Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisWhat principles connectand what distinctions separateThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets?The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot's early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principlesdialectic and relativismconstitTrade ReviewBrooker's familiarity with the detailed chronology of Eliot's intellectual development makes her an exceptionally helpful and authoritative guide . . . this is a lucid, intricate but informative book, and the more you already know about Eliot, the more you will learn from it.—Review of English StudiesBrooker integrates complex philosophical and theological analyses into a deeply sympathetic, emotionally intelligent study. She excels in guiding us along Eliot's intellectual and creative trajectory, using dialectics to draw a portrait of the conflicted mind of a poet who 'abandons nothing en route' . . . T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination will no doubt become a standard point of reference in the Eliotic critical canon.—The Modernist ReviewBrooker's work makes skillful use of hitherto unpublished materials.—Make it New: The Ezra Pound Society MagazineJewel Spears Brooker has written a book fully deserving of those accolades on its dust jacket. Its originality, intellectual heft, and clear, graceful style make it appealing to Eliot's general readership and essential for Eliot scholars. "We are in the dawn of a renaissance in Eliot studies," she writes in her Introduction. T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination is a distinguished contribution to that renaissance, taking it beyond its dawn to full sunrise.—Victor Strandberg, Literary MattersIn eleven compact and cogent chapters, Jewel Spears Brooker provides a persuasive account of T. S. Eliot's development as man, thinker, and poet. Brooker's book . . . is likely to be permanently useful.—Massimo Bacigalupo, Modern Language ReviewT. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination is an important contribution to Eliot criticism that will undoubtedly become essential reading for scholars of modernism in general and of T. S. Eliot in particular. Its straightforward and lucid language, accessible structure, and expert use of recent scholarship will appeal to a general Eliot readership as well. Like Brooker's other books and essays, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination is a major achievement.—Kinereth Meyer, Partial AnswersBrooker's latest monograph, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination, is a hallmark of scholarly brilliance and literary taste.—Lizi Dzagnidze, Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature T.S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination provides a fresh and systematic Eliot, reassesses some fundamental issues in Eliot studies, and more importantly, opens up new areas of interpretation regarding Eliot's concern with wholeness, his attitudes toward science and scientific methods, and his ventures into mysticism and epistemology.—Chen Lin, Shanghai Normal University, Journal of Modern LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Disjunction and Dialectic in T. S. Eliot 1. The Debate between Body and Soul in Eliot's Early Poetry 2. Eliot's First Conversion: "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and the 1913 Critique of Bergson 3. Eliot's Debt to F. H. Bradley: Reality and Appearance in 1914 4. The Poet and the Cave-Man: Making History in "Sweeney among the Nightingales" and The Waste Land 5. Individual Works and Organic Wholes: The Idealist Foundation of Eliot's Criticism 6. Poetry and Despair: The Hollow Men and the End of Philosophy 7. Love and Ecstasy in Donne, Dante, and Andrewes 8. Eliot's Second Conversion: Dogma without Dogmatism 9. An Exilic Triptych: The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, "Marina" 10. "Into our first world": Return and Recognition in Burnt Norton and Little Gidding 11. War and the Problem of Evil in the Wartime Quartets: Reason, Love, Poetry Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA poetry collection that grapples with the tragicomic nature of language, memory, love, work, and the performative self. Though at times whimsical and witty, the poems in Hastings Hensel's Ballyhoo inhabit the world beyond and between the punchline. In tightly controlled meditations on language's limits and its necessity, as well as on the many forms that humor takescomedy, laughter, farce, clowning, parody, and moreHensel navigates fine lines between joy and sadness, jokes and cruelty, reality and illusion, and irony and sincerity. Universal in scope, the 47 poems in Ballyhoo are richly idiomatic and evocative. They are also frequently grounded in the southern Atlantic coast with its particular ecology, characters, history, and myth. The pleasure in reading these poems comes from the original connections Hensel makes between the literary and the gritty: an elegy set in a bait shop, Twelfth Night's Feste delivering a monologue in a bar, a villanelle about a murder on a cruise ship. TTable of ContentsSpoiler AlertTrue Story, No Joke Comedy and the Uncommon Woman That Laugh You Have, or, A Study in the Via NegativaPlaying Cards with Mark Strand Plot Summary Reality as Prank "Forgive Us Our Happiness" Recovering the Sunk Docent Freud in 1939 Mr. Hall Against Jubilance What We Need Here Is a New Dialect Noun Reading the Water Coaching the Witness Questions from the Witness Old Feste, at the Bar, Remembering On Taste Forgetting a Flood Stage Right Thinking I Wanted Country HumorAt Slack TideAfter Seeing Four Turtles on a Stump in the Waccamaw RiverFunny FarmScraping Barnacles from the HullThe Bait Shop ElegiesPumping the Trout's StomachStoryboardAt the Grave of the Fabulous MoolahThe Comedian Questions Her TimingCounterpunch LinesSea PorkMisfit, Mountain TownSad Clown in the Woods, No HoaxWanted: The Raccoon on the DockTrue Story, No JokeKnuckleheadsOde to a Boat MechanicLaughing GullWhereverHokeThe Funny PagesThrowbacksAs I Lay Dying LaughingAny Which Way You Cut ItNothing Liquid, Fragile, Hazardous, PerishableTo a Seated HarlequinAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author

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Book SynopsisThis collection of poetry by the celebrated southern Iranian poet and filmmaker Roja Chamankar (b. 1981) introduces English-speaking readers to one of the most accomplished and well-loved poets of her generation. Chamankar’s work blends surrealism and the southern coastal landscape of the poet’s upbringing with everyday experiences in rapidly urbanizing Tehran. While locating herself in the modernist tradition of Iranian poets like Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlu through form and imagery, Chamankar infuses this tradition with concerns unique to a generation that grew up in post-revolutionary Iran and endured the effects of the Iran-Iraq war. Seascapes, love and eroticism, the disconnection of modern life, and myths and fairytales figure prominently in these vivid, lyrical poems.In the rich miniature worlds of Chamankar’s poetry, readers become privy to a range of experiences, from desire and pain to rage and humor. Sometimes abstract, other times surreal&Trade ReviewThere is a call in the culture of poetry at this contemporary moment for poetry that identifies the margin, names the margin, and works through our cultural ambivalence to margins. Dying in a Mother Tongue points at one way to do this—not by the all too common trope of boundless suffering but rather its obverse—a self which sees the limits of its suffering, the borders, political and emotional which mark it, and turns towards it. * Michigan Quarterly Review *The richness of Roja Chamankar's poetry lies in its contractions: familiar domestic scenes are cut with violent surrealism; love veers between tender and destructive; nature's enduring beauty clashes with urban war wounds and mythology's optimism gives way to modern disillusionment...The text pulls me in by constructing intimate scenes in a cramped urban apartment only to push me away with an unfamiliar place name or a surprising usage of my own language. This constant push and pull between closeness and distance is a hallmark of good translation. * Kenyon Review *

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Book SynopsisEdward Dorn's Gunslinger is an anti-epic poem that follows a cast of colorful characters as they set out the American West in search of Howard Hughes. This expanded fiftieth anniversary edition of Dorn's wild and comedic romp includes a new foreword by Marjorie Perloff, an essay by Michael Davidson, and Charles Olson's Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn.Trade Review“[Gunslinger] is altogether a brilliant and strange performance, with no true parallels in American poetry, at least up until then. . . . If it's not the major 20th-century long poem a number of serious critics claim it to be . . . it's the work of a brilliant, wildly original, very funny poet firing on all cylinders.” -- August Kleinzahler * New York Times Book Review *“There is nothing else like it in poetry.” * Publishers Weekly *“Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes.” -- Patrick McGuinness * The Guardian *“An essential piece of American literature, already, and the further we descend into an age of circuses without bread, the more poignant will be our Slinger’s aim on the true heart of the West.” -- Matthew Sirois * New York Journal of Books *“A dramatic poem of the first order for our day.” -- Andrew Hoyem * Poetry *"If poetry is news that stays news, Gunslinger tells you what the news feels like when language has lost all grip on reality, 'like trying to read a newspaper/from nothing but the ink poured into your ear.' If poetry tends to find its own moment, then Dorn may finally be due his." -- Andre Naffis-Sahely * Poetry *Table of ContentsForeword. On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger / Marjorie Perloff viii Introduction / Marjorie Perloff xiii Gunslinger / Edward Dorn Book I 1 Book II 43 The Cycle 87 Book III 111 Book IIII 143 To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn's Gunslinger / Michael Davidson 203 A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn / Charles Olson

