Poetry / Poems

Book SynopsisWithin the visual arts of painting and photography, Martha Ronk finds an undeniable presence lurking: silence. This character slips into pauses, hides between images, and expertly evades the grasp of language. Ronk shows us that what is hidden just off screen in these images might just be the force that gives them power. The poems in Silences seek possibilities of how to form language from a phenomenon that so earnestly resists it. Rather than coax silence out of hiding, Ronk’s poems respond to its mysterious presence through questions and conjecture. These poems endeavor to give a much-deserved voice to silence, addressing the power of what is not seen. While silence remains perpetually out of reach, Ronk invites us to follow the language that creeps up to its edges. The poems in this collection form an inquiry that moves through the presence of silence and reveals insights into the character of the visual art in which it lives.

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Book SynopsisA poetry collection that employs intuition, humor, and celebration while seeking to break out of restrictive social structures. Mary Wilson’s Both, Apollo speaks from inside the bodies and binaries that so often act as constraints. It sometimes tries to negotiate its way out. It laments, celebrates, reasons, jokes, and occasionally begs. It runs into a wall and hugs it, offers it pizza, and speeds through grammars and cities until dizziness catapults it from the grid. It tries to queer the echoes of its language in the hope that a rhyme might break the logic of “either/or” and give rise to “both/and.” Both, Apollo is a love poem to whatever has the grace to appear, quietly finding hope. Moments of humor and tenderness accompany the speaker with each act of crossing and circling back. The poems in Both, Apollo are constantly in flux, and Wilson’s lyricism acts as a teaching tool for using both the real and the imagination to guide us in moment-by-moment navigation of our world. Both, Apollo won the Omnidawn Chapbook contest, selected by Victoria Chang. Trade Review“‘And either my logic is valid and this world is a duplex,’ writes Wilson in her chapbook, Both, Apollo. In Wilson's world, the illogical is the logical and the result is a book of possibilities. In Both, Apollo, the ‘butterflies are pornographic’ and a ‘green dress’ is compared to a ‘great gymnast.’ What fun to read these poems line by line and not know what to expect next. Like the speaker, ‘I find myself in this/gray town where all is possible drawn to/its uncoupled logic.’ Here is a new voice of surprise and I look forward to all of Wilson's future possibilities.” -- Victoria Chang, author of Obit“In these spare poems, an askew logic comes into view to test our reason and perceptual resources, perhaps answering a question posed by Apollo about either and or. Number and gender are only two places of disturbance; sometimes the subject simply slips from its object, and just there, at that warp, Eros arrives, wearing a doubting lyrical mask. The world resists full knowledge of the world, and so a new grammar is needed, in obeisance and gratitude for the inexhaustible resources of the human imagined. In Both, Apollo, Wilson has given us just what we need: poems of wit and rueful hope, discovered in the ruined new real of our time. The fallout is almost a praise poem.” -- Ann Lauterbach, author of Spell

