Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book SynopsisJohn Poch’s fourth collection of poems, Fix Quiet, is an ambitious exploration in verse of failure, death, and a redemptive beauty found in the surprise of order. From the opening poem, “Shrike,” which is itself a meditation on poetry as paradoxically both predator and prey, to the final love poem, a crown of sonnets, these poems unite the form and function of line, rhyme, syntax, rhetorical wit, and larger architectures, to capture moments in time and name them. Poems that move from the rivers of northern New Mexico to travel across Italy are concerned with how the limitations of time and place wound and disappoint but also how they expand our vision and take us deeper into experience. A river can’t be apprehended easily, but here by faith the poet takes the measure of the headwaters to the sea, of our greatest moving mysteries of love and death.

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Book SynopsisD.H. Tracy’s debut volume, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize, marks a major event in contemporary poetry. Janet’s Cottage collects the richly textured, highly musical poems that have become Tracy’s hallmark in America’s finest literary journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Tracy brings buoyant wit and piercing intelligence to a range of poetic subjects, both intimate and domestic (“Janet’s Cottage”) and exotic and far-flung (“Impressions of the Tribeless”). Whether he is riffing on a string of clichés, making worn-out phrases shine again, or spinning out a deft conceit that even John Donne himself would have admired, Tracy never fails to surprise and delight. What strikes the reader most about Tracy’s work is the sheer abundance of his imagination. The unique vision of the world that he conveys in poem after poem dazzles at first and is sure to stay with readers long after. Trade Review CLUTCHSomething like a clutch, the two of uscommunicate the will to one anotherto move, and as one turns the other must,in contact with his mate, turn with her,unless the pedal disengages themand leaves them both to whine alone in airwithout a way to know the other’s aimor use their specious freedom from the pair.If you protest my model of us makesone the driving, one the driven, givingone pride of place, recall life engine-brakesas often as it climbs, and has us revvingloudest in our worst deceleration,when on the half that had been blithe about usis borne a little care with each gyrationto moderate our tumbling apparatus.So they function best who come to grips,and travel farthest fastest who bewarethe mismatch of intention in the slipsthat leave their coupling that much worse for wear;let us therefore use our hard-won touchto ride but not to ride it, me and youpressing close together inasmuchas is in us to be coming through.

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

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Book SynopsisDick Allen’s earlier collections have always included poems written in traditional form.But This Shadowy Place is his only book in which every poem is rhymed and metered.Allen’s “stand alone” new poems – narrative, meditative, lyric, sometimes excursionsinto Zen Buddhism – consistently merge traditional form with his hallmark cultural,political and religious themes. Even when seeming to write of himself, Allen is actuallyforever writing of the strange and unique transitions from the American TwentiethCentury to the Twenty-first. Known as one of the best craftsmen and poetry performersin the country, Allen here gives us new poems that when read either silently or aloudconstantly shift between the literal and the metaphorical. The paths in these new poemslead unexpectedly through both calming and foreboding shadows.Dick Allen is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including Present Vanishing,The Day Before, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. He’s received NationalEndowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, six inclusions inThe Best American Poetry annual volumes, a Pushcart Prize, among numerous other nationalawards. His poems have appeared regularly in many of America’s leading magazines,including The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, TheNew Criterion, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Tricycle, Rattle, and The AmericanScholar. Dick Allen was appointed as the Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010–2015),succeeding John Hollander.This Shadowy Place is the thirteenth winner of the annual New Criterion PoetryPrize. Previous winners of the prize include Deborah Warren, Adam Kirsch, CharlesTomlinson, Bill Coyle, Geoffrey Brock, J. Allyn Rosser, Daniel Brown, D.H. Tracy, and,prior to Allen, George Green. The New Criterion Poetry Prize was established in 2000and is awarded annually to a book-length manuscript of poems that pays close attentionto form. The series has for many years attracted the attention of both readers and critics,and Booklist has called

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Book SynopsisHow to Survive the Apocalypse, the second collection from poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble, examines the many apocalypses that African Americans have weathered, advising that those who wish to avoid annihilation should “live by rage and joy and turpentine.” Trimble reimagines the sonnet and the parable, producing poems of ironic indictment and joyous celebration. The book explores aspects of the Black experience in America, from Black woman pride, Nat Turner, kneeling, and the burning down of fast-food restaurants. Sometimes funny, sometimes biting, How to Survive the Apocalypse connects history to the contemporary and in the writing proves that the only balm for rage is creativity.

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Book SynopsisItalian poetry of the last century is far from homogeneous: genres and movements have often been at odds with one another, engaging the economic, political, and social tensions of post-Unification Italy. The thirty-eight poets included in this anthology, some of whose poems are translated here for the first time, represent this literary diversity and competition: there are symbolists (Gabriele D'Annunzio), free-verse satirists (Gian Pietro Lucini), hermetic poets (Salvatore Quasimodo), feminist poets (Sibilla Aleramo), twilight poets (Sergio Corazzini), fragmentists (Camillo Sbarbaro), new lyricists (Eugenio Montale), neo-avant-gardists (Alfredo Giuliani), and neorealists (Pier Paolo Pasolini)—among many others.Poets in the volume: Sibilla Aleramo, Carlo Betocchi, Dino Campana, Cristina Campo, Giorgio Caproni, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Sergio Corazzini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Milo De Angelis, Luigi Fontanella, Franco Fortini, Alfredo Giuliani, Corrado Govoni, Guido Gozzano, Amalia Guglielminetti, Giorgio Guglielmino, Gian Pietro Lucini, Mario Luzi, Valerio Magrelli, Anna Malfaiera, Fausto Maria Martini, Eugenio Montale, Arturo Onofri, Aldo Palazzeschi, Alfredo de Palchi, Giovanni Pascoli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sandro Penna, Antonia Pozzi, Salvatore Quasimodo, Amelia Rosselli, Umberto Saba, Roberto Sanesi, Edoardo Sanguineti, Camillo Sbarbaro, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Andrea Zanzotto

