Poetry Books

Book Synopsis[To] The Last [Be] Human collects fourextraordinary poetry books?Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway?byPulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts permillion; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. Thebody of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of thoseeighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, writtenfrom within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rifewith hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerfulto experience ? Graham?s poems are turned to face our planet?s deep-timefuture, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Butthey are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they arevery far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: topreserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when?the future / takes shape / too quickly,? when we are entering ?a time / beyondbelief.? They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form?.Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeinglanguage; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping giftof the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ?whirling robehumming with firstness,? there to ?greet you if you eye-up.? I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry forpresentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ?Wind would benice but / it?s only us shaking.? ? To read these four twenty-first-centurybooks together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patternsforming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing withinthemselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song thatjoins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of thelast book:The earth saidremember me. The earth saiddon?t let go,said it one daywhen I wasaccidentallylistening?

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Book SynopsisDynamically pairing traditional and experimental forms, Philip Metres traces ancient and modern migrations in an investigation of the ever-shifting idea of home. In Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and cut-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—in order to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism.  Fugitive/Refuge pronounces the urge both to remember the past and to forge new poetic forms and ways of being in language. In one section, Metres meditates on the Arabic greeting—ahlan wa sahlan—and asks how older forms of welcome might offer gen

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Book Synopsis Copper Canyon Press celebrates its first 50 years of poetry publishing in anticipation of the next 50 years. Poetry is vital to language and living. This anthology celebrates 50 years of Copper Canyon Press publications, one extraordinary poem at a time. Since its founding, Copper Canyon has been entirely dedicated to publishing poetry books; here Editor in Chief Michael Wiegers invites press staff and board—past and present—to help curate a retrospective. The result is a collection of beloved poems from books spanning half a century: representing Pulitzer Prize-winning books, debut collections, works in translation, and rare books from Copper Canyon’s early days. This book is a tribute to Copper Canyon poets and readers everywhere, because, as Gregory Orr writes, “Certain poems / In an uncertain world— / The ones we cling to: // They bring us back.”

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Book SynopsisNavigating the uncertainty of a divided China wracked by warfare and corruption, Tao Yuanming?s poetry?expertly translated by Red Pine?chooses the path walked by China?s ancient sages, finding joy in living a simple life. The latest work in Red Pine?s rich career of translation, Choosing to be Simple: Collected Poems of Tao Yuanming, is a definitive portrait of the early Chinese politician and poet. Thoroughly researched and beautifully translated, this bilingual collection of over 160 verses chronicles Tao Yuanming?s path from civil servant to reclusive poet during the formative Six Dynasties period (220?589). Familiar scenes like farming and contemplating the nature of work and writing are examined with intimate honesty. As Red Pine illuminates Tao Yuanming?s sensitive voice, we find the poet?s solace and sorrow in a China transformed by modernity. Tao Yuanming?s distinct verse shows a keen attention to rhythm as he explores the tension of scarcity and indulgence, duty and escape. Reverberating with clarity and sincerity and laced with humor, the poems of Choosing to Be Simple portray a man?s timeless desire to live by the principles enshrined by China?s sages. Guided by Tao Yuanming?s own wonderment, we, too, find ourselves asking: ?Why did I ever question my heart?? We are encouraged to find joy in simplicity?the tending of a garden, the sharing of wine with a stranger.

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Book SynopsisNavigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor, Close Escapes searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see.  “Never ''in'' time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”

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Book SynopsisA compendium of stories about the importance of poems in people’s lives, accumulating a remarkable history of Copper Canyon Press. For its fiftieth anniversary, Copper Canyon Press invited a broad community of staffers, board members, and poets to help curate a celebratory anthology that it named A House Called Tomorrow. The response to that invitation, however, exceeded the book. The Press received so many stories about the poems, from people far and wide, that it knew it had to publish a second volume—this one.  Come Shining is both an oral (and visual) history of Copper Canyon Press and a lasting testament to the power of poetry within people’s lives. If A House Called Tomorrow is the birthday cake, this is the birthday party: a joyous din of reminiscences, laughter, support, and yet more poems, all bound between two covers. Contributor stories are organized across thematic sections—such as “Personal Voltas” and “Stories for Our Tomorrow”—and are accompanied by a timeline of the Press, historic photos, and facsimiles of touching notes that Copper Canyon has received from readers and poets. The result is a remarkable account of a half-century of publishing, proof positive that poetry is, indeed, vital to language and living.

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Book SynopsisAmidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love. Fiercely self-aware and ?utterly present tense,? Traci Brimhall?s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift?the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth?a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet ?cannot live in or leave,? she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in ?a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.? Told through various forms?aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay?Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.

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Book SynopsisSpanning four decades of writing—and including never-before-seen poems—The Essential C.D. Wright carries the reverence and wisecracking lyricism of poems that reshaped American poetry. The Essential C.D. Wright, with a moving introduction by Forrest Gander, gathers rare selections from across her entire oeuvre—from the first book, Room Rented by a Single Woman (1978), through the final collection, Shall Cross, which was in production at the time of her unexpected death in 2016. It also presents readers with the very first look at a remarkable selection of works that have been entirely unpublished until now. Tracing a writing life that spans more than four decades, this collection illuminates works that remain empowered by an unrelenting independence, a reverence for mentors, and wry wisecracking lyricism. It is a powerful entry in Copper Canyon''s revered Essential series, which has provided reader-friendly editions of some of contemporary poetry''s most important voices. C.D. Wright introduced a contemporary audience to the promise and power of docupoetics, while pushing the musical boundaries of vernacular speech and reshaping American poetry. Formally restless and energetic, The Essential C.D. Wright stands as a staple in the larger poetic landscape.

