman life, to the way that we are all just collections of cells, prevent her from delighting in old forms, especially sonnets and pantoums.”— Publishers Weekly“Beer takes the octopus as a central conceit in her second collection, which unfolds like a phantasmagoric bestiary. With the eye of a wild documentarian, Beer imagines fantastic names for the strange cephalopods (‘viral naiad,’ ‘charred nebula,’ and ‘sepia epicene’), and catalogs their otherworldly traits. . . . Beer links humans and invertebrates amid the unfathomable mass of twentieth-century data—the ‘maddening swarm of alien ciphers’—and reminds readers of a festering, dark desire: ‘We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.’”— Booklist Praise for The Diminishing House “A wonder of both human understanding and poetic craft.”— Pleiades “These are more than simply poems of intense intelligence and complexity; every line contains intricate movements, always progressing, redefining, and delighting in language and sound. . . . These are intricate contraptions, delicate and beautiful shapes.”— Hollins Critic “Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection.”— Midwest Book ReviewTable of ContentsTable of Contents Drag Day at Dollywood Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale Cathy Dies Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf Etymology Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs Thorn Ostinato ⇎ Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944 Forged Medieval German Church Fresco with Clandestine Marlene Dietrich The Benevolent Sisterhood of Inconspicuous Fabricators The Magicians at Work Sawing a Lady in Half The Great Something The Plagiarist Notes on the Village of Liars Excerpts from The Updated Handbook to Mendacity ⇎ The Stereoscopic Man ⇎ Self-Portrait While Operating Heavy Machinery The Demolitionists Small Claims Courtship Exclusive Interview Marlene Dietrich Meets David Bowie, 1978 Marlene Dietrich Considers Penicillin, 1950 Mating Call of the Re-Creation Panda Scat Heart in Turmeric ⇎ Dear Bruce Wayne, Elegy Kindness/Kindling Juveniles Nessun Dorma The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts Because my grief was a tree Specimen #17 Revision Notes Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary WorkAma Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.Trade ReviewPraise for Bluest Nude“In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.”—Library Journal"The hotly burning poems in Codjoe’s debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova.”—Booklist, starred review"Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems…Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana."—Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation“If seeing were easy, we wouldn’t need poetry. That’s one of the implications of Ama Codjoe’s startling debut, Bluest Nude. The poems are portraits—glimpses—of a poet who wants ‘to be seen clearly or not at all.’... [Bluest Nude is] steeped brilliantly in the urgency of the contemporary hunger to know what we really are. There’s a quiet joy possible, too, in that difficult pursuit.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s“Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoe’s ‘I’ is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“Bluest Nude is a portrait of Black female desire and embodied love that will leave you closer to your own core. Codjoe uses a language so emotionally clear and nourishing that I felt physically hungry for it.”—The Common“Bluest Nude is a sensual, seductive, and luminous collection of poetry that draws the reader in with tenderness, vulnerability, and desire. These poems simultaneously satisfy while leaving you with an aching need for more.”—Christine Bollow, Between Drafts"How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination. Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter."—Tracy K. Smith"Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human."—Ada Limon"It is hard to find words for the fineness of Ama Codjoe's poetry, its unabashed and luminous vibrancy. She unframes old myths about beauty and femininity and care to bring them intimately into the experience of the body where she forges far more supple visions. Her language is so rich and resourceful that, as it enlarges lyric possibilities, it also enlarges human ones. Never have I been so convinced that the desire to know oneself and the desire to be the agent of one's own radical self-making can be audacious and brilliant collaborators."—Mary Szybist“Codjoe’s poems made me ache in the best way. These poems call forward our many mothers—in pictures and pages—they create a vibrant salon pulsing with the confidence of a poet’s urgent, material response. Exquisitely balanced between premonition and memory, Bluest Nude is a gathering and conjuring of improvisation and reflection, sensuality and joy, call and response.”—Ellen GallagherPraise for Ama Codjoe"Yes, listen. Listen. Ama Codjoe’s writing is too eloquent not the hear.”