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Book SynopsisFrom earliest childhood the nursery rhyme, one of the most captivating genres in our popular culture, has transmitted powerful messages to the child who hears it. These meanings may not be the ones adults perceive or intend, for such didactic precepts as the beneficial need of self-control, social order, and academic responsibility also can be weighted with the sadistic, angry connotations that lie deep in the human spirit. In Cradle and All nursery rhymes are shown to be both the instruments that tell children of the mortal hunger for the forces in the natural world that oppose them. Thus in bearing a double load of meanings, nursery rhymes remove the blinders and push children toward the life of contrasts that abound in their culture. This fascinating examination of the pervasive influence of nursery rhymes reveals patterns of psychological and cultural meaning in a broad range of rhymes, grouping them according to basic subject matter: animal rhymes, courtship and marriage rhymes, lullabies and amusements, and didactic rhymes. Combining the tools of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, folklore studies, cultural history, and cultural anthropology, Cradle and All explores meanings and motives that lie deep in many rhymes that are the fundamental literature of the nursery. This illuminating study also assesses attempts to sanitize rhymes by removing elements that some deem as needlessly violent, antisocial, and sexist. Cradle and Allis unique in its analytical treatment of a large number of rhymes grouped in broad subject areas. In its diverse and comprehensive approach it will appeal to all who enjoy the lore of childhood literature.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2014 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeJane Hirshfield, Judge "What are we to do with anger? What are we to do with love? What are we to do with one another, given all that happens and has happened between us? These are a few of the questions that haunt Matthew Minicucci's deeply original and profoundly moving poems. In work personal and learned, steeped in familial life, the natural world, and the culture's storehouse of literature, myth, and history, Minicucci transforms outward knowledge and observation into accurate and deftly navigable vessels of inner life. Whales' hearts and family stories; etymologies, metrics, and syntax; the war machines and fishing lures of past and present worlds—all are harnessed together, hammered together, in this book-long exploration of our shared and particular human fates."—Jane Hirshfield"Matthew Minicucci begins his collection with his prize-winning poem, 'A Whale's Heart,' where in the old world, a rose petal tincture was used to minimize a scar, but never concealed it completely. This is a book of such faint scars, losses almost imperceptible but there, hidden under the hairline, or just above the heart. It is how these losses are transformed, through the alchemy of memory, forgiveness and love, small, intense, painterly studies of a country populated by the human family."—Dorianne Laux"If fate is, as Aurelius contends, a weaver, Matthew Minicucci's remarkable collection Translation stunningly unravels all we have been given: the fate of each species, the fate of each family, the fate of languages, and the fate of the ancient texts which constitute the violent, compelling sea on which so much of our understanding of the present floats and into whose complex amnion we never tire of descending. Translation not only explores what we might call the work and origins of literal translation, but it is itself a beautiful, unflinching, unfolding embodiment of our most essential human translational efforts: the work of translating experience into words, memory into understanding, and anger into forgiveness. Here is a rare collection that must be held in full, a book that deepens its inquiries with the turn of every page. If the metaphor is itself a kind of translation, then Minicucci demonstrates with both imagistic precision and an abiding associative mystery how all things—both the fist and the clasp, the sword and the shield, the hawk and the turtle, and, finally, the lilac bush and the switch fashioned from it—when carefully lifted and turned, implicate us all." —Kathleen Graber

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Book Synopsis“Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us and what do we leave behind? Where do we keep the past and what do we keep it in? How do we measure a person, a country, a love, a loss? What do we remember? What can’t we forget? What do we declare and what do we declare it with: our words and mouths? our bodies and hands? in blue ink or black? If as Eudora Welty wrote, `The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit,’ then McAdams is an honest and faithful courier. The poems serve as storage boxes into which a memory is placed, then wrapped and bound. In poem after poem McAdams guides us to our most intimate spaces, the candy tin nestled between the handkerchiefs in a dresser’s top drawer, the cigar box packed in the trunk and stored in the attic, and she allows us to open and sit with our deepest selves.”—Catherine Wing“In an ideal world, all books would marry the lyricism of poetry with the narrativity of prose. They would pose questions and provide answers. They would be both accessible and elusive. They would evoke a sense of place yet remain profoundly universal. They would elicit wonder and concepts we have known our whole lives. We know we don’t live in such a world because Janet McAdams’s gorgeous and mysterious Seven Boxes for the Country After gives us an idea of what we’ve been missing in much of what’s out there. This is a beautiful collection.”—Dean Rader

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeThe Many Names for Mother is an exploration of intergenerational motherhood; its poems reach toward the future even as they reflect on the past. This evocative collection hovers around history, trauma, and absence—from ancestral histories of anti-Semitic discrimination in the former Soviet Union to the poet’s travels, while pregnant with her son, to death camp sites in Poland. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dasbach ponders how the weight of her Jewish-refugee immigrant experience comes to influence her raising of a first-generation, bilingual, and multiethnic American child.A series of poems titled “Other women don’t tell you” becomes a refrain throughout the book, echoing the unspoken or taboo aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to the postpartum body. The Many Names for Mother emphasises that there is no single narrative of motherhood, no finite image of her body or its transformation, and no unified name for any of this experience. The collection is a reminder of the mothers we all come from, urging us to remember both our named and unnamed pasts.Trade ReviewDasbach's collection is masterfully ordered to carry the reader through the weight and the gift of intergenerational inheritance. The history Dasbach has inherited, and which sits at the heart of these poems, is Jewish, Ukrainian, U.S.-American, and matrilineal. If it is not always an easy inheritance, it is one that Dasbach's poems honor and carry forward.... Dasbach's poems delve into motherhood in all its complications in a way I didn't know I needed to read until I read them."—The Adroit Journal