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Book SynopsisRenato Rosaldo's new prose poetry collection shares his experiences and those of his group of twelve Mexican-American Tucson High School friends known as the Chasers as they grew up, graduated, and fell out of touch, conveying the realities of Chicano life on the borderlands from the 1950s to the present.Trade Review"The Chasers is at once a snapshot of Chicano culture in the '50s, and contemporary in its humanity." -- Meredith O'Neil * Tucson Weekly *"The Chasers is a must read." -- Margaret Randall * World Literature Today *"Rosaldo’s antropoesía is an emerging hybrid genre, a method of knowledge production that cannot be codified. It insists on highlighting nuances rather than erecting schemas. It is precise in its ability to articulate the uncategorizable." -- Tara Westmor * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsPrelude xi Cast of Characters xiii Part I. Walnuts 3 Never Chicano Enough 5 Suddenly Blank 7 Nice Meals 8 Down the Little Arroyo 9 Never Dreamed 11 A Dark Side 13 Talking with Mom 16 Fastest Naked Sprinter 19 In the Cactus Chronicle 21 The Chaser Mystique 23 Part II. Playing Bull 27 Sports People 29 All about Fun 32 A Quiet Guy 34 In Formation 35 Champagne in a Martini Class 38 White, Black, or Blue 41 My Inner Mexican Comes In 42 No More Oranges 45 No Emblem 46 Ode to Ralph 48 I'd Like the Job 50 Part III. Not from Tucson 55 Ornamental Oranges 57 I Never Liked You 60 A Place to Stand 62 Fiftieth Reunion 64 I Was Shaking 69 Three Months Older 71 Guys on One Side 74 In the School Yard 76 Erased 77 You Won't Do Well 78 Part IV. Observing 83 Never a Fighter 85 Papa y yo hablamos 86 Dad and I Talk 87 You Were or Were Not 89 Raw Eggs 90 My Brother Raul 92 I Remember 93 An Old Story 97 I Am a Chaser 99 My Dad Died When I Was Six 101 Packager 103 Sure Hope We Can Enjoy a Few More Years 107 Acknowledgments 109

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Book SynopsisRenato Rosaldo's new prose poetry collection shares his experiences and those of his group of twelve Mexican-American Tucson High School friends known as the Chasers as they grew up, graduated, and fell out of touch, conveying the realities of Chicano life on the borderlands from the 1950s to the present.Trade Review"The Chasers is at once a snapshot of Chicano culture in the '50s, and contemporary in its humanity." -- Meredith O'Neil * Tucson Weekly *"The Chasers is a must read." -- Margaret Randall * World Literature Today *"Rosaldo’s antropoesía is an emerging hybrid genre, a method of knowledge production that cannot be codified. It insists on highlighting nuances rather than erecting schemas. It is precise in its ability to articulate the uncategorizable." -- Tara Westmor * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsPrelude xi Cast of Characters xiii Part I. Walnuts 3 Never Chicano Enough 5 Suddenly Blank 7 Nice Meals 8 Down the Little Arroyo 9 Never Dreamed 11 A Dark Side 13 Talking with Mom 16 Fastest Naked Sprinter 19 In the Cactus Chronicle 21 The Chaser Mystique 23 Part II. Playing Bull 27 Sports People 29 All about Fun 32 A Quiet Guy 34 In Formation 35 Champagne in a Martini Class 38 White, Black, or Blue 41 My Inner Mexican Comes In 42 No More Oranges 45 No Emblem 46 Ode to Ralph 48 I'd Like the Job 50 Part III. Not from Tucson 55 Ornamental Oranges 57 I Never Liked You 60 A Place to Stand 62 Fiftieth Reunion 64 I Was Shaking 69 Three Months Older 71 Guys on One Side 74 In the School Yard 76 Erased 77 You Won't Do Well 78 Part IV. Observing 83 Never a Fighter 85 Papa y yo hablamos 86 Dad and I Talk 87 You Were or Were Not 89 Raw Eggs 90 My Brother Raul 92 I Remember 93 An Old Story 97 I Am a Chaser 99 My Dad Died When I Was Six 101 Packager 103 Sure Hope We Can Enjoy a Few More Years 107 Acknowledgments 109

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Book SynopsisIn his new book-length prose poem, David Grubbs draws on decades of recording experience, taking readers into the recording studio to tell the story of an unnamed musician who struggles to complete a film soundtrack in a day-long marathon recording session.Trade Review“David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” -- Ben Lerner“It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” -- Will Oldham, music maker"Grubbs uses the set-up to extrapolate many philosophical questions surrounding the materiality of technology, the motivations of the performer, the collapsing of distinctions between different media and musing on the economics of entertainment – all within the crucible of the noble ruin of the recording studio, once the promised land for an aspiring musician and now an expensive obsolescence. . . . A kind of torrent of ideas and anxieties in the form of a visual score pouring forth from his three decades of recording in grungy studios and gilded arts academies all over the world." -- Alex Neilson * Record Collector *"At times, Grubbs goes into incredible detail: the buttons an engineer presses, the way a space looks, the feelings that arise from playing an instrument. However.just when it becomes almost tedious, such detail proves to be the book's greatest charm. As it progresses, one more fully appreciates how these descriptions illuminate the mindfulness that music-making can beget." -- Joshua Minsoo Kim * The Wire *"[The Voice in the Headphones] is an experience encapsulated in the space-time of the recording process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the room that not only floats acoustically but also is free from the flow of real time in the outside world. . . . This is an insider’s inside book about an inside experience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal to anyone who’s wondered just what goes on in those sequestered rooms." -- George Grella * New York City Jazz Record *

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Book SynopsisIn his new book-length prose poem, David Grubbs draws on decades of recording experience, taking readers into the recording studio to tell the story of an unnamed musician who struggles to complete a film soundtrack in a day-long marathon recording session.Trade Review“David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” -- Ben Lerner“It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” -- Will Oldham, music maker"Grubbs uses the set-up to extrapolate many philosophical questions surrounding the materiality of technology, the motivations of the performer, the collapsing of distinctions between different media and musing on the economics of entertainment – all within the crucible of the noble ruin of the recording studio, once the promised land for an aspiring musician and now an expensive obsolescence. . . . A kind of torrent of ideas and anxieties in the form of a visual score pouring forth from his three decades of recording in grungy studios and gilded arts academies all over the world." -- Alex Neilson * Record Collector *"At times, Grubbs goes into incredible detail: the buttons an engineer presses, the way a space looks, the feelings that arise from playing an instrument. However.just when it becomes almost tedious, such detail proves to be the book's greatest charm. As it progresses, one more fully appreciates how these descriptions illuminate the mindfulness that music-making can beget." -- Joshua Minsoo Kim * The Wire *"[The Voice in the Headphones] is an experience encapsulated in the space-time of the recording process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the room that not only floats acoustically but also is free from the flow of real time in the outside world. . . . This is an insider’s inside book about an inside experience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal to anyone who’s wondered just what goes on in those sequestered rooms." -- George Grella * New York City Jazz Record *

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Book SynopsisIn Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthet

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Book SynopsisIn Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthet

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Book SynopsisSatirical verse on society and its hypocrisiesA master of satire known for his ribald humor, self-deprecation, and invective verse (hija?), the poet ?medan al-Shwe?ir was an acerbic critic of his society and its morals. Living in the Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula, ?medan wrote in an idiom widely referred to as Naba?i, here a mix of Najdi vernacular and archaic vocabulary and images dating to the origins of Arabic poetry. In Arabian Satire, ?medan is mostly concerned with worldly matters and addresses these in different guises: as the patriarch at the helm of the family boat and its unruly crew; as a picaresque anti-hero who revels in taking potshots at the established order, its hypocrisy, and its failings; as a peasant who labors over his palm trees, often to no avail and with no guarantee of success; and as a poet recording in verse how he thinks things ought to be.The poems in Arabian Satire reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intenselyTrade ReviewColorful contrasts abound. . . . Quite entertaining. * The Complete Review *[Ḥmēdān's] gift for the memorable turn of phrase has ensured that his poetry has never been forgotten… A handsomely produced volume of 'melodic verses that swell and roll / like roaring waves on a pitch-black sea.' * IASA Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisA collection of serial poems, Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement, Josué Guébo’s poems combineelements of history and mythology. Guéboconsiders the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for migrants. Hemeditates onthe long history of narratives and bodies trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it—and what does it—connect and separate? Whose sea is it? Ultimately he is searchingfor what motivates a person to become part of what he calls a “seasonal suicide epidemic.” This translation of Guébo’s <Trade Review“Defiantly elegant. It is elegy and evocation, a summoning of the dead as a chorus speaking to those who do not see, or do not care, to remind them of the consciousness of Earth and of history’s will to life, and the ordering of change. . . . The poet’s hand is essential to our redemption.”—Afaa M. Weaver, author of The Plum Flower Dance and Multitudes “I can’t help but be moved by this large ambition of Josué Guébo, by his impossible task of bringing together poetics as different as those of Whitman and Mallarmé, by his huge desire to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves and also to find the secret of lyric utterance.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Musica HumanaTable of ContentsIntroduction by John Keene Translator’s Note Think of Lampedusa Notes