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Book SynopsisA call to anyone who thought they were alone on the journey, Incantations for Rest is for kindred spirits: neurodivergent folks, parents up late past bedtime nursing resentment, Black people in predominantly white spaces—anyone who has found themselves at the edges of Beloved Community.Incantations for Rest is an invitation to slow down and explore every kind of rest, providing sacred space for those exhausted by the demands of a racist, ableist society. This stunning collection of poems, meditations, and magic by poet-activist Atena O. Danner is an examination of spiritual spaces, a love letter to Black well-being, and medicine for BIPOC people. Within these pages you are invited to savor connection, question assumptions, admit to complicated feelings, and still make room for joy. It is a beacon of affirmation and a vital tool for ritual and reflection.Trade Review“My tensed shoulders relaxed while reading the radical care captured within Incantations for Rest. Atena O. Danner wields her powerful magic by bringing the systems that produce the weariness of racial and ableist oppression to light while she also lovingly rubbing a healing balm upon her rest-worthy readers’ spirits." —Sekile M. Nzinga, author of Lean Semesters: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequity and editor of Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering, and the Academy“Atena O. Danner has offered the world a reflection and revelation on legacy, imagination, and truthful naming in Incantations for Rest: Poems, Meditations, and Other Magic. Moving back in time to visceral memory and ancestral lineage and stretching out into a connected collective future where we leave no one behind, these poems are both a mending to the weary and a hymn to affirming what matters. I will be returning to them again and again throughout the years, for guidance, fortification, and magic. —Isabel Abbott, author of Salt + Honey: secular prayers for hedonistic hearts“Atena O. Danner’s poems invite us into the universal, while also singing praise and honor of what it means to be a Black woman in today’s United States. She covers specifics and love of her community via the heartbreak and joy voiced via such powerful pieces as ‘Generational Wealth,’ ‘Reciprocity,’ ‘Giving Each Other Our Flowers,’ and ‘Ancestors of the Page and Call.’ This heart-centered collection is the balm that can bring all of us to better love, understanding and movement toward a just world fit for our beloved generations to come." —Jen Haines, poet and educator“How deeply we need this invitation to divine rest—these spells for singing out, for swimming alone, for the beauty of Blackness, and for being ourselves, whoever we are. I will be reaching for this book for public worship and private reflection. I love how personal yet accessible and universal Danner’s poetry is, honoring her own experience and ancestors while calling each of us to grow and feel our interconnectedness. I feel honored now to witness the truth and beauty she has nurtured in this book. She has given birth to art and magic. Keep this book in your spiritual medicine kit.” —Erin J. Walter, editor of Care for the World: Reflections on Community Ministry“Whether you are an avid reader of poetry collections or a casual appreciator of the occasional poem, you'll want to add this book to your repertoire. To call Atena O. Danner's poems ‘incantations’ is exactly right—these are incantations, spells, prayers, recipes, and passionate calls to rest, care, and liberation. A long-time organizer and educator, Atena O. Danner offers balms for the weary, reminding us to rest so that we can show up for others in the ways we most want to. Reading these is a gift for anyone feeling worn down by the big (systems of oppression, especially against Black women and femmes) and the small (the everyday challenges of parenting, for example.) Since I read this collection, I've been keeping these incantations close. They work as monthly meditations or daily affirmations—reminders to breathe, to sing, to ‘pour love into an active volcano.’ —Coya Paz, writer, director, and artistic director of Free Street TheaterTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Storyteller’s Invocation Decatur, Georgia Creeks Mending Prayer for Artists and Creatives Ancestors of the Page and the Call Conspiracy Sharing Of the Altar Singing Prayer Evolution of Worship Lineage of Magic Facebook Vespers Simple Parts of Faith Sharing Losses Swimming Alone The Divine Audacity of Bree Newsome Reckon: Reclaim Changeling Generation Teacher to Teacher to Teacher Divine Right to Rest Litany for the Exhausted Litany of Oops and Ouch Litanies of Worthiness Labyrinth Chant Benediction to Build a World Psalm of Talents A Spell for Warriors and Heroes Thinking of Mathew Reciprocity Spirit Does Election Night 2020 Every Storm Runs Out of Rain Blessing of the Instigators Giving Each Other Our Flowers Humble yourself before the brutal lessons of the free Black child! Combing Liturgy A Normal Conversation About Attending UU Churches Unconditional Earth In Darkness, All Things Are Possible MYOB A Black Daughter Speaks of Rivers Generational Wealth Praise Song for a Desert Rock Spitting Out Rocks Instincts Attention Deficit Invocations Dear Fear, Earthen Vessel Revenge Bedtime Contemplation Stories and Stars Kuumba and the Fourth Principle