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Book SynopsisAlthough C. S. Lewis is best known for his prose and for his clear, lucid literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and imaginative Ransom and Narnia stories, he considered himself a poet for the first two and a half decades of his life. Owen Barfield recalls that anyone who met Lewis as a young man in the early 1920s at Oxford University quickly learned he was one ""whose ruling passion was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry."" The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis offers readers, for the first time, a one-volume collection of Lewis's poetry, including many poems that have never appeared in print. With the poems arranged in chronological order, this volume allows readers the opportunity to compare the poetry Lewis was writing while he was also writing his fiction and nonfiction prose.Beginning with his earliest lyric poems from 1907, The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis follows Lewis's efforts to write long, narrative poems, which were particularly influenced by Norse mythology. His outburst of lyric poetry as a young man in the trenches during World War I culminates in his first published work, Spirits in Bondage (1919), followed by his most ambitious narrative poem, Dymer (1926). Both volumes afford unique insights into Lewis the atheist.After his conversion to Christianity in 1930, Lewis wrote a collection of sixteen religious lyrics that he included in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933); as a group, these are considered among his best poems. Until his death in 1963, Lewis continued writing and publishing poetry, often appearing in journals and magazines under his pseudonym N. W., shorthand for the Anglo-Saxon nat whilk, ""[I know] not whom."" As a whole, these latter poems are either occasional verses, burlesques, and erudite satires or they are contemplative poems musing upon the human condition and its pain, joy, suffering, pride, love, doubt, and faith.The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis demonstrates a dedicated, determined, and passionate poet at work and illustrates the degree and depth to which poetry shaped Lewis's literary, intellectual, ?áemotional, and spiritual life.Trade Review"Don King has done a great service in collecting Lewis's poetry into one volume, including a good many poems never published before. C. S. Lewis is so widely admired as a prose writer that it is easy to overlook his accomplishments as a poet. But here we find the precocious adolescent perfecting his craft in a surprising variety of forms and meters: the eloquent war poet, whose best pieces rival those of Wilfred Owen; the spiritual pilgrim, who eventually found what he was seeking; and the witty occasional poet with a zest for whimsy and satire. Professor King is the world's leading authority on Lewis's poetry, and so his critical introduction and comprehensive notes invite readers to discover a delightful and thought-provoking side of Lewis they may have not seen before."—David C. Downing, author of Planets in Peril: C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy and Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel"This magisterial critical work by Professor King provides students of Lewis's poetry unprecedented chronological access to the full range of his poems, and makes possible a comprehensive reassessment of Lewis's enduring talent as a poet."—Bruce L. Edwards, Professor Emeritus, English and Africana Studies, Bowling Green State University, and editor of C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (4 volumes)

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Book SynopsisHow Blood Works is a collection of poems that considers the way memory, identity, and our very blood take shape in the places we inhabit: rooms, cities, landscapes, and the spaces within the body. Moore examines the idea of bloodlines—literal familial ties and the traumas, secrets, and complex relationships passed from one generation to the next. To explore these motifs, many of the poems borrow from the world of visual art, including painting, sculpture and its resonance with the creation of the self, and architecture, too, as a metaphorical counterweight to nature.In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves—and, by extension, our understanding of who we are—are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize"A luminous debut collection of poems." —Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice"Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace." —Jim Daniels, author of The Middle Ages

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeTrade ReviewForeword Indie Awards Honorable Mention 2023 in Poetry "Fatemi makes language think aloud and sing in these ruminative, beautiful poems." —Publishers Weekly *starred review* "Farnaz Fatemi's Sister Tongue explores the experience of living between the cultures of Iran and the United States, and of trying to find a voice to describe that in-betweenness. The poems take root in various liminal spaces, tracking the poet's journey through cross-cultural identity and expression."—Pedestal Magazine "In her debut verse collection, Farnaz Fatemi skillfully explores the nuanced between-life of Farsi and English and how that negative space houses language, displacement, longing, and the materiality of memory. .... This celebration of honoring roots, as a poem and a collection of poems, creates a treasury of understanding and introduction within the Iranian diaspora as a culture." —World Literature Today "…[a] complex [and] dazzling collection of poetry and poetic prose…" —EscapeIntoLife.com "In Sister Tongue, Fatemi shines gorgeous light on the liminal space between languages, bearing witness to the joy and longing that accompany every act of translation." —Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Life on Mars "Delicious, provocative, and incredibly wise, Farnaz Fatemi transcends years and oceans in these pages. Like gripping a cup and string to the ear, Sister Tongue is a hopeful missive, proof of words and their witnesses, an atlas of the wonder of becoming."—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls "I praise the present tense of these poems for its tensile strength, its ability to hold the struggle that is happening in the past, present, and future. The way it speaks of the perpetual, of what it is to be tongue-tied in the presence of one's other self. 'Language is geological,' this speaker tells us, 'a process of accumulation, and accretion accompanied by landslides.' In setting out to speak the language of her blood, she finds herself at once estranged and embraced. Thrilled and defeated. What to do with such a natural disaster? These poems persist in their attempts to bridge worlds, offering hope of a complex and hard-won reconciliation, one richly crafted line at a time. In the words of Fatemi, 'I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.'" —Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera "Sister Tongue, Farnaz Fatemi's debut poetry collection, transports us to a place where language must stretch to fit the largeness of human love and longing, and in doing so, fills the absences we did not even know we harbored. Sister Tongue begins to say what many of us already know—that borders and countries are too limiting to define us. Her poems offer us both a reckoning and a salve."—Persis M. Karim, chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University "Poet Farnaz Fatemi is the soulful Iranian American truth-teller and wonder-wanderer we've needed to hear. In Farsi, in English, in Tehran, or California, these poems cherish the miracle of connectedness by weaving family threads through time and space—through sisters, mothers, grandmothers, through a changed and changing world. Sister Tongue is a luscious love letter to language(s), spoken in a trusting, intimate voice. The poet recognizes the twinned solace of silence and song, of sister and self. Loss takes its seat, as it does, at the table, and Fatemi, with tea, family history, powerful memory, and a new/old tongue, inscribes it alongside the depths of beauty and joy in this radiant book of passionate understanding." —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum "Neither exile nor immigrant, Farnaz Fatemi writes with a double intelligence that transcends any presuppositions we might bring to a poetry of the other. She claims her strategic advantage with confidence and laser-like insight, the gift of deep listening and the power of naming, as she slips back and forth freely across borders like a master spy reporting from an uncharted world suspended between two cultures. I am optimistic that Sister Tongue speaks the language of our future."—Zara Houshmand, writera