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Gubernat’s The Zoo at Nightreflects with subtle craft on the dark side of love, death, the family romance, carnality, and lofty aspirations. She thinks of her poems as “night thoughts” resembling nocturnes, in which “a bit of light leaks in.” Both experimental and classic, Gubernat’s poems combine formal and free verse elements. A(mostly) unrhymed sonnet sequenceseeksto recall the world of apre-digital childhood when physical objects—tactile, mechanical—took on totemic import andmagical significance. Otherpoems echo the Rilkean principle that poetry can be empathetic by looking outward at the “thingness” of the world. In these works of love and longing, Gubernat enters through the doors of craftand exits with feeling.Trade Review"Rising out of experience—painful, beautiful, disruptive—The Zoo at Night offers an unflinching look at an imperfect world underlain with a conviction to hope."—Lisa Higgs, Kenyon Review“‘Beauty is always strange,’ says Baudelaire, and in Susan Gubernat’s brilliant The Zoo at Night, we have a grand tour of the many ways that the world, arriving directly under our noses, can remain, everlastingly, embodied and mysterious.”—Mark Svenvold, author of Empire Burlesque and Big Weather “For those of us who believe in words—their merit as instruments of inquiry, their aptitude for beauty, their power of linking soul to soul—these are difficult times. Open these pages, and find your hope restored. Susan Gubernat’s are poems of meticulous craftsmanship, luminous apprehension, and unfailing heart. I’m grateful beyond measure for this book.”—Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North, finalist for the National Book Award Table of ContentsAcknowledgments I Etruscans Wedding Cookies The Right Hand of Goltzius I Was in Gym Class When Cronkite Said They’d Shot Him Sharing a Birthday with Mata Hari Atlantic City Smart Enough The Roosevelt Christmas Fires Winter Coats After the Abortion Shaggy Parasol II Analog House: A Cabinet of Curiosities The Singer Easter Bread Hades Doberman Meat Grinder Piano Bench 13th Fairy Washboard Clothesline Feather Duster Spirit Level Paint-by-Number Net Netting Hats, Purses, Gloves Vestibule Deliberate Happiness Photo on Pony Underwood in Flames III The Zoo at Night (1) Aphasia of the Moon Sick Child Filia Poster Children La Sebastiana Portrait at Fourteen Ground Time No Warrior The Collective Deathbed Proof Day Lilies IV The Zoo at Night (2) The Entrance of Beauty Yellow Sweater Too Soon On a Scale Of Fonder My Sister and I Are Having the Same Dream Reading Loop: The Sibyl at Cumae Mating Dance Prey Eclipse The Buddhas of Bamiyan Our Road V “Report a Problem with This Poem” “Beautiful Contrivances” in the Sex Life of Orchids Fumée d’Ambre Gris The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson My Mother in the Eye of the Storm Blue Tooth Ground Note Near Capitol Reef, Utah Pears in Winter Notes

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Book SynopsisGerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone.His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. Costanzoevokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now—in the present—is forced to live with diminished experience. Hemourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be foundbut where its semblance can be endlessly marketed.Regular Hauntsis a retrospective collection of Costanzo’s work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.Trade ReviewPrevious praise for Gerald Costanzo’s poetry: “Costanzo is a grief-ridden observer of the kulchur. He reminds us of what we had, what we lost, perhaps what we never knew— and he does it in a mature, wise, lovely cadence. He is smart yet humble, full of pity for all of us, full of amazement. ‘When I first heard about America,’ he says, ‘it was already too late.’ He is one of our prophets.”—Gerald Stern “This is truly poetry in the American grain. Costanzo looks unflinchingly at our totems, artifacts, and folkways and sets them down just as they are, with a deadly but affectionate irony.”—Carolyn Kizer “Costanzo’s wit and satire and vision of the grotesque world of America get to the center of much of the madness of our culture.”—Peter BalakianTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction by Ted Kooser New Poems I. American RiverArabesques and Bottle Blondes Provincetown American River Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell Deathgrass at the Wheeler Summerfest Tinnitus Memory and Loss Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo The Lives They Lead Stories Minnie’s Death II. Regular HauntsThe Big Heat Blood on the Moon Stairway to an Empty Room A Graveyard to Let Downtown The Longest Second The Out Is Death Blood of Poets City of Whispering Stone Judge Me Not The Gentle Hangman The Winter People Invitation to Violence Deadline at Dawn Havana Run Spend Game Previous Poems I. The Sacred Cows of Los AngelesThe Sacred Cows of Los Angeles Snake “What Youngstown Needs Is Good Representation” Introduction of the Shopping Cart Houdini Disappearing in Philadelphia For Four Newsmen Murdered in Saigon Newlywed Badlands The Resurrection of Lake Erie Dinosaurs of the Hollywood Delta II. Living the Good Life on the San Andreas FaultLiving the Good Life on the San Andreas Fault The Problems, the Models The Riot of Nickel Beer Night Manhattan as a Latin American Capital In the Aviary Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard III. At Irony’s PicnicThe Rise of the Sunday School Movement Braille Grasshoppers Flagpole Sitter Seeing My Name in TV Guide Hunger A Tax Auditor for the IRS Dreams At Irony’s Picnic IV. Bournehurst-on-the-CanalLandscape with Unemployed Jockeys The Bigamist Everything You Own Stargazers Five Small Songs of America in 2076 Carl Yastrzemski Vigilantes The Man Who Invented Las Vegas When Guy Lombardo Died In the Blood Bournehurst-on-the-Canal V. Washington ParkNear Lacombe Building My Kindergarten Girlfriend Pastoral The Old Neighborhood Potatoes Toward San Francisco Jungles Washington Park VI. What’s Wrong with the Moon?What’s Wrong with the Moon? VII. Excavating the Ruins of Miami BeachReport from the Past The Story Excavating the Ruins of Miami Beach The Meeting

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Book SynopsisPresents a sweeping saga of the American West and John G. Neihardt's exhilarating vision of frontier history. It is infused with wonder, nostalgia, and a keen appreciation of epic history. Unquestionably the masterpiece of the poet who has been called the ""American Homer”, A Cycle of the West celebrates the land and legends of the Old West in five narrative poems.Trade Review"Republication of Neihardt's Cycle sets another high-water mark in the Press's long and distinguished catalog of books about the American West."—Daniel Simon, Nebraska History“A powerful succession of songs celebrating the experience of the frontier.”—Los Angeles Times “A sweeping narrative told with poetic images as big as the great American West.”—Historical Novels Review “Joe Green’s exhaustive annotations in this valuable new edition not only make John Neihardt’s powerful poems more accessible to twenty-first-century readers, they also draw attention to the depth of Neihardt’s own research into the period of American history that meant so much to him.”—Timothy G. Anderson, author of Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt “Green’s remarkable work clarifies our understanding of John Neihardt’s epic poetic ode to the American West and reinforces its position as a literary masterpiece that will inform and inspire readers for generations to come.”—Amy Kucera, former executive director of the John G. Neihardt State Historic SiteTable of ContentsIntroduction to the Bison Classic Annotated Edition, by Alan Birkelbach Annotator’s Note Introduction, by John G. Neihardt The Song of Three Friends Part I: Ashley’s Hundred Part II: The Up-Stream Men Part III: To the Musselshell Part IV: The Net Is Cast Part V: The Quarrel Part VI: The Shooting of the Cup Part VII: The Third Rider Part VIII: Vengeance The Song of Hugh Glass Part I: Graybeard and Goldhair Part II: The Awakening Part III: The Crawl Part IV: The Return of the Ghost Part V: Jamie The Song of Jed Smith Part I: The valley was beginning to forget . . . Part II: Now the jug went round . . . Part III: Now the deep . . . Part IV: “You’re getting sober, Squire . . .” Part V: Chin to chest and nodding . . . Part VI: The low intoning of the canyon grew . . . The Song of the Indian Wars Part I: The Sowing of the Dragon Part II: Red Cloud Part III: The Council on the Powder Part IV: Fort Phil Kearny Part V: Rubbed Out Part VI: The Wagon Boxes Part VII: Beecher’s Island Part VIII: The Yellow God Part IX: The Village of Crazy Horse Part X: The Sun Dance Part XI: The Seventh Marches Part XII: High Noon on the Little Horn Part XIII: The Twilight Part XIV: The Death of Crazy Horse The Song of the Messiah Part I: The Voice in the Wilderness Part II: The Coming of the Word Part III: The Dance Part IV: The Soldiers Part V: Sitting Bull Part VI: The Way Part VII: Wounded Knee Appendix: Prefaces Appendix: Errata Notes