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Book SynopsisA poetry collection that considers climate change and the possibility of wholeness within the Anthropocene. Through a series of experimental poems centered on ecology, Anthony Cody’s The Rendering confronts the history of the Dust Bowl and its residual impacts on our current climate crisis, while acknowledging the complicities of capitalism. These poems grapple with questions of wholeness and annihilation in an Anthropocenic world where the fallout of settler colonialism continues to inflict environmental and cultural devastation. Cody encourages readers to participate in radical acts of refreshing and reimagining the page, poem, collection, and the self, and he invites us to reflect on what lies ahead should our climate continue on its current trajectory toward destruction. These poems consider if wholeness, or a journey toward wholeness, can exist in the Anthropocene. And, if wholeness cannot exist in these times, we are invited to look at our lives and the world through and beyond annihilation. Trade Review"The Rendering by Cody returns to the central premise of his debut, Borderland Apocrypha: what seems like nature is not neutral, and supposedly unavoidable environmental disasters are not random." * Harriet Books *"Cody’s haunting and experimental second collection draws on the legacy of the Dust Bowl to explore late capitalism and criticize the excesses of greed that characterize American history. . . .Using photos from Dorothea Lange, inverted text, and QR codes, Cody pushes readers to expand their understanding of text and meaning. . . . In this exciting work, history, imagination, criticism, and wonder share the page, modeling a new way of being in conversation with the world and a new way of reading such a conversation." * Publishers Weekly starred review *"In the follow-up to his transcendent and widely celebrated 2020 debut Borderland Apocrypha, Cody builds on the shapeshifting 'snake poems' of the late Francisco X. Alarcón and arrives at a digital 'dust bowl' poetics reflecting the author’s mixed Anglo and Chicano heritage. The dazzling graphic and concrete sensibility of Borderland Apocrypha remains, yet here Cody intervenes upon photos, maps, charts, graphs, and field recordings, producing an autoethnographic score of settler (and displaced) histories." * The Latinx Project *“In The Rendering, Cody pays homage to Francisco X. Alarcón and Juan Felipe Herrera, two of our most important Latinx multilingual experimentalists who have pushed the poem into new visual and mystical territories. Yet Cody builds on what these brilliant artists have done by creating work that is so singular in its vision, that is impossible to classify or pin down, that is so beautifully complex and miraculous as it mines the histories of migration and settlement and property and seizure. Here cultural and environmental devastations and displacements are indexed and mapped to shape a narrative that is personal, communal, spiritual, lexical, lyrical, translational, material, multi-modal and off-the-page-virtual. This is mind blowing art for our past and future apocalypse.” -- Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human“A heat-stroked ‘dreamache,’ The Rendering renders a digital dustbowl of land and data over the poet’s anger, over pages of apocalyptic eco-deterioration, over maps to the extinct and dying. Cody does to the poem what desert sun does to signage—cracks it open, peels it back, tears letters away to expose the blistered surface underneath. Drama, documentary, epic, and ekphrasis gather here to be shattered by Cody’s dynamic visual praxis and turbulent dread, smoking wreckage at a dead end of US ‘ancientfuture.’ Certainly, I trust the poet who writes ‘the annihilation of anything is exhausting.’ Even so, this bravura collection asserts that in recording destruction, Cody can make a stunning warning against it.” -- Douglas Kearney, author of Sho, winner of the 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize“'I confuse today near the Fresno Rescue Mission with 1939' writes Anthony Cody in The Rendering, a book that chronicles and prophesies a past/future, climate/capitalist apocalypse. With charts and photos, poll questions and couplets, erasures and digital verse reverb/erations, these poems push into and against the limits of the archive and the page itself. Cody will teach you new ways to read and conceive of the lyric as well as to feel history as both ever present and ever open to potential renovation. 'Play the track, two times slow.' Cody tells us. 'The layer of [PAUSE] is an unpaid echo in the mechanics of site, an elder gustmemory of afternoon.' More than a compilation of Dust Bowl photographs and Depression-era songs (although both form part of this assemblage), this is a recontextualization, a grand experiment and a great excavation. The Rendering is a fiercely original and wholly indispensable work." -- Susan Briante, author of Defacing the Monument, winner of the 2021 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism

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Book SynopsisA poetry book of reflective, serious and humorous poems from short to long inspired by a solo motorcycle touring era when vanishing points were your friends and you did not know if you would ever go back to where you came from. An era of a weathered road map folded to the universe of your current driving day at an eye’s glance. When for days on end every person you spoke to or met was a total stranger and you took note of what they had to say. It was a time of living as one with your motorcycle, your gear, your maps, your journal, your wits and yourself was the daily routine of solo “John Doe” travel when a hug meant more than a simple greeting or good-bye and even though you were so very alone, you were never lonely. A time when the rising sun pointed the way. Scenic “open road” color photos of the day accompany the poems enhancing the reader’s experience of the poetry as if they were there themselves. There is a photo index giving subject, location and date of each photo.

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Book SynopsisPoems from a Southern childhood, feral poems from the parts of us that run wild when given a chance, poems born out of a home on the northern California coast, poems that emerged out of travel and art. This collection offers up all these experiences, sometimes playfully, sometimes sorrowfully, but always with an eye on the experience more than the poet. This poet avoids obscurity and offers up simple communication in its most economical form...