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Book Synopsis"Theater such as Kenneth Koch cannot be simply paraphrased, and presents to the audience the classic Mennipean challenge: to ponder, to mull it over, to think."--Mac Wellman The Banquet brings together 144 plays, ten screenplays, and five operas spanning more than five decades of experimental work from a writer John Ashbery has called "simply the best we have." Witty, provocative, and playful, Kenneth Koch's work draws on poetry, musicals, improvisational comedy, satire, and other forms for their inspiration and touches on subjects ranging from the silly to the sublime. Kenneth Koch (1925--2002), known for his association with the New York School of poetry, wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. His books include Seasons on Earth, On the Edge, Thank You and Other Poems, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, Hotel Lambosa, and The Collected Fiction, and several books on teaching children how to write poetry. Koch was awarded numerous honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University.Trade ReviewThe Banquet succeeds in spades, giving us an entire 'world of pure experience,' to borrow William James's phrase, one that is just waiting to be brought to life." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Some writers excel in more than one form ... the 600-plus pages of The Banquet suggest that the late poet Kenneth Koch had two right hands."--New York Observer "[T]he plays abolish time and space... If we lived in Koch's Arcady, the text seems to ask, might we live forever?" --Poetry Magazine "[These plays] are as funny and inventive as Koch could be. Count him among the few to move beyond Gertrude Stein in establishing alternative performance texts." --Rain Taxi Review "These are bursts of charming joy, mystery, surprise and delight animated by a love of language and a deep belief in its possibilities... The Banquet is the perfect title for this collection, a book to be read and reread." --BODYTable of ContentsPLAYS Pericles The Merry Stones Without Kinship Guinevere, or The Death of the Kangaroo George Washington Crossing the Delaware Six Improvisational Plays The Academic Murders Easter Mexico City The Lost Feed The Gold Standard Coil Supreme The Return of Yellowmay The Revolt of the Giant Animals The Building of Florence Scenes from Angelica E. Kology The Tinguely Machine Mystery or The Love Suicides at Kaluka The Moon Balloon The Election The Gold Standard Youth The Enchantment Time and his Trumpet Manet Elfred the Dancer Searching for Fairyland Tawai Nakimo Incident on the Street The Brave Bull The Promenade in Oaxaca Six Tones The Cowries Two Tall Individuals The End of Comedy Cook Four Loves The Umbrella of Stage Directions The Party The Animated Room Happiness Searching for the Tomb of Alexander The Tomb of Alexander An Atmosphere of Heavy, Intense (Summer) Stillness Pervades the World of Christineet Édouard Mary Magdalene’s Song A Song to the Avant-Garde The Two Bulls Spices Happiness Comes Back, in a Car Agamemnon Husserl Angels The Underground Army The Mediterranean Gospel Red Riding Noh Tanayachi Robert Wilson Riding Hood In China None The Black Spanish Costume Similar Events Gospel Toothbrush Permanently The Burning Mystery of Anna Départ Malgache On the Edge Smoking Hamlet La Comtesse De Bercy Hamlet Team Hamlet Little Red Riding Hamlet Hamlet Rebus Transposed Hamlet Aux Seins De Mandarine Different Rooms Doctor The Chinese Rivers Christine, Edward, And The Cube From The M’vett The Arrival of Homosexuality in Greece, or the Fagabond Watteau’s Reputation Hippopotamus Migration in Africa Wittgenstein, or Bravo, Dr. Wittgenstein! Tadeusz Kantor and the Duck The Theatre at Epidauros The Great Ball The Boat from Mandraki The Choice in Shanghai Dumplings Alexander Olive Oyl Commandeers Popeye’s Gunboat and Sails Off to Attack Russia After The Return of the Avant-Garde Les Bousculades de L’Amour, Suivies de the Mexicana The Yangtse Athens Extended Place Beijing Opera League Byron in Italy (On) A Corner (of Nothing) in Africa The Coast of West Africa, 1782 Conceptions of Things A Tale of Two Cities Down and Out Near the Bay Of Naples The Conquest of Mexico Quetzalcoatl and The Cook The Vanished God The Meeting in Mexico The Return of Odysseus Other Return of Odysseus The Harbor of Rhodes Crêpe de Chine St. Petersburg in 1793 A Love Play Trade Allegory of Sports Mao Tse-Tung Comes Back to Life Un Mélange De Styles In The Market Economy, or Lost in Finance The Precious Sea Mahx Bruddahs The Return of Brad Garks Vuillard Gnossos Time and the Sea Glory, or The Anthology Ages El Nacimiento de Federico García Lorca in Seville The Composition of Louise The Taps The Four Atlantics The Lost Moment Transposition—Bell to Europe, from China À La Banque de France The Duke of Wellington’s Nose In the Storm of Love Cook Comes Homes A Mournful Geography City Vanguard The Stove of Peace The End The Death of Sir Brian Caitskill The Red Robins The Strangers from the Sea A Heroine of the Greek Resistance Edward and Christine Popeye Among the Polar Bears The New Diana FILMS Ten Films Because The Color Game Mountains and Electricity Sheep Harbor Oval Gold Moby Dick L’Ecole normale The Cemetery The Scotty Dog The Apple OPERA LIBRETTOS Bertha A Change of Hearts The Construction of Boston Garibaldi En Sicile The Banquet