—Ed Roberson, from the introduction to Blood of the Air “At the heart of Codjoe’s poems in her first chapbook, Blood of the Air, is a real heart, pumping, working the blood of life—good blood, bad blood—out. . . . Codjoe’s poems, her re-framings, are full of care and kindness for the speakers of the poems, imagined or not, in their reveries, in their vulnerabilities, in their angers. The quieter poems press your hand with such intention when they skip—never a surprise CD skip from an accidental scratch; a practiced boxer’s skip.”—Adroit Journal “Codjoe’s poetry offers a brief, powerful intersection where the subjects of her poems illustrate how some issues recur again and again throughout the human experience. In times like these, when blood and air are porous elements that we fear, we see how they are ancient and necessary, too.”—Tara Betts “ Codjoe’s extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe’s mastery of the poetic craft. . . . Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other people’s definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom.”—Nadia AlexisTable of ContentsI. Blueprint On Seeing and Being Seen Two Girls Bathing Marigolds of Fire Labor Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima Diamondback “After the __________, I yearned to be reckless. To smash” Detail from “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” Primordial Mirror Le Sacre du printemps “After the __________, I had the urge to dance” II. She Said III. Posing Nude Burying Seeds At the Fish House Why I Left the Garden “After the __________, I mothered my mother” Facing Off “After the __________, time turned like a mood ring.” Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds Of Being in Motion “After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands” Heaven as Olympic Spa IV. Bluest Nude Bathers with a Turtle Slow Drag with Branches of Pine Lotioning My Mother’s Back Aubade A Family Woven Like Night through Trees Etymology of a Mood Poem After an Iteration of a Painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Destroyed by the Artist Herself Head on Ice #5 After a Year of Forgetting “There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed” Notes

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Book SynopsisThe poetry of Spending the Winter is musical and structured, whimsical and piercing, begging to be read aloud when one is not laughing or arrested by an image that hooks the heart. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading,” writes one poet. “A throwback to a time when lovers of poetry…looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin,” adds another. With sections of comedy that show his wit, translations that echo his vast reading, and formalist poetry that reveal his craft, Bottum aims, in the way few poets these days do, at memorable lines and heart-stopping images as he seeks the deep stuff of human experience: God and birth and death—the beautiful and terrifying finitude of life. “We do with words what little words can do,” he writes. But in Spending the Winter, Joseph Bottum shows that words can do far more than a little. “Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading. . . . If you’re a reader who loves poetry whatever mood it’s in, just open Spending the Winter anywhere to find poems that hurt, enlighten, and delight.” —Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Rehearsing Absence and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize “Joseph Bottum is a brilliant formalist, and to read him is to enter the world of the tried-and-true classics, all achieved with an amazingly contemporary ring. His Spending the Winter is a delight. Here is a poetry of elegy, humor, wit, political savvy, and vast learning.” —Paul Mariani, author The Great Wheel and winner of the John Ciardi Award “Joseph Bottum’s Spending the Winter is a throwback to a time when lovers of poetry outside the literary establishment looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin. This is poetry from another age—an age when we expected intellectual, religious, and literary significance from our verse.” —A.M. Juster, author of Wonder and Wrath and winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize “Spending the Winter is a word-lover’s dream: Joseph Bottum’s poems pierce, probe, dazzle, and delight. They will open the eyes of your soul.” —Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well “When reading Spending the Winter, I recalled C.S. Lewis’s description of joy as a wanting for something that is beyond this world. There’s a sense in these poems that things around us are fleeting, yet for that reason, the poems ask us to pay all the more attention.” —Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of Giving the Devil his Due