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Book SynopsisSonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerising feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

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Book SynopsisA tender poetry collection considering home, family, and personal and ecological loss. Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: “Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.” Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change. Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief.Given was the winner of 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry. Trade Review"[Given] is poised at the boundary between eco-poetics and the poetry of personal tragedy. Duncan explores the trauma of environmental cataclysm not simply as context but as metaphor for devastating personal loss through precise images and shattering restraint." * Adroit Journal *"Given is the record of a haunting, a clear-eyed love song to the notion of home, a frame stilled on the highwater mark after the flood. Through finely wrought lyric poems that swell and break with movement, Duncan articulates the speaker’s longing for family and place 'despite the dying world.' Indeed, the world of Given grapples with a precarious future: hurricanes Sandy and Irene loom large in the town’s memory, and the present, where the 'seasons unseason,' are marked by mass die-offs and the threat of subsummation. And just as the world reckons with the catastrophes of the Anthropocene, so too does the speaker attend to staggering personal loss. Yet the collection trembles with a skeptical but persistent hope. Duncan shows us the town she chooses, though 'neighbors head inland, / leaving the keys in the door.' Here the bay, the uncles; there the Wawa, the 'streets with names / that were self-explanatory: Harbor Way. Shore Concourse.' The speaker asks, 'What if my body is not an apocalypse?' Asks, 'What if my body is not a misunderstanding / with the changing earth?' Given argues, granularly, tenderly, that home and place are worth remembering, worth returning to, that roots, however ephemeral, can ground us in the swirling tides of grief." -- Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations“Given testifies to the luminous terror of creation: ‘the sky makes and remakes.’ Then: ‘I had to write myself back into this place, if only to watch it fall apart.’ There is so much here being made and unmade: personal griefs decimated by ecology, ecologies decimated by personal loss. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a poet do what Duncan does here, testifying to loss and endurance this way, in such a radiant braid.” -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell"Given is one of the strongest debuts I’ve read in a long time. In an age where market and media forces encourage us to silo our griefs, Given makes the necessary argument that our losses intersect and inform one another: from the loss of a child to the loss of a home, a town, a shoreline, a way of living. The poems are emotionally moving and impressive in formal range, from short lyrics to longer sectioned sequences, incantatory litanies to poems in received forms. In Given, Duncan brings home the lived ramifications of dailiness in an age of ecological peril. The book is a necessary addition to our developing libraries of eco-poetry and docu-poetry and poetry period—Given is a must-read." -- Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are

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Book SynopsisDopplegangbanger, rendered as the A- and B-sides of an album of poems, re-imagines and remixes American politics of the 90s, the Obama era, and today via a hip-hop blerd's investigation of a hi/lo culture of American crime.Trade ReviewPraise for Telepathologies: “Cortney Lamar Charleston's poems testify in the eternal court of history; he speaks, as Aime Cesaire once did, "for miseries that have no mouth" and to liberate "those who languish in the dungeon of despair." Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner and nine slain members of Mother Emanuel AME Church—voices silenced through institutionalized racism and the unchecked power of hate—form the nucleus of this powerful indictment of an America still suffering the legacy of its slave-trading past. Timely, immediate, imperative; this is poetry from inside the center of the storm; an urgent and articulate call for change.” —D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys “Cortney Lamar Charleston fills Telepathologies with his big-hearted, yet biting and clear-eyed analysis. These powerfully worded poems do not let us look away, neither from the ills and woes infecting contemporary black life nor from the role of media (news, social) in circulating them among us. We move from concrete poems to ghazals to familiar and unfamiliar forms of free verse. Charleston keeps us on our toes as we follow him into spaces of blackness—those that he inhabits and those that inhabit him. In these poems, even in the face of fatal violence, the black body lives and breathes, mourns and survives. I welcome this poet’s debut.” —Evie Shockley, author of the new black