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Book SynopsisPraise for Saeed Jones: "Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."--FlavorWire "This book leaves your body transformed in a way that poetry should." --ElevenEleven "I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."--D. A. Powell "Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poems don't dole out mercy. Mr. Jones undoubtedly dipped his pen in fierce before crafting these stanzas that rock like backslap. Straighten your skirt, children. The doors of the church are open."--Patricia Smith "It's a big book, a major book. A game-changer. Dazzling, brutal, real. Not just brilliant, caustic, and impassioned but a work that brings history--in which the personal and political are inter-constitutive--to the immediate moment. Jones takes a reader deep into lived experience, into a charged world divided among unstable yet entrenched lines: racial, gendered, political, sexual, familial. Here we absorb each quiet resistance, each whoop of joy, a knowledge of violence and of desire, an unbearable ache/loss/yearning. This is not just a "new voice" but a new song, a new way of singing, a new music made of deep grief's wildfire, of burning intelligence and of all-feeling heart, scorched and seared. In a poem, Jones says, "Boy's body is a song only he can hear." But now that we have this book, we can all hear it. And it's unforgettable."--Brenda Shaughnessy "Inside each hunger, each desire, speaks the voice of a boy that admits 'I've always wanted to be dangerous.' This is not a threat but a promise to break away from the affliction of silence, to make audible the stories that trouble the dimensions of masculinity and discomfort the polite conversations about race. With impressive grace, Saeed Jones situates the queer black body at the center, where his visibility and vulnerability nurture emotional strength and the irrepressible energy to claim those spaces that were once denied or withheld from him. Prelude to a Bruise is a daring debut."--Rigoberto Gonzalez From "Sleeping Arrangement": Take your hand out from under my pillow. And take your sheets with you. Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts. I can't have you rattling the bed springs so keep still, keep quiet. Mistake yourself for shadows. Learn the lullabies of lint. Saeed Jones works as the editor of BuzzfeedLGBT.Trade ReviewNPR's Best Books of 2014 Time Out New York Best Books of 2014 Book Riot, 2014's Must-Read Books from Indie Presses Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Books of 2014 Vol. 1 Brooklyn, A Year of Favorites, Jason Diamond Greenlight Bookstore, Holiday Picks "In his debut collection, Jones has crafted a fever dream, something akin to magic... Solid from start to finish, possessing amazing energy and focus, a bold new voice in poetry has announced itself"--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Jones had a meteoric rise to literary prominence in the past year... the poems of this book are harrowing and heartbreaking, treating family, sexuality, and race with unrelenting intensity."--Publishers Weekly "A debut poetry collection examining identity in all its forms--racial, sexual, geographical, and more--with both incisive intensity and tenderness."--Off the Shelf "Jones's lavish sonic patterning and gothic imagery often recall the incendiary mythos and immaculate craft of Sylvia Plath's Ariel as well as the haunted, sensual longing of Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger." --Kenyon Review Online "[T]he way these poems address violence, life in the south, race, sexuality and relationships makes for an engrossing read best consumed in as few sittings as possible."--Time "This book leaves your body transformed in a way that poetry should." --ElevenEleven "This is indeed a book seamed in smoke; it is a dance that invites you to admire the supple twist of its narrative spine; it is hard and glaring and brilliant as the anthracite that opens the collection: 'a voice mistook for stone, / jagged black fist.'" --NPR Book Review "The features that distinguish his poems from prose -- brevity, symbolism, implication -- let him investigate the almost unsayable."--Los Angeles Times "This year's Stonewall-Gittings literature award goes to Saeed Jones's Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House), a punch-in-your-gut fusion of racial, sexual, and personal struggle and a National Book Critics Circle finalist."--Library Journal "Perhaps the readiest, most painfully assured debut of the decade."--Flavorwire "The poems in Prelude to Bruise enflame, with all flame's consequences of wounding and illumination ... It's a story of the forces of destruction--the destruction of black bodies and black selves--built into America, and it surfaces in the lines of lust, violence, possession, and power." --Rain Taxi "This book is so good it will give you night sweats."--Greenlight Bookstore "An astonishing poetry collection, furious, tender, and true." --Tin House "Prelude to Bruise is a harrowing examination of masculinity and femininity as a "brutal" performance."--Buzzfeed "Jones' sentences bristle with foreboding ... Jones seems to be playing with the idea of the nature of man, of those who live closer in tune with the laws of nature than with those of humanityJones, like great poet-novelists, fills his book with beautiful sentences."--Electric Literature "Prelude to Bruise is an airtight collection of visceral and stunning poems."--Mosaic Magazine "Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones, a tome of searing poetry about what it means to be Black, gay, Southern and so much more"--Refinery 29 "Prelude to Bruise Saeed Jones is a powerful collection ... with a high level of craft, emotion and metaphor."--Ebony "Reading this book will change you."--Cambridge Writers' Workshop "Saeed Jones's first full-length book, Prelude to Bruise, is a necessary piece of contemporary poetry that bravely tackles issues such as abuse, promiscuity, homosexuality, and racism."--Prairie Schooner "Jones uncovers what exactly is at stake when one presents oneself authentically, when one insists on being oneself regardless of the consequences."--Coldfront "Prelude to Bruise was published by Coffee House in August to widespread (and deserved!) acclaim."--Electric Literature "It packs a wallop ... I found myself in awe."--Raging Biblio-holism "I didn't exactly mean to survive myself," writes the African-American poet Saeed Jones, and the line comes to my mind: what it means to have survived official policies designed to erase you, and the kind of impulse to self-destruction that might arise in the face of this."--The Monthly(Australia) "His work is imaginative and lyrical while maintaining a self-proclaimed ferocity, as if there could really be any other kind, that challenges conventions of masculinity and race in a deeply emotional way." --Dazed, "The top ten American writers you need to read this year" "Maybe the best collection you will read this year, Jones is a poet who also understands how to tell a story, obviously keeping his feet planted in the former since poetry is his craft, but giving the reader so much more to unpack page after page. At times harrowing, Jones succeeds at never straying too far away from beauty and light, and that balance makes this a true reading experience."--Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn September Books Review "Saeed Jones may be one of the most necessary poets of our time." --July Westhale, Lambda Literary "Prelude to Bruise is a book with a controlled realm of imagery, which creates this really beautiful territory for the reader to explore."--Ace Hotel "Beautiful, haunting and heartbreaking--Jones's poems are an emotional punch to the gut. A lyrical shock to the system." --Lambda Literary "It's a diverse festival, showcasing talents as different as the best-selling crime novelist Rebecca Chance and the politically engaged poet Saeed Jones."--The Times Picayune "[Saeed Jones] is leading the way and writing critically about the community," [Spectrum's president] Diaz said."--The Torch "What these poems show us is the necessity of owning that longing, the refusal to let the wounds the world has laid upon us turn inward, into our shame, our silence. To show the world the face that the world has made."--Muzzle Magazine "Saeed Jones brought the audience to a near swoon."--Twin Cities Daily Planet "Prelude to Bruise is an airtight collection of visceral and stunning poems."--Mosaic Magazine "I was bowled over by Saeed Jones's Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, GBP16), a beautiful and biting collection of poetry that has been making waves in the US. Investigating race, sexuality and what it means to be southern, Jones's lean, searing lines transcend identity politics."--New Statesmen (UK) "Poetry book most likely to win over your poetry-avoiding friends: Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones"--Time Out New York, "The Best Books of 2013" "Jones is responsible for a growing portion of the gay narrative being written online, and the Internet is a much better place for it. His voice will have even more impact with his upcoming debut, which will explore the collision of race, sexuality and identity."--The Root, "30 Viral Voices Under 30" "For years now the Buzzfeed LGBT editor has been lighting it up at his day job, and also on Twitter, with a ferocity befitting his name. Now, after earning praise from D.A. Powell and after winning a NYC-based Literary Death Match bout, Jones will use his debut collection to prominently display his poetry chops."--The Millions "This powerful collection feels at times like a blow to the throat, but when we recover, the air is sweeter for having been absent."--Guernica "A work of insight and great beauty, Jones' first poetry collection manages to be both ferocious and and subtle."--Brooklyn Magazine "It's a book about identity that expands beyond the borders of the terms we use to cordon off safe spaces."--Dialogist "[A] stunning debut collection of one of America's most promising young poets... These poems lacerate as they heal, making us feel the resilient intensity of a protagonist who says, "I didn't exactly mean to survive myself."--The Journal "Saeed Jones has created a radically different coming of age narrative distinctly his own through forceful, original poetry."--Lonesome Reader "[A] daring, ferocious, and often impossibly gorgeous meditation on boyhood and personhood, language and love."--Flavorwire, "10 New Must Reads for September" "The first book of Saeed Jones's poetry, Prelude to Bruise, reads with astonishing momentum and tenacity, a lyrical torch thrust into shadows and silence to illuminate pain from a history of wounds." --Shelf Awareness "Jones has a voice, and it is not plucky or regretful. It is not about being a 'man' -- it's more ambitious. This book is his credo, his aspiration. Convert or abstain, his 'hunger [does] not apologize.'"--Poets at Work "For their journey on this beautifully clear but sweltering Saturday afternoon, they were not disappointed, treated to over a dozen readings of vintage O'Hara poems, as well as new poems written by the likes of Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to Bruise and the editor of Buzzfeed LGBT..." --Huffington Post "You may know Saeed Jones as the Buzzfeed's Literary Editor, but you definitely should get to know him for his poetry as well."--Bustle "These poems are tightly constructed, scary-beautiful, and lyrically brilliant, driven by a raw and devastating emotional power. He awes me."--The Millions "Saeed Jones begins this electrifying book--one of the most exciting debut collections I've read in years--with a quotation from Kafka's notebooks: "The man in ecstasy and the man drowning--both throw up their arms." It's a powerful opening for these searing poems." --Towleroad "In his first book of poetry, Jones blazes forth, his voice new, potent, lyrical, and deadly beautiful. Enveloping his words in the body, its politics, its genders and colors, the legacy of its trials and abuse, Jones sings truths from the perimeter, the disenfranchised, the ready to be heard."--Bookshop Santa Cruz "Riveting and heartening to read..."--The Dodge Blog, "2014 Featured Poet: Saeed Jones" "Jones' haunting lyricism creates a portrait of hard-won self-realization, of a young man's determined struggle, pushing through doubt and distress with the strength of his imagination and verve." --NBCC's Critical Mass "I had to stop trying to read Saeed Jones's debut, Prelude to Bruise, on the subway to avoid yelping with joy, weeping, or getting all hot and bothered in public."--Work in Progress "Prelude to Bruise is a thunderous title for a first collection. It promises that a bruise will come later. It says that, even when we feel like we're drowning, we can still be ecstatic."--The Brooklyn Rail "Heartrending, lyrical, and raw."--BuzzFeed "Ecstatic and haunting."--Brooklyn Magazine "This is the type of book that merits cliched hyperbole: because it will actually "leave you floored," "feeling naked" (together, that's almost a Natalie Imbruglia lyric!), and "gasping for breath."--Flavorwire "A radical standard of pain acknowledges the intersection between individual and collective histories of suffering. This radical standard is the thrust of works like ... Saeed Jones' Prelude to Bruise, a collection of poems that narrates the wounds of a black gay boy in the American South."--Pacific Standard "Poems like "Post Apocalyptic Heartbreak," "History According to Boy," "Prelude to Bruise," and others will break your heart and force you to investigate and confront the unconscionable brutality of this nation."--MELO "A compelling collection."--Runestone "Saeed writes about blackness and gayness, fierce and thick and brave in every poem."--Medium "Damn near genius."--Shade