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, American Radiance,at turnsfunny, tragic, and haunting,reflects on the author’s experience immigrating as a child to the United States fromUkraine in 1991. What does it mean to be an American? Luisa Muradyandoesn’t try to provideananswer. Instead, the poems in American Radiance look for a home in history, folklore, misery, laughter, language, and Prince’s outstretched hand. Collidingwith the grand figures of late ’80s and early ’90spop culture, Muradyan’s imagination pushes the reader forward,confronting the painful loss of identity that assimilation brings.Trade Review"Through generous associative leaps, Muradyan turns a narrative of assimilation into a debut collection that is as playful as it is wrenching. . . . Muradyan reveals herself to be a savvy and thoroughly modern poet, observing her subjects with a dispassionate, often droll eye."—Publishers Weekly"Luisa Muradyan's moving, wonderfully funny first volume of poetry merges an immigrant's passionate study of her adopted culture with Gen-X media obsession. . . . Muradyan is an enormously talented poet."—Annette Lapointe, New York Journal of Books"Luisa Muradyan's American Radiance reflects the complexities of the immigrant experience, and, through humor, pop culture allusions, and lyrical playfulness, highlights the exodus from one's homeland and what it means to assimilate in America."—Pank Mag“Luisa Muradyan’s playful, fresh, and tender debut collection shows how a brand-new poetry can be made from many different existing sources. . . . Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Talmud, Madame Bovary, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, and the lives of her Russian Ukrainian ancestors. . . . And we feel included too, as she constructs her innovative highways between inner and outer worlds. This is the real stuff of poetry: spontaneous, original, compassionate, and provocative—who knows, maybe the glow of her poems does testify to the stubborn persistence of an American radiance!”—Tony Hoagland, author of Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God“At once historical, personal, tender, enraged, and aroused, Luisa Muradyan has arrived precisely on time in American poetry. These poems are alive, ecstatic in the earthiest divine sense, lucid where humor blurs with grief, precise when weeping breaks into song. Her force is the force of love, and her voice is unforgettable.”—Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault“In her vibrant debut, the Odessa of Luisa Muradyan’s childhood is magically wedded to an America, brash and colorful as a crazy quilt. These poems, brimming with wild, fanciful juxtapositions, with juicy pop allusions and joyous praise for the overlooked or the mundane, bring the wizardry of Chagall to mind, but the specters of exile, memory, and holocaust also emerge as dark threads woven into the writer’s alert and wondrous world vision. I salute this intrepid new poet’s up-to-the-minute friskiness, unfettered eroticism (“My breasts are like Aristotle and Plato / They never see eye to eye”), and quick-witted candor which make American Radiance, in all its gorgeous irreverence and reach, such an exhilarating read.”—Cyrus Cassells, author of The Gospel according to Wild Indigo “Odessa, lost city of a lost childhood. America, lost country of the now (as promised by Bruce Willis). American Radiance is about searching, and Luisa Muradyan realizes that this is what it is to pray, to allow the search to reveal an invisible world.”—Nick Flynn, author of My Feelings Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Part 1. Psalm for Odessa If You Were Wondering about the Couple Who Owns the Funeral Home Schwarzenegger in Prayer Purple Rain Clams Bruce Willis, in the Light Macho Man Randy Savage 7:40 Prodigal Son Lilies Maria Rasputin The Red Forest, Рыжий лес Crane Resurrection The Seduction of Masha by Rasputin Doves We Were Cosmonauts Boris Marriage Anecdote Message from a Peeping Tom Ornithology What Is True for Birds Psalm for Odessa Part 2. American Radiance New Eden Adoration Raptor Translating Ashes Crane Fly Rasputin and Alexei Moscow 1972 Deaf Sonnet, Глухой Сонет Firefly Boot Trawler Spicer’s Promise to Lorca Spud Love In the Moonlight Spilling Breasts Into the Blackberry Records of Failed Weapons of World War II Rumi in the Mouth of the Snake Poem for the Man Playing Piano in Front of the Wall of Police Cremation This Was His Garden American Radiance

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Book SynopsisTanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa’s Ivory Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these events onto a mythic topography where people liveamong their ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at once magical and all too petty. The elements—the sun, the wind, the water—are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the landscape—“during these times / I searched for the letters / for the perfect word.” Boniaffirms her desire for hope in the face of ethno-cultural and state violence although she acknowledges that desiring to hope and hoping are not the same. Trade Review"Todd Fredson ably captures the images, structure, and tone of Boni's poetic landscape in a project supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. No doubt Fredson's extended visits to the Ivory Coast (first, as a Peace Corps volunteer, and then as a Fulbright Fellow), as well as the fact that he is a prizewinning poet in his own right, have informed this exciting translation."—Nancy Naomi Carlson, World Literature Today“‘The dawn counted its nomadic steps / to the border.’ Tanella Boni’s translucent, extraordinary poems transform usually ineffable explorations of war, violence, and the ever-tangled exit out of these realities, into meticulous experiences that––while rendered elegantly––nevertheless leave the reader face to face with the horror of our own humanity. Boni not only expands poetry’s possibilities (‘ordinary life / between routine and rupture’), but in searing, unique, meticulous language, her work challenges the limit of writing itself.”—Robin Coste Lewis, author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the National Book AwardTable of ContentsIntroduction, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Translator’s Note Land of Hope A Murdered Life Acknowledgments Notes

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Book Synopsis Your Body Is War contemplates the psychology of the female human body, looking at the ways it exists and moves in the world, refusing to be contained in the face of grief and trauma. Bold and raw, Mahtem Shiferraw’spoems explore what the woman’s body has to do to survive and persevere in the world, especially in the aftermath of abuse. A groundbreaking collection, the poems inYour Body Is Warembodyelements of conflict, making them simultaneouslya place of destructionand of freedom.Trade Review"As Shiferraw refuses silence, rejects erasure, she braids the pain of women she loves into her poetry. Indeed, the poet writes on a continuum, refusing boundaries. And in so doing, Your Body Is War gives the reader stunning poems that re-create the pain and triumph of women the world would rather unsee."—Mary Catherine Ford, World Literature Today“Elegant and heart-wrenching, these poems possess a powerful voice that travels across oceans to reconnect with the language and stories of Ethiopia, Mahtem Shiferraw’s homeland. Your Body Is War speaks poignantly about the inherited historical traumas, the ache and beauty of memory, and the strength it takes to endure the wounds of a nation, of a family, of a conflicted self.”—Rigoberto González, author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood“This is a collection of harrowing, prismatic lyrics made by severances and war and possessed by memory and place. In a language that dilates between the epic and the humble, nearly invisible, Mahtem Shiferraw does not once allow readers to imagine that war is anything but bodied, personal, inherited. Shiferraw’s work is elemental, brilliant, fierce; and with mystery and exactitude, she pushes language past itself and into breathtaking resonances. There are lines I will never forget for their power and for what they reveal about how this poet’s thinking shapes the terms of her and her speakers’ survival(s). ‘I am yellow, / I have yellow in me // and it does not / let me die.’ I believe these poems are part of that survival—a trace, a strategy, a prayer record assembled in the ruin of Then that is perpetual, that is also always Now.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black MariaTable of ContentsSwallowing Suns Your Body Is War (I) Madhouse The Art of Invisibility The Suicide Chamber The Tree of My Deaths Behind Walls and Glass Your Body Is War (II) Ash and Blue Body of Punishments Like a Lover’s Quarrel Water The Curse of Ishmael Black and Blue Death by Trains The Memory of the Body Your Body Is War (III) Genesis The Old Tree The Wrong Kind of Dream Your Body Is War (IV) Journey with Dante At the Mad Man’s Water Dreams The Body Book Conversations with Self The Yellow Woman The Fruit Mother Ghost Procession Your Body Is War (V) Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisJoyce Sutphen’s evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the late 1960s, and traveling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota and beyond will recognize themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbors in these poems, which move us from delight in keen description toward something like wisdom or solace in the things of this world. In addition to poems selected from the last twenty-five years, Carrying Water to the Field includes more than forty new poems on the themes of luck, hard work, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language and lyrical precision. Trade Review"Precise in the language of everyday, rich in wisdom and maturity, Joyce Sutphen's newest collection, her eighth, speaks to her comfort with farm life, travel, aging, the distortions of memory."—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews"Representing nearly a quarter-century of published work, Carrying Water to the Field attests to Joyce Sutphen's accomplishment as a lyric poet dedicated to clarity and concision. . . . The reader can dip in, selecting one perfectly crafted poem at a time and relish the weight and feel of each in their palm."—Elizabeth Hoover, (Minneapolis) Star Tribune"Perhaps you are interested in a poet’s journey, or the story of a family, the value of meaningful work, the beauty of things well-crafted, or the muscle and music of words. Perhaps the Heartland as a place intrigues you, or maybe you are fascinated by the places the heart will take us. If any of these things matters to you, then no matter how you choose to read Carrying Water to the Fields, you’re likely to find rewards."—Tracy Rittmueller, Lyricality“How rare to see lyric tenderness sustained over years with no stumble into sentimentality. This remarkable collection wields a keen blade of attention, a nonchalant elegance. The reigning landscape is the Minnesota family farm of Joyce Sutphen’s girlhood, a world lost not only to her but to America. The mind at work here is not nostalgic, but piercing, acute. The city of her adulthood, her travels (especially to Ireland), and the tally of enduring and broken relationships form a faithful history of our raucous times. Chekhov comes inevitably to mind, with his remorseless stories set in the dustscapes of the Russian provinces. No regionalist, he. Joyce Sutphen is our Chekhov, only in poems.”—Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day“The writing in Carrying Water to the Field is faultless: the language is limpid and accurate, the choreography is unerring, the forms are balanced and satisfying. And even more satisfying is the fact that this brilliant technique justifies and is justified by the truth value of these poems, which usher us into the reality of time, change, loss, and memory’s belated and beautiful insights.”—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Three Sections: Poems“It is poetry that Joyce Sutphen finds in owls, marshes, tractors, harrows and mason jars: just as (amid the urgent matter of contemporary existence, literary life, love, and human frailty) she shows us the very heart and soul of her working, rooted prairie people, as shy of being caught in a poem as they once were reluctant to be photographed, but perfectly captured for us in this sweeping account of life that is both specific and universal. A stunning collection of poems.”—Anne-Marie Fyfe, author of The House of Small AbsencesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction by Ted Kooser Selections from Straight Out of ViewStraight Out of View The Farm Tornado Warning Feeding the New Calf My Father Comes to the City St. Joe, the Angelus In Black From Out the Cave Great Salt Lake Holland Park at Dusk Riding East to Dover Reading Sylvia Plath in London Edgar’s Dream Death Becomes Me Suppose Death Comes Like This What You Wanted A Kind of Deliverance In Quest of Agates Living in the Body Crossroads Selections from Coming Back to the BodyHomesteading Comforts of the Sun Girl on a Tractor A Poem with My Mother in It Apple Season Fields in Late October Casino Of Virtue The Silence Says A Kind of Villanelle Her Legendary Head Not for Burning The Temptation to Invent Bookmobile Rodin on Film Arrangement in Grey and Black What the Heart Cannot Forget Older, Younger, Both Coming Back to the Body Into Thin Air The Assumption Selections from Naming the StarsNaming the Stars Raku Songs How We Ended Up Together The Problem Was Losing Touch Polaroid # 2 Ever After The Sound of No One Calling Aisle and View The Apostate’s Creed Empty What Comes After In the Wake This Body Now That Anything Could Happen What to Pack Getting the Machine Some Glad Morning At the Moment Now, Finally, a Love Song Selections from First WordsFirst Words The Body I Once Lived In My Legendary Father The Kingdom of Summer The Aunts My Luck Just for the Record Bringing in the Hay My Dog, Pal Harrow The Oat Binder “H” What Every Girl Wants The First Child My Brother’s Hat These Few Precepts In Vermeer’s Painting Things You Didn’t Put on Your Résumé How to Listen The Last Things I’ll Remember Selections from After WordsA Dream of Empty Fields Taking Stock The Scythe “Perfect Weather for Hanging Wash” My Mother’s Secret Life The Exam Grandma Clara September Afternoon, Writing My Grandmother Sells Her Strawberry Field The Queen of Summer Lawns My Sister’s School Papers Two Girls on a Hayrack The Blue in the Distance Things I Know Bell Bottom Baby The Suzuki Mother We Have Come This Far Next Time Dominoes The Last Perfect Season Selections from Modern Love & Other MythsWhiteout On the Shortest Days Winter’s Night Like That It’s Amazing The Hampstead Sonnets Bird on a Wall in County Clare The Last Straw Things to Watch While You Drive The Idea of Living The Lost Prophecy One Thousand and One Nights The Poem You Said You Wouldn’t Write The One Constant Thing Death, Inc. Even in My Time The Posthumous Journey of the Soul All the People I Used to Be For the Evening Light Say It The Book of Hours Selections from The Green HouseIrish Suite A Bird in County Clare A Postcard from the Burren At Clonmacnoise Playing the Pipes This Beautiful Paper Snow, Snow, Snow The Sound of a Train Writing Poetry Why We Need Poetry Reading the Notes in the Norton Anthology of Poetry The Birds Walking The Cardinal Still Life Constable Clouds Bird Song, Cannon River Bottoms Good The Cup New Poems I. LuckThose Hours Someone Just Like You In Iowa City One Night Primitive Too Much Luck The Signal The Fortune Cookie Writer Eleanor Beardsley in Paris Miracles Chickadees At Los Alamos What the Music Required So Close The Light Left On II. WorkThe Long Centuries What He Doesn’t Tell Us Work Hoeing Potatoes with My Grandmother Horseshoes with Maurice More of Everything My Brothers My Mother Breaks Her Ankle Snowmen at the Farm Open Because of the Sun Prodigal III. Again The Last Apples Autumn Again Carrying Water to the Field Stay What We Didn’t Talk About My Father, Dying After You Were Gone Sunday Afternoon in Early May Reading Anna Swir in October For the Letter Writers Without How I’m Doing Isla, Morning Your Name Making Do