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Book SynopsisKara Candito's second poetry collection is anything but a comedy, although it ends happily. At the book's centre is the struggle of a U.S. citizen and a Mexican citizen to find a common space and language in their relationship while navigating the U.S. immigration system, a process that sometimes requires magical thinking just to endure. By employing a kind of documentary poetics that views the application process through different angles and perspectives, Candito crafts discourses around xenophobia, otherness, and national and ethnic identity.""In the waiting room of the third government office, / you will invent your own religion,"" writes Candito in ""Ars Amatoria: So You Want to Marry a Foreign National,"" a tragicomic sequence written in Roman-numeric fragments reminiscent of an official document's formatting. Interspersed with moments of lyric urgency (""I am here to suffer more beautifully"") and disconcerting cinematic observation (""One wore an assault rifle across his back, // another pointed a video camera at our faces.""), Spectator charts the plural self's course through a world of airplane travel, drug wars, and customs forms.From Italy to Boston, Lorca's Granada to New York, and the dusty street of Mexico City to the snowy parking lots of the Mid-west, the speakers of Spectator probe the jagged boundaries between past and present, observer and observed, and political and personal. The book becomes an homage to anyone who's been displaced or redefined by bureaucratic systems of power.Trade Review"The fluidity of the writing, the lift of the heart, the self-deprecating humor, and the aggregate of the understated losses add up to, in Kara Candito's second collection, a kind of brilliance and readability all too rare. These new poems are alive with the personality and honesty of a young poet at the beginning of true art." —Stanley Plumly "Spectator has a subversive heart: a series of poems about a Mexican and an American in love. These ravenous poems cross many emotional and aesthetic borders. They're surreal, tender, meta, political, impressionistic, and angry. Kara Candito has enlarged the contemporary love poem. This is vital and startling work." –Eduardo Corral “Candito proves herself once again to be a surprising and sage voice, offering poems of candor and urgency.” —Better View of the Moon (blog)

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Book SynopsisElectronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changing—and, indeed, must change—to keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together radically different methodological approaches—close reading of onscreen textual and visual aesthetics, Critical Code Studies, and cultural analytics (big data)—into a collaborative interpretation of a single work of digital literature.Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} is a work of electronic literature that presents a high-speed, one-word-at-a-time animation synchronized to visual and aural effects. It tells the tale of a mysterious pit and its impact on the surrounding community. Programmed in Flash and published online, its fast-flashing aesthetic of information overload bombards the reader with images, text, and sound in ways that challenge the ability to read carefully, closely, and analytically in traditional ways. The work’s multiple layers of poetics and programming can be most effectively read and analyzed through collaborative efforts at computational criticism such as is modeled in this book. The result is a unique and trailblazing book that presents the authors’ collaborative efforts and interpretations as a case study for performing digital humanities literary criticism of born-digital poetics.

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Book Synopsis“At the edge of a field a thought waits,” writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode. Here is a voice slowed by an erotics suffused with pain, quickened by discovery. In masterful long poems and refracted lyrics, Donish flips the coin of subjectivity; different and potentially dangerous faces are revealed in turn. With lyricism as generous as it is exact, Donish tunes her writing as much to the colors, textures, and rhythms of daily life as to what violates daily life—what changes it from within and without.

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Book SynopsisI Always Carry My Bones is a complex ideation for many people of color and migrant peoples. Felicia Zamora explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging.Trade ReviewIt's said that the body remembers, and this book reveals that memories, too, embody. The story of a lived, living body is stored, stored-up until it spills over onto pages full of memories, rage, power, cruelty, survival, love . . . and some stubborn belief that a body will find a way to tell the truth. The poems ask: What did it take to survive? The poems answer: It took every cell moment by moment, accounted for, told on, inscribed, memorized." - Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize"What dwells in land, dwells in you,' - writes Felicia Zamora in I Always Carry My Bones, a book that flows as streams do: relentlessly despite obstructions, despite injustices. Through a boundless range of analysis, Zamora renders trauma in the brown body as a 'lone thistle in the torrent of letters.' Her poems are ecstatic and leap in pursuit of truth and cruel beauties. Zamora's work will remind you that the world is the body' science and psyche. This book is thread let loose and there's no telling which direction Zamora will pull it." - Diana Marie Delgado, author, Tracing the Horse"A body is a landscape. Ridges outlining a horizon, shared, even as yet remaining particular and positioned. In Zamora's lines, one connects images to narrative threads, peaks to trails, glimpsed like a face lit up 'amid the mulberries at twilight.' The fact of the horizon, light over the ridge, even as it shines unevenly, is grounding: 'we're all born grounded.' We share the fact of an embodiment however asymmetrically available to violences. One carries 'ruptured rules & words & shelter' and often literally. I Always Carry My Bones carries itself, past salvage or triage, the unevenness of light, to imagining - 'we imagine / ourselves every moment' - where the body might carry itself, imagined anew. How the fact of one particular body's history signals all that was, 'memories in the cavities,' but also all that could have been otherwise. And how to imagine an otherwise. 'How, like an egg, a body maps out the body,' but also how it 'questions it, runs broken in the sun.'" - Jos Charles, author, Feeld