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Book SynopsisWritten over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.Trade ReviewPraise for Ron Padgett “Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.” —New Yorker “Deeply pleasing to read.” —The Paris Review Daily “Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.” —John Ashbery “Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. . . . As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.” —New York Review of Books “One of the motivations driving the poems is the poet’s desire for knowledge, which he pursues without making any grand claims for this yearning. It is Padgett’s craving that animates his writing, and keeps him alert to the small and easily dismissed moments that make up our everyday lives.” —Hyperallergic “Ron Padgett exposes the interconnectivity of past and present, the ways our conception of self is defined in relation to others, and how our inescapable sentience and use of language is what both connects and estranges us from the world around us.” —3:AM Magazine “Padgett exercises his poetic license with the purity of his intent despite the tongue in cheek sparkle of his eyes. Among the many adjectives used to describe Padgett’s poetry, the most telling is almost never used: subversive.” —Black Bart Poetry Society “The poet makes superlative use of the directive writing consciousness—often automatic pilot—to tap the unconscious for memory, vision, emotion, and the unexpected and indefinable. The poems speak backwards and forwards in time, to self, to family and friends, to poetic technique, to the birds caged in the chest. It is so lovely.” —Alice Notley “Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.” —Robert Creeley “How to Be Perfect should remind us of how long Ron Padgett has managed to stay perfectly balanced on a tightrope of irony despite his verbal giddiness and the uproariousness of his imagination.” —Billy Collins “Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems is 810 pages long, and every page is a good time. . . . By turns (or all at once) sweet, hilarious, moving and mind-bogglingly imaginative. This book is for anyone who likes writing or who thinks it’s interesting to have a mind (or simply a forehead).” —Wall Street Journal, “12 Months of Reading: Richard Hell’s 2013 Picks” “This collection of poetry infuses life and images of nature. In entry after entry, I found rustic language and a voice worth noting.” —Dr. J Reads “Although it wasn’t a requirement for this award, I can think of no other poet I’ve read over the past 40 years who embodies Williams’s spirit and his great heart’s aesthetic. . . . I’m willing to put money on Padgett, in two or three generations (it takes that long) to be counted among the best poets of his generation, to be counted among the best American poets, period.” —Poetry Society “Coffee House Press has released a vehicle for everyday space travel: Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems. . . . Forty-five years after Great Balls of Fire, Padgett’s poems still fuel our capacity for joyful incomprehensibility and subsequent mobility of thought.” —Poetry Magazine