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Book SynopsisNamed after the poet’s mother, ‘mamaseko is a collection of introspective lyrics and other poems dealing with the intersections of blood relationships and related identities. Thabile Makue questions what it means to be beings of blood—to relate by blood, to live by blood. In her poems Makue looks for traces of shared trauma and pain and asserts that wounds of the blood are healed by the same. Trade Review“The author’s focus on blood as both the root and the salve for violence is an ingenious metaphor employed throughout the book under numerous guises.”—Veronica Schorr, New York Journal of Books Table of Contentsli teboho mali maseko giving birth to my mother unborn inside outside the bondage the daughter’s inheritance her mother’s loss the children’s right giving birth to my father grandmother’s womb blood crowing uncreation ‘mele and these are eyes and these are lips and this is nose and this is tongue and these are ears and this is heart ‘mele oa bobeli root body year body blood body time body too many body fight body wound body naha not to die alone refugee bones mantsoe before the next one aragonda out of battle secheso passage mollo marriage distress signal church womxn the wailers hush now baby close the handmaid’s psalm popelo gray mountain sunset sunrise moonlight starlet to be wind river border bosoms the purge i drought the flood the purge ii bolokoe peppermint girl hungry belly universe those hungry girls pheko aragonda not to forget grandmother’s marriage to torch apology to sara the patch up the rot the peace where does love go the hunger not to love you baleful heart phupjane april phato may wrists wait end ballade roof top blue end haunt body over water end year li teboho glossary

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Book SynopsisKwame Dawes is not a native Nebraskan. Born in Ghana, he later moved to Jamaica, where he spent most of his childhood and early adulthood. In 1992 he relocated to the United States and eventually found himself an American living in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska, this beautiful and evocative collection of poems, Dawes explores a theme constant in his workthe intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems, set against the backdrop of Nebraska's discrete cycle of seasons, are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. While he shovels snow or walks in the bitter cold to his car, he is engulfed with memories of Kingston, yet when he travels, he finds himself longing for the open space of the plains and the first snowfall. With a strong sense of place and haunting memories, Dawes grapples with life in Nebraska as a transplant. Trade Review"Dawes is no longer a stranger to the middle American landscape, now a welcome newcomer creating space for new voices to be heard."—Luke Hollis, Harvard Review Online"As the poet contemplates the wealth of opportunity that seems innate—now, as well as when the plains people first saw the land, concluding in Prairie that the wide-ranging opportunity must be home to imagination and continual new beginnings. This is where Nebraska meets the poet most intimately, as a place of riches and with a history of new beginnings."—Jordan Charlton, Adriot JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgments I How I Became an Apostle Advent The Barking Geese of Edenton The Immigrant Contemplates Death Fledge Longing for the Hall of the Deaf The Midwestern Sky First Winter Loneliness Dark Season Plain-Speaking Novela The Scent of the Cankerworm Dawn Chadron Sandoz Revisited The Enemy of Memory The Poor Man’s Sacrifice Bones Sponge On History II The Epoch of Lies Sea and Rain Purple Forgetting The Quality of Light In These Times Sugar “All Teeth and Smile” Sniper III Half Long Distance Prairie Pleasure The Chronicler of Sorrows July Fourth IV Jasmine On Blindness Insomniac Bed Time Transplant Surviving, Again Sancho Panza The Messiness of Place Bone Dust Ambulation Falling Away On Picking Battles The Exile Remembers His Sisters Fatigue