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Book SynopsisAnthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin’s emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin’s poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: “among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,” Bolin writes, “a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.” This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions—with animal acuity—a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.Trade ReviewWhat won’t a ‘saint with a shovel’ unearth in these exquisite, disquieting, soul-trawling poems that variously mine, measure, tally, sample, body-scan, and heat-capture our bereaved universe? Anthem Speed drops us here in the ruins mid-song, in wonder and sorrow, dappled ‘in forensic light,’ holding on to Bolin’s dire music for dear life." - Robyn Schiff, author, A Woman of Property"With a jade eye, but never a jaded one, Christopher Bolin offers us our contemporary condition’s ‘changing symbols / in forensic light.’ Here the world is an ongoing apocalypse, where ‘the uranium thinning quail’s eggs’ hint at a wider irradiation, where ‘birds’ bodies smell of smoke,’ and the images chatter their jagged clarities through the Geiger counter’s static, and the logic of the lyric poem suffers such mutation that one line’s leap to the next can feel like a gnostic juxtaposition. Search engine bots vie with capital’s half-life to claim the human heart’s worried worth, and the security state sings to the link satellites that surveil us. And yet a strange hope runs its electric current through these lines: not that all is not lost, but that the very evidences of our vast dismantling can be rebuilt into another structure, ones that witness the world even if it cannot heal it, while quietly suggesting that a meaningful life still exists, and these poems are our path to it." - Dan Beachy-Quick, author, Arrows

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Book SynopsisNew York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.Table of Contents“INTRODUCTION: Mapping the Poetry of Ukrainian New York”POEMSPart I: 1920s-1930sMykhail Semenko Каблепоема №2 Cablepoem, No. 2 (Tran. by Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Каблепоема №6 Cablepoem, No. 6 (Tran. by Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Система System (Tran. Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Решта The Rest (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oleksa Slisarenko Уот Уітмен Walt Whitman (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Mykola Tarnovsky Subway Subway (Tran. Abbey Fenbert) На П’ятій Авеню On Fifth Avenue (Tran. Abbey Fenbert) У місті, де жив Уот Уітмен In The City Where Walt Whitman Lived (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)Kasandryn Times Square Times Square (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)M. Pilny Вже досить Enough Already (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)V. Rudeychuk Ню Йорк New York (Tran. by Abbey Fenbert)Ivan Kulyk Чорна епопея (уривок) From the Black Epos (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Part II: 1940s-1980sAndriy Malyshko Маяковський в Америці Mayakovsky in America (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Yevhen Malanyuk Ані вершин, ані низин… Untitled (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Ньюйоркські стенограми New York Shorthand (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Ні, не пустеля і намет… [No, neither desert, nor tent…] (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Думи Thoughts (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Дні Days (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Одного дня One Day (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Vadym Lesych Нью-Йоркські строфи New York Verses (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv with Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko) гарлем ніч (І) інтермеццо (ІІ) день (ІІІ) Harlem (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv) night intermezzo day Люди осілі The Settled People (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv) Ніч на Іст-Бронксі A Night in East Bronx (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Yuri Kosach Мангаттен, 103-тя вулиця Manhattan, 103rd Street (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Нью-Йоркська елегія New York Elegy (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Бродвей Broadway (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Авеню діамантів Diamond District (Tran. Ali Kinsella) З пісень Гарлему From the Song of Harlem (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Балада про Золотий Бродвей Ballad of Golden Broadway (Tran. Ali Kinsella)Yuriy Tarnawsky Ода до кафе Ode to a Café (Trans. by the author) Неділі Sundays (Trans. by the author) Любовний вірш Love Poem (Trans. by the author) Приїзд ІV Arrival IV (Trans. by the author) Кінець світу End of the World (Trans. by the author) Сссмерть Dddeath (Trans. by the author)Bohdan Rubchak