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Book SynopsisAn anthology and tribute to a unique independent publisher, Clark City Press. In 1987, the painter and author and fly fisherman Russell Chatham, renowned for his stunning landscape paintings and his appetite for life, decided to take control of his own career by creating a publishing house in Livingston, Montana. As one does, at least if they are Russell Chatham. Control was probably the wrong conceptfor the next five years, Clark City Press was the chaotic home of beautifully produced works by an eclectic, talented collection of writers and artists, many of them given a painting in lieu of a publishing advance. What began as an effort to publish Chatham's own work and that of his friends (a large and varied group) in elegant trade paperbacks morphed into something grander and more wayward. Chatham could talk almost anyone into anything, and before the press imploded, all sorts of people said yes: Barry Gifford signed on for A Good Man to Know, a fictionalized memoir about his gangster father, Jim Harrison traded paintings for The Theory & Practice of Rivers and Just Before Dark, and Rick Bass wrote about the first wolves to resettle the continental United States in The Ninemile Wolves. Clark City Press published Thomas McGuane on fishing and memory, Guy de la Valdene on hunting woodcock, Richard Hugo's only mystery, James Crumley's short stories, and Peter Stackpole's Life photos from the golden age of Hollywood. In A River Dream, Clark City's former editor, novelist Jamie Harrison, has collected some of the best of the press's prose, art, and poetry, in a glorious celebration of a small and lost world.