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves in other nations, as well as the ways cuisine is inextricably linked to occupation, transmission, and survival. Dwelling on the personal as much as the historical, Some Are Always Hungrytraces the lineage of the speaker’s place in history and diaspora through mythmaking and cooking, which is to say, conjuring.Trade Review"In this excellent debut, Yun lingers over descriptions in precise and evocative language. . . . This is a lush and moving collection."—Publishers Weekly"Yun’s poems are unflinching in subject matter and elegant in expression. This contrast of painful moments, beautifully rendered, makes for compelling reading."—Sylvia Santiago, Kenyon Review"Some Are Always Hungry is a powerfully wrought book of poems. Yun’s meticulous crafting and incisive lyricism is a testament to her mastery of a poetic imagination. She ultimately conveys a singular existence that is precious and beautiful because of loved ones—those who’d rather perish than see us go hungry."—Stacey Park, Portland Review"Winner of the prestigious Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Korean American poet Jihyun Yun's debut offers readers a nuanced yet visceral depiction of food and satiation, one that truthfully exposes violence and greed, and another that exemplifies survival, sustenance, and mercy. Perceptive and moving, Some Are Always Hungry is an inquiry into what sustains humanity through intergenerational injustice."—Eugenie Julienne Mamuyac, International Examiner“Image by clear-eyed image, sound by tightly wrought sound, the poems in Some Are Always Hungry are a thundering revelation. At once a reckoning with immigration and historical trauma and rooted in the sensorial world, these poems are timeless and ongoing. Here is both the fever and the scar it leaves, the female body and the lineage of power, hunger, and desire, what cannot be forgotten and what keeps us alive despite it all; here is a poet staking her undeniable claim on the world.”—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying“In this visceral yet compassionate inquiry into what makes us alive, Yun shows us how hope can be fashioned out of the desire to speak on and through atrocities. This book is one of those rare collections that stuns me back to my own life, somehow renewed, somehow better, kinder, and less alone.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds“Jihyun Yun’s captivating poems hold a wise and magnetic energy at the center of each page, one rarely seen in a first book. This is a poet of grace and elemental blood-wisdom who will pull you to unexpected terrains where food is a vehicle not just to explore lineage and ancestors but to navigate the winding roads of the present and the future. . . . Some Are Always Hungry is a most magnificent and memorable debut from a deeply talented poet I’m certain we’ll be turning to again and again.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of OceanicTable of ContentsAll Female My Grandmother Thinks of Love while Steeping Tea Passage, 1951 Bone Soup, 1951 For Now, Nothing Burns Diptych of Girl in 1953 Field Notes from My Grandparents Immigration Homonyms I Revisit Myself in 1996 War Soup The Daughter Transmorphic Yellow Fever Saga of the Nymph and the Woodcutter Fish Head Soup Recipe: 닭도리탕 Diptych of Animal and Womb Aubade Mother Undresses Blood Type Lilith Husband Stitch The Tale of Janghwa and Hongryeon Caught Menstruation Triptych Some Are Always Hungry Immigration Benediction as Disdained Cuisine Praise Thirst Homecoming Savaging Revisitations The Leaving Season Reversal Grandmother, Praying Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisTurning an unflinching spotlight on the American Dream, Indigo Moor plunges headfirst into national—and personal—laments and desires. From Emmett Till to the fall of the Twin Towers and through the wildfires of Paradise, California, Moor weaves a thread through the hopes, sacrifices, and Sisyphean yearnings that make this country the beautiful trap that it is. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something takes an imagistic leap through the darker side of our search for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,perusing what we lose, what we leave behind, and what strange beauty we uncover. Trade Review"Indigo Moor’s new book challenges us to look back to gain a wider understanding of what has been, look around to derive a deeper understanding of one another, and look inside to find our true home."—Entropy“Indigo Moor’s new collection shuttles between searing rebuke and hopeful anguish with accents of hard-edged humor. What I love most is the clarity of thought—the no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled sharpness of the language that carries the reader through each poem, jonesin’ for the next. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something invites you out of your complacency and fuels a restlessness that reminds you that you’re alive, that this is no time for sleeping.”—Tim Seibles, author of One Turn around the Sun“An extraordinary and penetrating look at the world through the eyes of an electrifying writer who is indeed jonesin’ for something; perhaps the answer to who we are as Americans, or even who we are as human beings. There’s joy in experiencing a work like this one. Each page enthralls as Indigo Moor explores a myriad of topics in a keenly aware, yet compassionate voice filled with stirring language, powerful observations, and intense wonder.”—Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, author of Epitaph for the Beloved“Narratives don’t always belong to history’s victors,’’ writes Indigo Moor. If this line gives you pause, I strongly suggest you carry Moor’s brilliant book, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, home with you. In this dazzling book, you will read just how closely this poet has been paying attention, to us, to his histories, foreign and domestic, to our mighty (and sometimes mighty confusing) nation. Jonesin’ is a verse flashlight to all the corners you thought no one was supposed to pay attention to, line by beautifully crafted line, truth by earned truth. You’ll reach the last line of the last poem, and trust me, that’s when the hunger for more will begin.”—Cornelius Eady, author of The War Against the ObviousTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsThis American Groove Love Letter to Dr. Ford from the Patriarchy Trayvon Martin Disappears on Stage The New Math Extinction EventAll Night Jazz from the Sisyphus ClubAll Night . . .. . . Jazz . . .. . . from the Sisyphus Club Creole Rumspringa The Fortress of First and Last Thoughts Christ Is Summoned to the House of the Broken Ladder Mamie Till & the Minotaur What Was True and Not So. And Yet, Again . . . Unforgettable Birds in FlightA Dream Deferred/Detained Dismissed Genealogy Guardians Fermi Paradox for Black Nerds Happiness The Wandering Jew Drunk Dials God The Party Crashers of Paradise Exiled to America Oppenheimer’s Badass Cat Joshua in the New World Frac/Tured Finder of Lost Sheep Woods to Grow Out Of Red and Yellow QuartetWe the (Chameleon) People Unjumping the Broom Easter Morning Prayer Hunter’s Moon The Saint of McClatchy Park Veterans of Foreign Wars How We Got Here from There Blackberries Maisey Gets a Washing Machine Pretty Boy Sanchez American Bataan Lost in the World Machine Catching a Cotton Ball Anywhere but Here

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Book SynopsisFirst Place in Creative Works from the American Journal of Nursing''s Book of the Year Awards Second Place in Professional Issuesfrom the American Journal of Nursing''s Book of the Year Awards The poems in An Otherwise Healthy Woman delve into the complexity of modern health care, illness, and healing, offering an alternative narrative to heroics and miracles.Drawing on Amy Haddad’s firsthand experiences as a nurse and patient, the poems in this collection teach us to take a moment to stop and acknowledge the longing for compassion in each of us, what ought to be the immediate human response to suffering. The poet isn’t afraid to explore her own fears and failures or to find joy and humor in the many roles women play. An Otherwise Healthy Woman presents the intimate experiences of a nurse, the vulnerable perspective of a patient, and the lessons of caring for family.Trade Review“A clear-eyed look at what it is to be on both sides of America’s health care system, this book of poems offers rare insight into the humanity of the health care professional and the humanity of the patient. Spare and truthful, sorrowful and wise, these poems are necessary in both their deep empathy and their fierce gaze into mortality.”—Ada Limón, author of The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award“Amy Haddad’s poems impress and move as much for their implacable precision as their empathetic alertness to the variations of human pain in the twenty-first century, across a family, an individual life, a world. An Otherwise Healthy Woman is, as one of her poem titles tags it, a ‘hire-wire’ act, at once accomplished and devastating.”—Robert Polito, author of Hollywood and God“The stories weave in and out with an incredible understatement that brings the stakes out to you like a slap.”—Matt Mason, Nebraska state poet“Haddad’s poems are masterfully crafted and painfully honest—at moments, even harrowing. Yet here is a poet who, when the tension gets to be almost more than the reader can bear, offers up her own brilliant brand of comic relief. One of the strongest collections of poetry I have read in years.”—Cathy Smith Bowers, former poet laureate of North Carolina and author of The Abiding ImageTable of ContentsContents 1. In the Clutch of a Rubber Band Making Camp Cafeteria—2013 Admissions Flexion/Extension The Day after Memorial Day At Rehab Home Assessment Flipping Garlic Toast From the Motel Window Whole-Berry Cranberry Sauce The Promises Women Make to Each Other My Role as the Wife The Fit of Suffering 2. What We Did on the Floor Overture A Guide to the Physical Exam Blame Placing Dehiscence Gallows Humor Second-Degree Block The White Stucco House Families Like This The Course of Leukemia Day’s End at the Farmer’s Market in Montparnasse Ten Items or Less 3. Cut along the Lines Stereotactic Biopsy Nuclear Bone Scan An Otherwise Healthy Woman Infidelity Chemotherapy Lounge Post-Op Cat Scan Chemotherapy Side Effects French Weaving for Damages Before- and After-Breasts Port-a-Cath Dark Rides High-Wire Act New to the Joint Ode to a Freckle above My Left Breast Oarsmen at Chatou Cut along the Lines Jug Shots Bottom of the Cup The Commercial Version of Metastatic Breast Cancer Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisThere Where It’s So Bright in Me pries at the complexities of difference—race, religion, gender, nationality—that shape twenty-first-century geopolitical conditions. With work spanning more than thirty-five years and as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary African literature, Tanella Boni is uniquely positioned to test the distinctions of self, other, and belonging. Two twenty-first-century civil wars have made her West African home country of Côte d’Ivoire unstable. Abroad in the United States, Boni confronts the racialized violence that accompanies the idea of Blackness; in France, a second home since her university days, Boni encounters the nationalism roiling much of Europe as the consequences of (neo)colonialism shift the continent’s ethnic and racial profile. What would it mean for the borders that segregate—for these social, political, cultural, personal, and historicizing forces that enshroud us—to Trade Review“Meditative, precise, and abundant with mystery, Tanella Boni’s poems are alive with the breath of the world. They are fierce, prayerful, experimental, and lamenting—filled with movement, the songs of small things, ‘the time of sobbing the long blues,’ her ‘woman’s skin’ and ‘woman’s memory.’ Todd Fredson’s translations bring such gorgeous and complex lucidity from Boni’s French into English.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria“The negotiation in language, politics, history, gender, and identity is at the heart of this extraordinary translation of Tanella Boni’s poetry. . . . [Translator] Todd Fredson is becoming a reliable guide across the borders of language that impede the conversations that should be going on between African poets and readers, and poets and readers from around the world. He is doing so with care and sensitivity. Tanella Boni has published prolifically in French. We welcome such translations for what they give to us, for the way they expand the journeys of our collective selves.”—from Chris Abani’s forewordTable of ContentsForeword by Chris Abani Translator’s Note: At Exile’s Terminus Words Are My Preferred Weapons The Path of Ephemeral Lives Memory of a Woman What Needs to Be Said Might Take the Dreams as Well Those Who Are Afraid of Naked Women The Ladder and the Spark