Бездомний Homeless (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Bohdan Boychuk Негр сидить посередині дороги і б’є у барабан A Negro Sits in the Middle of the Road and Beats a Drum (Tran. Anand Dibble) Вірші про місто City Verses (Tran. Anand Dibble) Любов у трьох часах (уривки) Три Одинадцять From Three Dimentional Love Three (Tran. Mark Rudman and the Author) Eleven (Tran. Mark Rudman and the Author) Ланчонетний триптих Luncheonette Triptych (Tran. Anand Dibble) Нью-Йоркська елегія New York Elegy (Tran. Anand Dibble)Leonid Lyman Осінь у Бронкспарку Autumn in a Bronx Park (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Dima Вечірній Бродвей Broadway in the Evening (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Нью-йоркська ніч New York Night (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Dmytro Pavlychko Повітря Нью-Йорка New York’s Air (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Ivan Drach Вічний блюз Eternal Blues (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Двоє ввечері пішки Two Walk in the Evening (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Нью-Йорк в стилі кубізму New York in the Cubist Style (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Дмитрові Павличку (уривок) From For Dmytro Pavlychko (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Lida Palij Спекотливий день в Ню-Йорку A Hot Day in New York (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Borys Oliynyk Від білої хати до Білого дому... 1.Знайомство 2. Горить Нью-Йорк 4. Прометей приручений 5. Та від Білої хати...From the White Home to the White House (Tran. Ali Kinsella) 1. Getting Acquainted 2. New York Burns 4. Prometheus Doomed 5. From the White HousePart III: 1991-2016Abram Katsnelson Уолл-Стріт Wall Street (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) На Бродвеї On Broadway (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Yuri Andrukhovych Bombing New York City Bombing New York City (Tran. Sarah Luczaj)Oksana Zabuzhko New York, NY New York, NY (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Serhiy Zhadan Нью-Йорк – факін сіті New York Fuckin’ City (Tran. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phills) “І найменша дівчинка в Чайна-тауні…” [And the smallest girl in Chinatown…] (Tran. Ostap Kin)Vasyl Makhno New York Postcard to Bohdan Zadura (Tran. Luba Gawur) Coffee in Starbucks (Tran. Michael Naydan) Federico Garcia Lorca (Tran. Orest Popovych) A Farewell to Brooklyn (Tran. Orest Popovych) Brooklyn Elegy (Tran. Orest Popovych) Staten Island (Tran. Orest Popovych)Maryana Savka Eleventh Street (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oksana Lutsyshyna “Мій друг Стефан у вельветовому піджаку фотографується…” [My friend Stefan…] (Tran. the Author and Ali Kinsella)Kateryna Babkina Знеболювальні і снодійні Painkillers and Sleeping Pills (Tran. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phills)Iryna Shuvalova велика риба та інші мости учора містом ходила велика риба ти розгойдуєшся – й переступаєш поріг із чого складається місто? якщо вийти за двері Big fish and other bridges (Tran. Olena Jennings) 1. yesterday a big fish walked through the city 2. gathering momentum – you cross the threshold 3. what is the city made from? 4. if we were to walk out the doorIryna Vikyrchak Р.А. R.A. (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Сезонна Seasonal (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko в Maikley At Maikley’s Café (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Yulia Musakovska “Тунелями білого кахлю курсують жовті рибини…” [In tunnels of white…] (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Vasyl Lozynsky Нью-Йорк New York (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Olha Fraze-Frazenko Грудень December (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)NOTESACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF PUBLICATION IN UKRAINIANPRIOR PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONPOETSTRANSLATORS

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Book SynopsisNew York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.Table of Contents“INTRODUCTION: Mapping the Poetry of Ukrainian New York”POEMSPart I: 1920s-1930sMykhail Semenko Каблепоема №2 Cablepoem, No. 2 (Tran. by Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Каблепоема №6 Cablepoem, No. 6 (Tran. by Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Система System (Tran. Ostap Kin and Marlow Davis) Решта The Rest (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oleksa Slisarenko Уот Уітмен Walt Whitman (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Mykola Tarnovsky Subway Subway (Tran. Abbey Fenbert) На П’ятій Авеню On Fifth Avenue (Tran. Abbey Fenbert) У місті, де жив Уот Уітмен In The City Where Walt Whitman Lived (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)Kasandryn Times Square Times Square (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)M. Pilny