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Book SynopsisThroughout Sound Fury, poems by metaphysician Robert Herrick are refashioned into phantasmagorical oddities of likeness and difference. Figures from the fringes of popular imagination—Zane Grey, Robinson Crusoe, Porfirio Díaz—surface as cobbled-together avatars on the theme of identity. Brilliantly asserting the necessity of humane and resistant modes of speech against the vapid sounds and enforced silences of orthodoxy, Sound Fury finds the poet “Now, in our former state/ In our current one/ In stately procession,” venturing forth in a world “where things of questionable being go.”Trade Review“Since his debut collection, Debt, Mark Levine has managed to reinvent himself with each new book. In Sound Fury, he turns to canonical poetry, which he has absorbed with love, distaste, and ambivalence, to embark on a chaotic, dream-like romp that puzzles and dazzles with its images and invented forms. The immersive landscapes of these poems might remind one of other fantastic and haunting worlds: environments such as Ian Cheng’s endlessly proliferating self-playing video game Emissaries, or Victorian fairy paintings like Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke. Sound Fury amplifies our conception of how the art of the past can be radically transformed and brought renewed into the present—and ultimately of what poetry can be: a realm of expanded possibility and a heightened feeling of being alive. This is an extraordinary book.”—Geoffrey Nutter, author, Giant Moth Perishes“Mark Levine has an extraordinary nose, taste, and mouth for lives low and abject, filthy talkers and doers. Sound Fury—its nouns pressed together loudly and furiously—is distinguished by its intense, continually revved-up virtuosity of voice, its absolutely right pitch, idiom, line cuts, and rhyme, and its large cast of ‘scavenging muckers.’ Levine’s language is unstoppably vigorous and his wit sly; his distinctiveness is his genius for a devastating inwardness. The postmodern disenchantment with the Anthropocene, that farce of human greed and conceit, finds its latest, most confident tracker here.”—Cal Bedient, author, The Breathing Place“Whether lark as in songbird, or lark as in stunt, these skeptical, fabulous poems pluck pieces from Herrick and Pope like particulate matter from which the wonder of a poem inexplicably grows. Here is the poet Mark Levine at a great height. Sound Fury turns any easy notion of content and context inside out, executing the truth of our effortful helplessness. This book is a feat, a tonal fiesta, but not for this will it keep mattering to me, no—these songs come from somewhere deep underneath: if bawdy, then tender, full of woeful delight.”—Sally Keith, author, River House

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Book SynopsisPart wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.Trade ReviewThis poet knows that to transform pain and anguish into words is to call on the ancient goddesses—earth women who spun new sources of nourishment, showing how to do the work that centuries of women poets, seers, makers, mothers, and wanderers would take up, take in, and become. How many ways can a poet invent to survive? Maggie Queeney shows us the old ways are infinite, umbilically connected to our now-howling, our new bodies beautiful amid the ageless brutality. No one can destroy this poet’s lived knowledge, though she speaks of destruction, because she also speaks of this regenerative line of women’s lived histories. In Kind is a book that mothers will relive, daughters will recognize, and the patriarchy will, if there is any justice of the kind Queeney imagines, shake in its boots. Shake then crumble, while Arachne spins triumphant." —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize"Maggie Queeney’s haunting new book is a stunner. She nails surviving trauma and the cost of enduring it in a complicated household. This collection is the sleeper hit you need to buy—haunting, evocative, easy to know, and impossible to forget." — Mary Karr, author, The Liars’ Club"That Queeney channels Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a touchstone makes perfect sense. She plumbs the same psychological depths as her predecessor. She knows there are monsters in the closets and under the beds. She knows, too, they will cower under her unblinking gaze." —Christopher Kennedy, author, Clues from the Animal Kingdom"Maggie Queeney spins then weaves intricately, in defiance of fate, the threads of origin and history. Here, transformation, fiercely rendered, salves then saves. Here—wound turned bruise then scar, traced over—the body harmed revisions herself to survive, to become. Unforgettable, haunting and hauntingly beautiful, In Kind is a rescue.”—Monica Berlin, author, Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live

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Book SynopsisLo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.Trade ReviewMelissa Crowe is a new kind of genius of sensory memory. Mina Loy–like, Sappho-seeming, as if those ancient fragments blossomed so many centuries later as lush nerve endings signaling desire, signaling help for the crushed blooms of a childhood betrayed, in a cycle of agonizing poems the book’s other sections surround as if holding, carefully, even joyfully. Lo is a love song with a haunting melody that thrills me and makes me weep with gratitude." —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize"Lo rides the exclamation and imperative of its title with indefatigable tenderness and dogged reverie and confirms Crowe’s place as one of contemporary poetry’s most skilled raconteurs. Crowe knows attention is a kind of love, and her work resonates with the easy hum of concentrated care; what’s rare, then, is how these finely spun poems carry us through the sweet and the bitter, reviving a buried bravery both necessary and all our own." —Meg Day, author, Last Psalm at Sea Level"Lo is a devastatingly gorgeous, sigh-out-loud-every-other-line celebration of the inner life. Like a geode, an ordinary looking rock, Lo insists that there is more—more to discover inside or underneath, more in the secreted and unsaid. In these poems, Crowe cracks open the ordinary, the harrowing, even the ugly, to reveal the jewels inside. This book—this poet—is a marvel." —Maggie Smith, author, Goldenrod