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Book SynopsisEric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist The poems of Might Kindred wonder aloud: can we belong to one another, and “can a people belong to a dreaming machine?” Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American. Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the poems in Might Kindred are rooted in the body and its cousins, seeking the possibility of kinship, “in case we might kindness, might ardor together.” Belonging and unbelonging are claimed as part of the same complicated whole, and Gomery’s intersections reach for something divine at the center.Trade Review"These generous and sensitive meditations on belonging and the first-generation experience cast intimate light on shared human experiences."—Publishers Weekly“What I found in this collection is not only an invitation to belong, but a reassurance that the self has always been unequivocally whole even if we must journey forward and back through time to come to that understanding.”—S.M. Badawi, Waxwing Magazine“Into this collection’s longing arms Gomery gathers all matter of kin and all kin of matter: landscapes, stones, ‘unsiblings,’ creation myths, God, language, home, bodies, soil, dignity, ‘jagged verges,’ mirrors, and eyes. She grapples: What are we to do in a world where loss is certain, time is defiant, and the self aches to transcend its borders? Instead of offering us synthetic answers Gomery’s poems arrive ‘bare skinned on the bridge between thinking and knowing.’ This book is an invitation, a constellation, a map. We are lucky, lucky victims of its grandeur.”—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium “‘If you take a child to the mountain,’ writes Mónica Gomery in Might Kindred, ‘do not expect the mountain to not live inside the child.’ Reader, you and I are the child. This collection is the mountain. Expect nothing less than to be forever changed.”—Nicole Sealey, author of Ordinary BeastTable of ContentsSelf-Portrait with Airplane Turbulence Theology Emblanquecer Immigrant Elegy for Ávila Family Is an Illumination of Shoulders Ghazal for a First Lover Might Kindred Prologue When My Sister Visits Here God Queers the Mountain It Isn’t Easy to Speak Falling Out A Poem with Two Memories of Venezuela Letter to Myself from My Great Grandmother Origin Stories Abecedario When My Sister Visits After Pulse The Synagogue Membership Assembles to Discuss the Fascist Presidency Imaginative Exercise in the Study of Epigenetics Dendrochronology of Hair Ode to the Poop Bag The Oldest Form of Prayer Now We Live Together Because It Is Elul When My Sister Visits We Thanked Her by Digging a Hole Fragments of an Anthem Banishing Loneliness Here A Poem About a Book About Venezuela Sleeping in Hurricane Season Emblanquecer Ghazal for a Year Halleluyah We Walked Dahlias to Her Front Porch I Thought I Was Done Writing About My Dead Ghazal for God & Wellbutrin The Poet Considers If Her Body Belongs to Her When My Sister Visits Here Love Letter Acknowledgments Notes

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Book SynopsisPeter Viereck's career has been an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. Tide and Continuities is the embodiment and culmination of that career. It includes many new poems, never before published, and work--some with stunning revisions--from books as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Terror and Decorum. Tide and Continuties is the revelation of a great American poet.

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Book SynopsisIn 1988, the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins' ""The Apple That Astonished Paris"", his ""first real book of poems,"" as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press' twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press' all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, ""I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail."" After ""what seemed like a very long time"" Press director Miller Williams, a poet as well, returned the poems to him in the ""familiar self-addressed, stamped envelope."" He told Collins that there was good work here but that there was work to be done before he'd have a real collection he and the Press could be proud of: ""Williams' words were more encouragement than I had ever gotten before and more than enough to inspire me to begin taking my writing more seriously than I had before."" This collection includes some of Collins' most anthologized poems, including ""Introduction to Poetry,"" ""Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House,"" and ""Advice to Writers."" Its success over the years is testament to Collins' talent as one of our best poets, and as he writes in the preface, ""this new edition...is a credit to the sustained vibrancy of the University of Arkansas Press and, I suspect, to the abiding spirit of its former director, my first editorial father.

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Book SynopsisIn 1999, Robert Gibb published ""The Origins of Evening"", selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that year's ""National Poetry Series"" selection. Nearly five years later, he published ""The Burning World"" with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the ""evolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway."" Indeed, in Gibb's new collection, ""World over Water"", this evolving, lyric narrative finds its conclusion in the third volume of his Pittsburgh trilogy. The new collection continues to explore the lost industrial world - a world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers, and working-class lives, in which place and family stand as metaphors for each other. The poems reach back to the late nineteenth century in a mixture of elegy and chronicle, genealogy and history, reclaiming the past and its witnesses. In Gibb's universe history is an invisible, omnipresent, essential force, as elemental as the air we breathe: ""That this is what it means / To live in history, as though / The past were a difficult music / To keep from your head."" ""World Over Water"" is not a remembrance of what was but an act of imagination that wills the past alive in all its savage beauty.Trade ReviewThe strength of American writing today is in such good work." —Guy Davenport, author of The Geography of the Imagination"In the grave, elegiac, and exquisitely accomplished poems of his new collection, Gibb teaches us anew how, as one of his poems has it, 'seeing [is] a way of inhabiting time.' . . . [Here are] deeply felt, formally masterful, and strikingly various poems. It is gratifying to encounter a poet who possesses such a resonant combination of intelligence and feeling."—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Place: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2004

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Book SynopsisWith a quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell's third collection probes the nature of loss—loss that's actual and loss that's feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss and "calls the cops / to say his best friend / went fishing and won't answer his phone." Often, the poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman's husband has a history of infidelity. There's also the loss of romantic love, as when the woman "pulls / toward shore, a shore she calls by a name / she swore she'd never breathe again."Trade ReviewDannye Romine Powell's luminous new poems seem places we've all been, made of words we wished we had said: where we take the dead shopping, where Loss is made flesh, and where a son and a garden teach us too much about sacrifice. Bravo!" - Alan Michael Parker, author of Love Song with Motor Vehicles"The poems in A Necklace of Bees are lyrical, passionate, intimate, and nervy, and they respect the complex reality of love. They do not gloss; they do not lie. They tell the beautiful, painful truth." - Kelly Cherry, author of Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems

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Book SynopsisThe Fire Landscape is a series of poem sequences that chronicle a wide variety of coming-of-age moments from childhood in the 1950s through the beginning of the 21st century. These deeply layered, complex narrative poems are connected by close personal observation of place and time but also by the politics of the Cold War and its aftermath, including a sequence driven by the May 4, 1970, shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State where Gary Fincke was a student at the time.Trade ReviewThe Fire Landscape is an eloquent addition to a masterful body of work by one of our best multi-genre writers." - Michael Waters, author of Darling Vulgarity"No one is better than Gary Fincke at locating grand gestures inside the fragile details that make up a life.... The old dangers, the old fears, rise before us with radioactive language and an exactness of phrase, of line, that feels like catechism." - Fleda Brown, author of Reunion"[A] remarkable series of poetic sequences... a bildungsroman for a generation that grew up watching the horizon for a different glow, the almost-wished-for atomic bomb. Few poets have so unnervingly located the personal at the imploding heart of a particular historical epoch." - James Harms, author of After West

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation PrizeSin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad’s last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work, and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in The Body Mutinies bring speech to those accomplishments of the body that are most often relegated to silence, though in Perillo's usage "accomplishments" may include illness, death, and certainly sex. Her textual landscape includes rock climbers and the ill, female killers who take to the road and women who survive by climbing out of burning buildings, even though in the process they're forced to let modesty fly to the wind. In poems that are at once colloquial and elegant, Perillo strives to bridge the gap between the exuberant voice of the streets and the rarefied voice of literary tradition. Using the long lines and narrative style that have been identified with some of the finest male poets of our times, Perillo tells the stories of female experience with a grim eye for the comic and an ear turned to language's highest pitch.

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Book SynopsisTaking its title from a poem by Paul Celan, playing off the notion of the ""hart"" walls erected to corral deer for a mediaeval hunt, and evoking the physiology of the heart itself, these poems explore the possibilities for love and feeling in a world besieged by tragedies.