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Book Synopsis“Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world. At the book’s core are three ambitious poems titled “The Complete List of Everything,” which together offer an extended vision of American longing and connection—as well as a window into the sort of compendium of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. “The hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And ends,” Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us. This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling—a large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height of his powers.

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.” Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence—selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

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Book SynopsisSelected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”Trade ReviewPraise for Return Flight “[An] avid, observant debut . . . The poems here chart the path from past to present wherever it leads, coolly and curiously.”—New York Times Book Review, “Newly Published”“I love the complicated emotional range Huang conveys . . . Deceptively delicate.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post’s “Book Club” newsletter"Huang joyfully and deftly weaves together mythology, objects, landscapes, food, violence and intimacy across time and space into an immersive collection that hits every pleasure center and deeply felt emotional beat."—Seattle Times“An emerging, brilliant poet . . . Huang’s poems ring true for readers expressly because of their willingness to share the often complicated, difficult-to-pin-down yearning of the outsider, and as Huang’s speakers journey back through difficult terrain, we are often returned to a place of compassion and openness for where we might land next.”—Lavender Magazine“Return Flight is both grave and beautiful, often simultaneously, a clear window into Jennifer Huang’s life”—International Examiner“There is such a thing as a vulnerability, not of the personal, but of the unsaid: a strength in testifying to contradiction, overflowing occurrence, like saying something that surprises even yourself or a fleeing that returns. Return Flight is an attentive but effulgent but joyously aching book. Its lines dig inward and cling even as they unfold outward in excess and surprise. ‘What pain is the desire for pain?’ one poem asks. ‘Many visitors lately, another begins, I wake to an ache in my sternum.’ Huang’s lines can move like that, with, sonically, crystalline compactness, while directing the reader with cinematic clarity of scene and the delights of recontextualization. ‘I wanted this poem to be about dropping textbooks on my arm to get out of practicing violin’ is an actual—how carefully it discloses!—opening line. And while there is much to mourn, and Return Flight does mourn, it never gives into despair, the unsaid of parting, things never touching—but offers in its place a poetics of gentle, real, expansive touching. It comes back around and leads us out: like a ‘window you turn to and notice outside two papayas touching.’ Return Flight is a book that aligns itself with pleasure. Burrow inside.”—Jos Charles“Jennifer Huang’s compelling poems arise from the mutable realm between speaking and flying, touching and breaking, absence and forgiveness, numbness and desire, everywhere and nowhere, the home of the body—and home. Here, the poem abides even through gradations of silence—the bone in the throat, the tongue both captive and captivated, and love, too, abides, despite striations and separations, even dissolving the veil between the living and the dead. Huang writes, “what I know is what I imagine,” and it is imagination, made manifest in poems that map a blooming selfhood, that fuels the concentric energy of Return Flight.”—Diane Seuss“Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight feels like a conversation and journey at once. It is a charismatic debut collection, one of whose many feats is its meditation on lineage. The poet asks: How does pain suture and puncture a family through generations? What language gives what body to that pain? Whose languages and forms have I inherited? Whose literary lineages am I writing in? Deeply introspective, Huang also contemplates the ‘distance between me and I,’ the distance between themselves and their body, and how love can turn the self into a stranger as well as an opening for others. I marvel at the intimacy and wonder with which Huang treats and transforms their figures––many of whom are shape-shifting, mythical, or part-human––to render their themes into rich imagery. At the end of this conversation, this journey, I also emerge a different animal, vigilant and curious about my own body and its place in this strange, cruel, and miraculous world.”—Emily Jungmin Yoon“How delighted I am by these poems that praise ‘the holy scent of ripe mud’ and the ‘joyful stench’ of chou doufu. How moved I am by this poet who understands that beauty can stink, desire can suffocate as much as illuminate, and becoming is an endless looking back while dreaming into. And family is never simple, always ample with history, lilies, seas, such fissure alongside tenderness. Jennifer Huang is more than an undeniably talented poet—they are an uncompromising truth-teller.”—Chen Chen“Poems about childhood and selfhood, pleasure and pain, that try on different forms…”— Elisa Gabbert, Medium