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

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Book SynopsisThe lyrics in All Black Everything shine with work and the freedom of young people. Full of menace and humor, objects of warfare and luxury consumption are transformed with Shane Book’s blade of caustic irony against the worldwide nihilism of cash payments, guns, and disease. In their syncopated, slangy, and musically enjambed flow of the digital world, a poet known for singular collections has produced his most inventive and uncompromising volume yet. The political sublime of Caribbean poetics ebb and flood in this contagious new voice of borrowings, hijacking the trap house. This is an original collection, daring to assume the voice of the system and its death drives, having fun, mixing it up, throwing hands too. If old pirates rob I, then Shane Book has stolen back something from them. All Black Everything is a redemption song.Trade ReviewAll Black Everything proposes an expansive, global poetics, which is equally a poetics of Black diasporan fluency. All Black’s poems ride the crosscurrents of history and popular culture through African America, the Caribbean, West Africa, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As references whirl and constellate, All Black’s language grows dense and intricate. It gathers color and image. It acquires regional inflections, absorbs a riches of sound, and riffs on proverbial wisdom. The global reach of these poems works to collect and synthesize fragments of culture. Connections are established across time and distance. This synthesis happens as we read, and the rhythms of Black language and music become its measure." - Kaie Kellough, author, Magnetic Equator"Every rewind rewounds as Book’s book bars out (like breaks free). Reader, peep game— where game is play, prey, and how they stay laid down in an unsound system of robber-baron domination, post-Maria neglected Puerto Rico, (in)appropriation, and grief on grief on grief. Ergo: ‘Very hardcore business, man.’ All Black Everything left me syntaxed, thus spun as black wax under a needle; the poet on some Tender Buttons, but the buttons are an MPCs or 808s. Get it, get it. It’s ‘so good, God,’ Book leaves black ‘satchels stuffed with green.’ I pray on everything: should we meet in the lettuce aisles of ‘fully white-peopled cities,’ let us stay all Black fullness when we get there." - Douglas Kearney, author, Sho

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Book SynopsisIn Not For Luck, Derek Sheffield ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. In particular, these poems explore a father's relationship with his daughters, which is rooted in place and time. There is tenderness and an abiding ecological consciousness, but also loss and heartache, especially about environmental degradation. We are invited to listen to the languages of other beings. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, two bears on a stretch of coast, a river otter, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth.

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Book SynopsisIce Hours is a suite of poems set in majestic and severe Antarctica, chronicling the nearly forgotten story of the Ross Sea party. Weaving historical and scientific research into lilting verse, Marion Starling Boyer follows the adventurers who sailed on the Aurora at the beginning of World War I to support Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. These poems reveal the characters of the explorers and the conflicts they faced during the two years they labored to lay a chain of supply depots across the ice, unaware that Shackleton would never come because his ship, the Endurance, sank on the opposite side of the continent. The Ross Sea men battled frozen wastelands, scurvy, snow-blindness, starvation, hypothermia, and frostbite while their ship, the Aurora, was ice-trapped, marooning them without vital equipment, clothing, fuel, and food. Through lyric and formal poetic forms, Ice Hours brings to life the close of a heroic period interwoven with the brooding voice of the Antarctic continent, evoking themes of what occurs when humanity engages with the sublime.

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Book SynopsisLesbian bars, libraries, highways, churches, and oil rigs set the scenes for the poems in Landlocked. Whether at work or at play, the speakers in Landlocked live in the space between longing and belonging, wanderlust and homesickness, and explore the intersection of place and identity. In the era of “don’t say gay,” these poems provide a defiantly queer perspective on Oklahoma, one of the reddest of the red states, and its many contradictions.Trade ReviewWith humor, grace, the perfectly placed earthbound image, and ineffable longing, Julia McConnell writes of “things that seem unbearable” in ways that make them bearable, glorious, necessary, true. These poems reawaken forgotten yearnings, and remind one of the complexities of love and loss, landscapes, and home. Julia McConnell is an important new voice in American poetry, and Landlocked is a stunning debut." - Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place"Julia McConnell’s Landlocked teems with all the strange, violent, and glittering ephemera of America’s forgotten places. With precise language, thrilling music, and unforgettable images, “we are drilled into the interior” of romantic and dangerous landscapes. In these poems, the reader rides shotgun while our guide narrates her singular dream—a dream in which illness, Elizabeth Bishop, diner breakfast, and gay bars weave seamlessly along the highway shoulder. I can’t remember reading a debut so complex and self-assured. Landlocked proclaims the arrival of a major talent." - Lisa Wells, author of The Fix"The poet’s sense of place as central to both personal and public narrative strikes powerful chords with this reader, as do the diction, images, management of white space, and formal choices made in creating and assembling this powerful collection." - Thomas Lynch, National Book Award finalist The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

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Book SynopsisAccording to the preface to Don Welch’s latest collection of poems, “Gnomes” are defined as: short expressions, from a word meaning judgment, opinion, purpose; of, or pertaining to, someone originally Greek, especially a poet. A species of diminutive beings, usually shriveled old men who troll interiors, guarding earth’s treasures.This is an apt description of Welch’s book, indeed. The senior poet of Nebraska and the Great Plains, Don Welch may sardonically regard himself as the “shriveled old man” who both explores the Plains’ interiors and, by writing about them, becomes the protector of the earth’s treasures.The gnomes in this collection are beautiful little crystals of verse, reminiscent of the brevity of ancient Chinese poetry but purposefully armed with the occidental twists of language and experience that only someone immersed and baptized in the spirit of the local can wield. Welch’s poems are vertical moments for our busy horizontal lives. They are like pendants of beaded water, their careful silences speaking loudly through our din.