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Book SynopsisA sequence of poems that interrogates American civics and citizenry from its foundation in the pastoral tradition.In Irredenta, Oscar Oswald raises the prospect of pastoral opposition to state power, elaborating and investigating the genre through ethical and spiritual inquiry. As a citizen is a stranger to itself, so too does Oswald’s pastoral speaker define the tensions between identity and nationality inherent in a civic body as they are traversed across the American political geography: land, water, and country, from the Mojave to Wisconsin.Trade Review"Oscar Oswald’s exciting debut Irredenta both pushes back against and claims new space within the pastoral tradition in American writing... Irredenta is an astute and astonishing new entry into contemporary ecopoetics."—Kelly Weber, Ecotheo"While Irredenta may carry the spirit and tradition of past American ecopoetics in its lyrical precision, its fragmentary lines and honest images render these poems beyond the mere pastoral, and by depicting and deconstructing myths in the geographical and political landscapes of America, we venture into new poetic and philosophical perspectives, ones that will lead readers to question their identity, ethics, and their role as everyday citizens."—Esteban Rodríguez, Colorado Review"The poems in Irredenta seem to float effortlessly, as if made of wind, the wind the effect of a desire to simultaneously name and unname, and so rescue language from the toxic traces of our difficult moment: 'the helicopter’s way/flowers the flag/redeems the reprobate/who names discover/this America.' Oscar Oswald knows that the desert is dry; but he knows also that the ghosts that roam above it are free, 'a pond blown over be blown back to rest.' A haunted and haunting collection."—Ann Lauterbach "Irredenta adopts the dictions and discourses that thread through America’s complex multivalent history for a sequence of atmospheric poems that critique idyll and manifest destiny and that undo American mythologies. Oscar Oswald is our walking citizen whose 'fat soul' travels before and after time. His travels transcribe the winding path of our common song."—Carmen Giménez Smith "In Oscar Oswald’s luminous Irredenta, America has found its post-modern Virgil. The poems in this debut collection acknowledge the fact of a people’s undeniable connection to the beloved earth, that is, as always, irrevocably up for grabs by the reigning power de jour. As fierce and antagonist as Thoreau, Oswald asks 'what is people but a sequel,' solidifying his dispossession in a 'song with those who are not made their destinies.' And yet, miraculously somehow, our shepherd, working with the materials at hand, finds our real locale in his willingness to 'tune up my pipe with grease and gasoline.' Irredenta constructs a timely eco-poetics that ups the ante on the ethics and meaning of place in the 21st century. A must read!"—Claudia Keelan "Oswald writes our undeniable connections to the earth, reaching to reconcile a disconnect between human consideration and activity and the natural world. 'There is no universe but ours,' he writes, as part of 'LYCIDAS,' 'and theirs. Our common song is optional.' And his, too, is composed as glorious song, one that sees a way through to salvage, even save, the ways we’ve cornered ourselves. One might suggest that his is very much a song of hope."—rob mclennan

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Book SynopsisBending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir's poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields. I Hope This Helpsreflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I'm thriving. In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.

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Book SynopsisA new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community. From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.

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Book SynopsisThe book Unraveling contains poems that show how women’s lives evolve and take shape over the years through lived experiences, be they pleasant or unpleasant. Some women may fall apart during a crisis and need to find the inner strength that will help them become whole and strong. It is a painful process that requires patience and persistence, however, in the end they will understand and accept that life is not perfect and is always changing.Basic to the ability of becoming a strong woman who faces life with determination is the establishment and affirmation of who we are. How do we describe ourselves? Some women tend to undervalue themselves because they don’t fit the stereotypical concept of women. We need to look inwards and value our character strengths and how these contribute to our own well-being and that of our loved ones.Another aspect of life as a woman that my poems address is that of love of a man. We decide to enter into a relationship and sometimes it will be right, but other times it turns out terrible. What will we do? Will we stay in a toxic relationship hoping it will get better, or will we decide to save ourselves? Again, we need to make a choice and be willing to face the consequences.Death is a topic I address in my poems. It is not a pleasant topic, but it is part of life. Perhaps your spiritual upbringing will help you face the departure of a loved one, nevertheless, it still is a difficult life passage that we need to walk and accept. The good thing about life as we approach the end is that we can reminisce and relish the many happy moments we lived and shared.Poetry is a magnificent tool that helps us dig deep within and bring forth life events that need to be looked at from where we are today, a different place, perhaps wiser and less painful. To be able to express those thoughts we have kept hidden is liberating, it is a cathartic experience. Many of my poems come from that deep place within; others are reflections of the lives around me.