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Book SynopsisThe subject matter of these poems is ordinary: motherhood, marriage, sexuality, middle age, ambivalence, mortality, the Midwest. But in addressing these topics, Laura Kasischke finds and reveals the strangeness of the most common traditions and dilemmas. These are poems that work to fuse reality and dream, life and death, logic and illogic. Kasischke precisely renders the experience we have of ourselves as physical and time-bound beings existing in a psychological and spiritual realm that seems to have no barriers or laws. The poems in this collection are both narrative and lyric, grounded in reality but also surreal, at once fully realized and merely hinting at what might be.Trade ReviewLaura Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps. [She] can recall James Wright, Randall Jarrell, or Jorie Graham, but she resembles none for long. Volatile, sometimes shocking, and seamless, her poems greet, tame, or confront the trials of puberty, medicine and marriage.... Balancing the quotidian with the estranging, fluent sentences with rumbling stanzas, and tenderness with anger, Kasischke shows as superb a feel for the bravura enjambments as for single details. Poems plummet into apparent melodrama, pull out of it, and then pull off (like stunt flyers) - maneuvers that depend on those perilous dives. - Stephen Burt, Lingua Franca

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Book SynopsisDiane Seuss's poems grow out of the fertile soil of southwest Michigan, bursting any and all stereotypes of the Midwest and turning loose characters worthy of Faulkner in their obsession, their suffering, their dramas of love and sex and death. The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension - state lines, lakes' edges, the space ""between the m and the e in the word amen."" From what she calls ""this place inbetween"" come profane prayers in which ""the sound of hope and the sound of suffering"" are revealed to be ""the same music played on the same instrument.""Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. ""We receive beauty,"" Seuss writes, ""as a nail receives / the hammer blow."" This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open - the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.

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Book Synopsis"Mrs. Sigourney in Hartford" brings together the poems and prose of Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791 - 1865) inspired by her deep dedication to those neglected by the traditional educational system, especially people who are deaf. Sigourney played a key role in the fledgling American deaf community, influencing Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet in his formation of the first American school for the deaf. The writings collected here are a testament to Sigourney's foresight and will reinstate her importance in the history of the deaf community.

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Book SynopsisFirst representative English collection of the Sturm und Drang writer Lenz, suited for the classroom and anyone interested in German literature, the European Enlightenment, or the theory and practice of theater. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is, after Goethe, the most important writer of the German Sturm und Drang. Crucial in the reinvention of German literature through the reception of Shakespeare, his works contain a scathing critique of the ethical, political, and sexual regimes then prevailing in German and Eastern European territories. Both aesthetically and politically, Lenz strongly influenced later German writers - most notably Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht. In Germany, Lenz is still widely read and performed. Given his importance and lasting reception, it is surprising that many of his texts are not available in English. While his best-known dramas have been translated, many of his essays have not, and none of his stories or poems have been. This is especially astonishing given the growth of English-language Lenz scholarship over recent decades. This volume contains new - and, in many cases, first - English translations of Lenz's most important plays, stories, essays, and poems. It is the first representative English collection of Lenz's works. Providing reliable translations of Lenz's key writings and succinct glosses of historical and literary references, this book is a valuable resource for classroom use and for anyone interested in German literature, the European Enlightenment, or the theory and practice of theater. Martin Wagner is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Calgary. Ellwood Wiggins is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Washington.Trade Review[P]rovides a thoroughly reliable introduction to the historical Lenz and places his writing securely in the period from which it originates. English speakers owe a debt of gratitude for this substantial extension of their knowledge of the German eighteenth century . . . . -- David Hill * TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE *Table of ContentsA Note on the Translation Introduction by the Editors PART ONE. THE PLAYS The Tutor The New Menoza The Soldiers PART TWO. STORIES The Hermit The Country Pastor PART THREE. ESSAYS Remarks on the Theater On Götz von Berlichingen Review of The New Menoza On Scene Changes in Shakespeare On the Marriages of Soldiers PART FOUR. POEMS Portrait of a Slain Man Herr Professor Kant Where Are You Now Love in the Countryside Impromptu in the Audience Just to Hang upon Her Glance Adorned with Beautiful Stones Allwill's First Spiritual Song Song Set to the German Dance Song of a Shipwrecked European Shakespeare's Ghost Pygmalion To the Spirit Chronology A Note on the Currencies in Lenz's Works Selected Bibliography

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Book SynopsisDaniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. Southern Crossings"" crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea- or ideas, many and contrary- of ""Southernness"" to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner's close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm's central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, pass\u00e9. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.""- Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry's value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered. Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a ""constant southerness"" that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels. With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.Trade Review“Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passÉ. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems

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Book SynopsisIn ""Sunday Houses the Sunday House"", Elizabeth Hughey embraces the possibility that we can learn as much from objects as we can from other people, from the inanimate as much as the animate. Each poem descends upon a place and a time, takes a few notes, and then leaves quietly without slamming any doors. ""Sunday Houses the Sunday House"" reveals what the world is like when your attention is focused elsewhere, when your head is turned the other way. In ineffably beautiful verse, Hughey captures moments in time and place with confidence but without being judgemental. Although it may seem that the scope of these poems is rather small - a good party, a couple of eggs, a housekeeper's daydream - they reveal both a deep intelligence and a spirit of whimsy. Gertrude Stein wrote that she wanted to be ""drunk with nouns,"" and in a sense that is what Hughey has accomplished here. A native of Alabama, Elizabeth Hughey attended Hollins College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her MFA. Her poems have appeared in ""Shampoo"", the ""Hat"", and the ""Southern Poetry Review"" and are forthcoming in La Petite Zine. She lives and teaches in western Massachusetts. Sunday Houses the Sunday House who spent the night for church the next day. Stay Fredericksburg. Every room opens to Kathy. The heart from homestead. The map to go too far. Says Sunday house. Says womanly opposite. Says glass armchair. I'd like to cover the whole thing with rhinestone. The guest downstairs, unframed, whose background is reflected in the silver. Make the bed as Victorian as a stack of soap. Brick house adding fragrance to the mint.

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Book SynopsisAs restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff's ""Revolver"" 'repeats fire without reloading' as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren's silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection's exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can't be contained as what can.This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman's knife also described here, ""Revolver"" keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation - 'Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.'

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Book SynopsisMichele Glazer’s poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just `what’ is, but `how’ it is. The poems trouble borders—between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding scepticism. The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning: “What is looked at is changed - what is looked for is gone.” From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.

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Book SynopsisOn the surface, L. S. Klatt's poems are airy and humorous--with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub--but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word. Under the heat of inquiry, under the pressure of metaphor, the poems in Cloud of Ink liquefy, bend, and serpentine as they seek sometimes a new and sometimes an ancient destination. They present the reader with existential questions as they side-wind into the barbaric; the pear is figured as a 'wild boar' and the octopus is 'gutted,' yet primal energies cut a pathway to the mystical and the transcendent. The poetic cosmos Klatt creates is loquacious and beautiful, strange and affirmative, but never transparent. Amid 'a maelstrom of inklings,' the writer--and the audience--must puzzle out the meaning of the syllabary.

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Book SynopsisThe importance of Juliusz Slowacki (1809–1849) as Poland’s second greatest Romantic poet, after Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1856), is a platitude. Yet, in the English-speaking world, Slowacki receives little more than honorable mention even among students of Slavic literature. The intention of the authors of Agamemnon’s Tomb: A Polish Oresteia is to focus on Slowacki’s use of Antiquity in his most famous lyric, Agamemnon’s Tomb, written in 1839 Since Antiquity is an essential part of the fabric of Romantic poetry, of all works of Polish Romanticism, Agamemnon’s Tomb fits best into the larger framework of European Romanticism. It is grounded in the ancient and therefore universal language of the epoch probably more than any other European Romantic poem. “If I am a poet, the air of Greece has made me one,” Lord Byron once remarked. What is true of Byron is equally true of Slowacki and his literary output, where antique themes and elements flow like a torrent through virtually all his works. What makes Agamemnon’s Tomb unique, however, even when compared to the British or German Romantic literature, so saturated with ancient themes, is that it harnesses Antiquity as an interpretative mirror for Slowacki’s understanding of the history of Poland and the Polish national character. This is the first book in English that offers the American reader a chance to encounter one of Poland’s greatest poets and a work of European Romanticism at its best. It provides the Polish text with the first new full translation of the text and a stanza-by-stanza commentary that emphasizes Slowacki’s debt to Greek and Roman authors.

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Book SynopsisThe Lord God Creator has given us five openings to the physical world around us, that sacramental world in which we swim: hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell. The experience of each of these senses is sometimes sharp and clean; poignant, evocative, almost unendurable. In the lines of this collection, penned during sixty years, Michael Novak has sought to snatch from the flames of rushing time a few simple pieces, shards, remainders. “All Nature is a Heraclitean Fire,” a real poet wrote. Novak calls himself an amateur. But one who believes, however, that everybody should write poetry, or reach for it. It is the language of our soul. It is concentrated prose. Table of Contents Pieces from the Flames: Through My Friends, the Senses Stonehill (1–14) Rome (15 –39) Manhattan(40–46) Harvard (47–57) Washington(58–81) Karen (82–84)

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