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Book SynopsisAn activist conscious dialogue, Marcia Slatkin’s Cheese After Fukushima laments an impending future occupied by melted ice caps, fishless oceans, persistence of global obesity, the absence of CO2, and a wheezing Earth suffocated under city sidewalks. These wildly inventive poems are backed with a beautiful linguistic language which brings an element of beauty to the otherwise stark descriptions of our own reality.Cheese after Fukushima If I were young, my ovaries prodding possibility, squirming newness still in my future, I might stop. Rain brings rads to grass, unknowing ruminants munch, and the rest is amplification. “Then buy skim, packed before the Japanese release – enough for a lifetime -- and mix your ration daily,” says the health ‘umai.’ But I’d so mourn lessened pleasure: that thick milk-magic that lets enzymes ferment and grow wildly-unctuous tastes undreamed...

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Book SynopsisMany immigrants experience the concept of third space, a culture and language unique to themselves within the intersection of past and present, of there and here. In Dandelions in Third Space, Edytta Wojnar describes her own experiences with this third space she created for herself after emigrating from Poland, which resulted in the loss of language and family. Within this collection of 70 poems, many explore acculturation, investigating what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be a writer who has lost a language. Expanding the metaphorical concept of third space to marriage, Wojnar describes the continual translation and adoption that occurs between two people’s backgrounds and psychological traits. Wojnar doesn’t shy away from any topic, describing her experiences as an immigrant, a wife, and a mother with refreshing, sometimes brutal, honesty.“My Mother’s Necklace”, Dandelions in Third Space “I left my home country & learneda lie can be true—life can be wasted& there is a metaphor for every loss—even language.”

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Book SynopsisThe Wonder Years, an expertly crafted collection of poems, leads readers on a heart-wrenching journey of love and loss. From childhood to young adulthood and becoming a parent, this collection addresses coping with loss and the feeling that what haunts us never really goes away. In these poems, Arian Katsimbras beautifully encapsulates the essence of origin and the pain that remains after wounds start to heal, giving readers the image of his personal experiences in difficult honesty and full clarity. Katsimbras, with this collection, has painted his life in detail like a brutal renaissance, and each poem holds nothing back while maintaining a moving, emotion-filled magnificence. Readers will cling to every word, holding onto the power behind them. The Wonder Years is a painful but necessary telling of Katsimbras’ life that balances past memories with current knowledge.

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Book SynopsisBuilding Brownville explores forms of grief through the internalization of experience and wanders further to wonder if the past is too far away to fix the present while also serving as a love letter to Nebraska. This collection offers a millennial voice within poetry––a voice that not only subverts the norm of what poetry is but defies the stereotypes of a region, offering connection through grief, love, and place––to experience a somewhere which we have never been.

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Book SynopsisIn Crosshairs of the Ordinary World, the author, Dixie Salazar explores social justice issues such as the pervasive violence in our modern society, incarceration and homelessness filtered through the author’s experiential lens. Salazar has taught art in the prisons and currently volunteers on two boards dedicated to solving the local homeless crisis. Avoiding negativity and cynicism, the author searches for and finds elements of hope and redemption in these lyrically inspired poems.

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Book SynopsisWaking Past Midnight collects elements of the rough South and life as a teenager on the Delta, tinged with threat and violence. In my late teens a pewter flask Rode my hip and I tucked in my right boot An eight-inch blade crafted in dimpled bone. I didn’t court trouble, but knew cemeteries Were full of coffins, their rubber gaskets Rotting in the August humidity. In Greenwood, Mississippi, my maternal Grandfather primed his rage with bonded Whiskey. He loved to roll the bones, to shoot The jive with dock-hands behind the Quinn Drug Co. A blue .38 riding his hip, he passed The collection plate odd Sundays, blackjack Tucked in his breast pocket. Some devout Church-goer whispered how a white hood And sheet haunted his bedroom closet.

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Book SynopsisIn Listening Devices, James Dennis brings a near- Renaissance breadth of vision to bear on a dizzying array of topics—murder hornets, the Fibonacci sequence, reincarnation, Gandhi, the dreariness of January, even an ill-behaved dog. While much of his work probes spiritual mysteries or confronts societal ills like the death penalty, U.S. immigration policy, and Covid-19, he still finds room for humor, vigorously defending “the cowardice of (his) convictions.” Dennis is as much at home with the sonnet or ghazal as with free verse, and this command of craft, coupled with his deep music and arresting imagery, transforms the seemingly ordinary into the breath-taking. No doubt about it: James Dennis is a poetic wizard, and at least some of that magic is sure to rub off on his readers. How lucky they are.