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Book SynopsisFreshly translated poems reveal the complexity, self-realization, and spiritual freedom of threeclassicalDaoist women poets.Yin Mountain presents a fascinating window onto the lives of threeTang DynastyDaoist women poets. Li Ye (c.734?784), Xue Tao (c.768?832), and YuXuanji(843?868) lived and wrote during the period when Chinese poetry reached its greatest height. Yet while the names of the male poets of this era, such as Tu Fu, Li Bo, and Wang Wei, are all easily recognized, the names of its accomplished women poets are hardly known at all.Through the lenses of mysticism, naturalism, and ordinary life, the five dozen poems collected here express these women?s profound devotion to Daoist spiritual practice. Their interweaving of plain but poignant and revealing speech with a compelling and inventive use of imagery expresses their creative relationshiptothe myths, legends, and traditions of Daoist Goddess culture. Also woven throughout the rich tapestry of their writing are their sensuality and their hard-wrought, candid emotions about their personal loves and losses. Despitethat these poets?extraordinary skills were recognized during their lifetimes, as women they struggled relentlessly for artistic, emotional, and financial independence befitting their talent. The poems exude the charged charisma of their refusal to hold back within a culture, much like our own, that wascosmopolitan yet still restrictive of women''s freedom.Skillfully introduced and translated by acclaimed translators Peter Levitt and Rebecca Nie, these wonderful poems will resonate with the lives of spiritual practitioners today, especially women.

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Book SynopsisSubversive, visual, and bold, Curaçao-born Dutch Radna Fabias’ explosive debut collection Habitus marks the entry of a genre-altering poet. Habitus is a collection full of thrilling sensory images, lines in turn grim and enchanting which move from the Caribbean island of Curaçao to the immigrant experience of the Netherlands. Fabias’ intrepid masterpiece explores issues of racism, neo-colonialism, poverty, and sexism with a heartbreaking rhythm and endless nuance. Broken into three parts (“View with coconut,” “Rib,” and “Demonstrable effort made”), Habitus explores the profound struggles of melancholic longing, womanhood, religion, and migration. This ambitious, powerful, and compassionate collection has emerged, cheering on ambiguity, fluidity, and a lyrical ego on a quest to find its home.Trade ReviewWinner of the 2019 Grand Poetry Prize of the Netherlands Winner of the Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize Winner of the C Buddinhh’ Prize Winner of the Awater Poetry Prize Winner of the Herman de Coninck Prize "Radna Fabias’s Habitus, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, astonishes with a measured unruliness. The reader is energetically flung through space by the irregular stanza breaks, enjambment, and narrative trajectories that feel fresh and unpredictable. Yet even with the zigzagging through time and space, Fabias’s authoritative voice steers us through critiques of the nation-state’s ongoing violence, showing us how such violence disguises itself as white generosity." —Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation“Radna Fabias practices her craft in the spirit of strangers and strangeness, liberty and lyricism, truth and transience.” —Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews“Radna Fabias’s debut collection Habitus advances geographically, temporally, and thematically—almost narratively—yet at the same time feels resonantly still, as though each line echoes the entire collection.” —Action Books“I was stunned and thrilled by these poems. They have a confident, clear, strange, wild energy, along with the rage and wisdom and humor of a soul who understands the terrors and beauties of this world. They are the electric record of an exceptional imagination. I love these poems and can’t wait to see what’s next.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry and Father’s Day "If lucky, readers get drawn into a language; at best, they get pulled into a new world. The 35-year-old poet Radna Fabias provides an exceptional ‘at best’ case. Fabias does what readers hope a poet can do: she does not just throw language and thoughts at you; she draws you into her world. The opening poem of her collection Habitus starts with an appropriate image: shiny wheel rims, flawlessly polished and too big and expensive for the cars to which they are attached. It’s fitting, because what follows is speed: 115 mesmerizing, generous, sensory, playful, daring pages. She introduces the reader to the Dutch Antilles, to perforce powerful women, and to the peril that always lurks around the corner. All of this haunts Fabias, such that she must write poetry about it: she speaks of “the inability to amputate my cultural background from my identity.” And it haunts the reader. […] The Jury reached a consensus quite quickly and agreed: What a gift, this Habitus, and what a winner for the Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize!" ––Jury Report, Aan Zee Poetry Debut Prize “What transforms this poetry into great poetry is its momentum and rhythm, the wealth of its images and its nuanced vision on human existence." ––Piet Gerbrandy, Versopolis Poetry

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Book SynopsisA book of poetry meant to conjure the future while nourishing the present, Julie Poole’s second collection is inspired by movement within the Texan cityscape. Written from 2016-2017 during a taut political moment, Gorgeous Freak follows Poole’s decision to start keeping a poetry journal while commuting by foot around Austin. Her intent, folded carefully in these slender and jagged poems, is to call out to a future soulmate, pulling them back into her present: hot, humid Austin, Texas, in the first year of the Trump presidency, traversed by foot miles a day, watching the seasons change through surrounding urban flora and fauna.

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