Вже досить Enough Already (Tran. Abbey Fenbert)V. Rudeychuk Ню Йорк New York (Tran. by Abbey Fenbert)Ivan Kulyk Чорна епопея (уривок) From the Black Epos (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Part II: 1940s-1980sAndriy Malyshko Маяковський в Америці Mayakovsky in America (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Yevhen Malanyuk Ані вершин, ані низин… Untitled (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Ньюйоркські стенограми New York Shorthand (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Ні, не пустеля і намет… [No, neither desert, nor tent…] (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Думи Thoughts (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Дні Days (Tran. Alexander Motyl) Одного дня One Day (Tran. Alexander Motyl)Vadym Lesych Нью-Йоркські строфи New York Verses (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv with Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko) гарлем ніч (І) інтермеццо (ІІ) день (ІІІ) Harlem (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv) night intermezzo day Люди осілі The Settled People (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv) Ніч на Іст-Бронксі A Night in East Bronx (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Yuri Kosach Мангаттен, 103-тя вулиця Manhattan, 103rd Street (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Нью-Йоркська елегія New York Elegy (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Бродвей Broadway (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Авеню діамантів Diamond District (Tran. Ali Kinsella) З пісень Гарлему From the Song of Harlem (Tran. Ali Kinsella) Балада про Золотий Бродвей Ballad of Golden Broadway (Tran. Ali Kinsella)Yuriy Tarnawsky Ода до кафе Ode to a Café (Trans. by the author) Неділі Sundays (Trans. by the author) Любовний вірш Love Poem (Trans. by the author) Приїзд ІV Arrival IV (Trans. by the author) Кінець світу End of the World (Trans. by the author) Сссмерть Dddeath (Trans. by the author)Bohdan Rubchak Бездомний Homeless (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Bohdan Boychuk Негр сидить посередині дороги і б’є у барабан A Negro Sits in the Middle of the Road and Beats a Drum (Tran. Anand Dibble) Вірші про місто City Verses (Tran. Anand Dibble) Любов у трьох часах (уривки) Три Одинадцять From Three Dimentional Love Three (Tran. Mark Rudman and the Author) Eleven (Tran. Mark Rudman and the Author) Ланчонетний триптих Luncheonette Triptych (Tran. Anand Dibble) Нью-Йоркська елегія New York Elegy (Tran. Anand Dibble)Leonid Lyman Осінь у Бронкспарку Autumn in a Bronx Park (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Dima Вечірній Бродвей Broadway in the Evening (Tran. 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Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Yuri Andrukhovych Bombing New York City Bombing New York City (Tran. Sarah Luczaj)Oksana Zabuzhko New York, NY New York, NY (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Serhiy Zhadan Нью-Йорк – факін сіті New York Fuckin’ City (Tran. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phills) “І найменша дівчинка в Чайна-тауні…” [And the smallest girl in Chinatown…] (Tran. Ostap Kin)Vasyl Makhno New York Postcard to Bohdan Zadura (Tran. Luba Gawur) Coffee in Starbucks (Tran. Michael Naydan) Federico Garcia Lorca (Tran. Orest Popovych) A Farewell to Brooklyn (Tran. Orest Popovych) Brooklyn Elegy (Tran. Orest Popovych) Staten Island (Tran. Orest Popovych)Maryana Savka Eleventh Street (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oksana Lutsyshyna “Мій друг Стефан у вельветовому піджаку фотографується…” [My friend Stefan…] (Tran. the Author and Ali Kinsella)Kateryna Babkina Знеболювальні і снодійні Painkillers and Sleeping Pills (Tran. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phills)Iryna Shuvalova велика риба та інші мости учора містом ходила велика риба ти розгойдуєшся – й переступаєш поріг із чого складається місто? якщо вийти за двері Big fish and other bridges (Tran. Olena Jennings) 1. yesterday a big fish walked through the city 2. gathering momentum – you cross the threshold 3. what is the city made from? 4. if we were to walk out the doorIryna Vikyrchak Р.А. R.A. (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella) Сезонна Seasonal (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Oleksandr Fraze-Frazenko в Maikley At Maikley’s Café (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Yulia Musakovska “Тунелями білого кахлю курсують жовті рибини…” [In tunnels of white…] (Tran. Olga Gerasymiv)Vasyl Lozynsky Нью-Йорк New York (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)Olha Fraze-Frazenko Грудень December (Tran. Ostap Kin and Ali Kinsella)NOTESACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF PUBLICATION IN UKRAINIANPRIOR PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONPOETSTRANSLATORS

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