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Book SynopsisIn his debut poetry collection Little Palace, Adam Gellings gives readers a perfect example of that often-repeated but rarely achieved instruction: “show, don’t tell.” These sophisticated poems wander through the busy streets of Paris, past quiet courtyards full of flowers, into a kitchen that smells of fresh-baked bread. This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art. "Adam J. Gellings doesn't write poems so much as he partitions arrondissements of feeling on the page." Dante Di Stefano, author of Lullaby with Incendiary Device

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Book SynopsisDreaming of Endangered Species explores issues of health and illness, disability and cure, and human frailty and vulnerability in an age of global unease and uncertainty. It maps a tension between the infinite and finite, between the concrete and ethereal. In some ways, it is a celebration of the mundane, by which I mean the world of everyday objects, of plants and animals, scents, textures, movements, water, and phases of the moon. But interwoven with this testament to ineffable beauty, this celebratory mode, are reflections on my cancer, for example, my autistic strivings, my gender queer identity, and the plight of the natural world. A recurrent thread that runs through the manuscript is the idea of dreaming, which offers a kind of poetic membrane, a connective tissue that softens some of the weighty concerns and allows them a more muted resonance than they might otherwise have.

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Book SynopsisFight or Flight artifacts the trauma of McFadyen-Ketchum’s divorce after ten years of marriage and the journey he took across the wilds of America (living in a twelve-person tent on the California coast, getting intentionally lost in the Utah desert, tracking wild animals in the bitter cold of Indiana winters) in search of healing that led to the greatest discovery of all: his indigenous wife and her three indigenous children he now calls his own.

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Book SynopsisIn Below Zero, her fourth poetry collection, Carol V. Davis explores Siberia, an area in Russia largely unknown to Americans. Flying into Ulan-Ude, capital of Buryatia Republic, where she had never been, she mutters a prayer that her plane will be met. On a trip to Lake Baikal, she and her colleagues drive past trees strung with Tibetan prayer flags and stop to drop rubles in the lap of a Buddha. In Irkutsk, when her host dips a finger in a glass of beer and taps it on the tabletop, “For the house spirits,” she thinks of her own Passover, “finger dipping in the wine.” Intermingling faith practices, shamanistic rituals jostle with Russian Orthodox blessings. Amid a harsh life in winter “below zero,” the poet finds wonder and majesty in the vast landscape and the warmth of people who welcome her. These poems wander over borders, America to Russia, Los Angeles to Nebraska, from cities to tall grass prairie to forest. Faith and doubt, magic and superstition, place, cultures, and family history weave through this journey, inviting us to ask ourselves: Where do we belong and why?

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Book SynopsisIn John Hazard’s collection of poems, Interrupt the Sky, the title comes from a line in “Hills,” in which the speaker imagines an Ohio River landscape, with hills that send their chatter outto interrupt the sky,which has been too vast, too long.The hills have had about enough. Attending to detail and gesture, these poems present humans and other modest creatures set against larger forces, usually in nature. With varying degrees of hope and affection, Hazard is pulling for the small and the vulnerable to interrupt the sky, to declare themselves in one way or another. The book’s three parts are titled “Small,” “Beautiful Clowns,” and “Home Before Dark.” In each section, the poems move from darkness toward cautious affirmation. The light comes at angles, muted by realism and shadow, but it seems right there, on the horizon, if we look hard.

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Book SynopsisNow and Then, Poems for Eustress represent experience, insight, ideas, introspection, and impression. Some of the poems contain historical content, while others contain contemporary or current trends. Written to provide inspiration, the book is divided into five parts: Historical, Philosophical, Humor, Mythic, and Social Commentary. Consider campus unrest in the ’60s, mythical beasts, rat ranches, cryptids, and coronavirus. In each section, the reader will find the haunting, the violent, the satirical, the realistic, and the metaphorical in an experience that will, like Vonnegut, unstop time.

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Book SynopsisHarmonia explores the psychic distance and damage created by loss as it considers art, physics, geology, and literature. These poems offer an intimate look at how grief can sink us, forever changing how we see our closest relationships and the spaces we share.

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Book SynopsisAisle 228 is a book of poems about the Chicago Cubs and listening to baseball on the radio. The speaker also details attending games with her father. The book highlights milestones across baseball in the past 70 years and culminates in the Cubs 2016 World Series win.

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Book SynopsisIf Not Him, gifts us with an exquisite collection of poems about love, family, and grief, a love all the sweeter because it contrasts sharply with a difficult childhood.

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Book SynopsisYou Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book - a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms - that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called ""Quadrilaterals"" - four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your HeelSoars the mackled sound, kites ago :A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :When were we first older than we wanted to be :That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.

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Book SynopsisWrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?Trade Review“Headlong, agile, volatile, Lara Egger’s poems crackle with collision and invention. They shoot the divide between unsayable and unknowable. They ‘traipse the vast / in devastation.’ It’s a thrill to discover her work.”—James Haug, author of Riverain “Beating inside Lara Egger’s chest is a beast of pathologic geometry. She cries and curses, begs and screams, and laughs it over the cliff. She refuses to love and die alone, will not ever judge you, will gladly swap all of your jaded conceits for a few hardy knocks of messy wonder. If you’re feeling lucky, say yes to her eternal burning questions. Say yes to all of them.”—Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?

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Book SynopsisLocated somewhere between fiction and reality, the animals of Dogged exist as both "creatures children see in their fevers" and "your one / good dream / in the night." Inhabiting a space apart from time and narrative, the space of the ever-elusive now, these haunting poems probe animal consciousness and desire, as "howls float / like crocuses— / violet / and half open / to the unknown." Looking to a wide range of high and low visual media, from Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Animal Planet's Fatal Attractions to Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Hercules's dog discovering Tyrian purple, Stacy Gnall ponders human-animal connections and divisions, exploring those moments when human voices blend with "silent" beasts to exceed the limits of language. In Dogged, animals emerge as the highest aspiration of poetry. Around the bend it was reckoned we would never grow old because there were no words for it.I placed my arms soft around the neck of a fawn and she felt no alarm. Speech is where we went wrong. (From "The Wood in Which Things Have No Name")

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