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Book SynopsisA Library Journal Best Book of Poetry of 2021A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.Trade ReviewPraise for Tethered to Stars“This is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fires, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores … taking walks … teaching kids … trying to stay steady. In his brilliant forthcoming book, Tethered to Stars, Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages — as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let’s call all our cities holy. Let’s hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can’t accomplish.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine “True to its title, Joudah’s collection of poems musically connects the body to the Earth and the Earth to the stars . . . It’s earthy and ethereal, as we are.”—Houston Chronicle “Joudah centers his fifth poetry collection on the 12 star signs and other astrological phenomena, blending his physician's penchant for precision and the poet's ear for lyricism . . . What shines most brightly here is Joudah's ability to render extended imagery that plays out over several poems. An uprooted oak in one poem creates a place to plant olive pits in another. Dandelion and sunflower florets populate the pages. Butterflies lay eggs in lemon trees and enchant speakers from afar . . . Another stellar entry in this poet's expansive body of work.”—Booklist “This is a treatise on cosmic unity that does not shy away from grief, but that yearns for the immense, abstract sense of possibility, believing that ‘a heart remains a heart in its beyond’ . . . The clarity of Joudah’s imagery is countered by a complex choral voice that feels at turns analytical and biblical in its rise and fall. Each poem seems to be spoken from various perspectives, the roving voices echoing and replacing one another in their observations until both the speaker and addressee dissolve. ‘You’ll be everywhere,’ one poem closes. Joudah offers a nuanced vision of what connects man to the cosmos in this deeply searching book.”—Publishers Weekly “The poems in this brilliant book themselves stand beside our own sadnesses and grow large in our imaginations, like trees. . . These poems, many among Joudah’s finest so far, are as intimate as the night sky.”—McSweeney’s “So much of Tethered to Stars grapples with what is difficult to understand. From the nature of stars to racial tension, mortality, and his own cultural heritage, Joudah uses his lyricism to attempt to uncover life's mysteries. This collection deals with these complex and inexplicable topics, and yet it does so in a way that never abandons its tenderness, curiosity, and admiration for the beauty of the world.”—The West Review “The poems in Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars reflect a poet’s pinnacle, where readers experience the vision of a virtuosic poet who possesses multiple registers and allusive riches, transforming them into a polyphonic symphony.”—Deema K. Shehabi, Michigan Quarterly Review Praise for Fady Joudah “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”—The Guardian “A luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements.”—Louise Glück “Joudah has been writing essential poetry for some time . . . forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth, and dream where falsely imagined boundaries―of gender, nation, family―fray and unfold. . . . Joudah’s gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage, and grief are fully alive.”―Mary Szybist “If you love poetry, or simply wonder what powerful poetry is and what it can do for you, then the poems of Fady Joudah are waiting for you.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips “With a quiet certainty, Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century.”—Yusef Komunyakaa “Joudah’s poems defy classification, not because they perplex, but because of their remarkable power of synthesis. His mode is the lyric, with its concinnity and necessary music, but his lyrics compress, contain and then liberate the matter of narrative: allegory, fable, folktale, parable, documentary. He is a superb, seductive storyteller.”—Marilyn Hacker “Joudah examines his subject with an eye both clinical and caring, alert to the symptoms we don’t recognize or won’t admit we have. His language is like crystal: patterned, prismatic, sharp.”—Evie Shockley “Joudah is uniquely capable of crafting language that moves fluidly between lyrical abstraction and clinical precision . . . Like the stars its title invokes, Joudah’s latest is mysterious and ruminative.”—Library Journal, Starred Review “Joudah’s mission is perhaps to spiritualize our minds, and to catch the heart in its deepest modes of thinking, and the outcome is lyric of the highest order.”―Khaled Mattawa “Joudah uses language both rich and fiercely honed to consider the sweeping universe and our sometimes troublesome place in it.”—Library Journal “A doctor, Joudah reads bodies like texts, illuminating their stories . . . [and] bringing a loving precision to his descriptions.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“Joudah’s poems are driven by a delight in all aspects of language. . . . [This] is the work of a restless poetic mind whose inventive and capacious poems bring wonder and skepticism and incandescent language to bear on questions of human experience.”—The Rumpus “Supple . . . We often say that poetry transforms, but Joudah’s verse also transports.”—The Millions “Joudah is a remarkable poet of great intellect and vision. . . . [His] thought-provoking and imaginative juxtapositions shine.”—Arkansas International

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Book SynopsisFrom Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”Trade Review“Fagan leans into descriptions of the world that pay tribute to what it is, not what it could or might be. ‘How will I choose,’ she writes, ‘between Heaven & Sorry.’ This vibrant book resides in that in-between, honoring the loss that comes with love.”—Publishers Weekly"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss—the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing,' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up."—Maggie Smith“Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they’re stony, or they’re both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I’m so grateful for Fagan’s brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die.”—Natalie Shapero“The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly.”—Tweet Speak BlogPraise for Sycamore“It’s hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan’s mind is endless with depth and truth—her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves—we are each other too, living and remembering within each other’s shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition.”—Brenda Shaughnessy“Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating ‘Platanaceae Family Tree’ that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan’s inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action.”—Wayne Miller“Kathy Fagan’s poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may ‘dress defensively’; however, ‘all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.’ Fagan’s sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.’ Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years.”—Randall Mann“Kathy Fagan’s poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don’t miss this beautiful, knowing book.”—Barbara Ras“Sycamore, Fagan’s dynamic fifth collection of poems, explores the loss of a loved one through the singular and deeply personal voice of one woman and, in so doing, evokes the gut-wrenching effects of grief through vibrant, ever-evolving images culled from the natural world.” —Kenyon Review“Sycamore delights as much in its close inspection of the natural world as it does in the auditory pleasures of its language. ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more,’ the speaker recites, and we know we are in the hands of a gifted word master. ‘Though they are not a choir . . . not Kabuki,; the trees become a temporary stand in for love, for her ‘amours,’ providing the solace and steadiness necessary to stage a rebirth.”—Boston Review“Sycamore burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surface nonetheless hot to the touch. . . . Fagan’s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps.”—Publishers Weekly“Fagan erects a veritable forest in her fifth collection. Austere and elegant, the first poems call forth a cold, still world inhabited by ghosts. . . . Still, though, there is substantial hope. Trees grow, emotions thicken, and, structurally, poems melt: shorter, tenser lines ultimately give way to sprawling ones.”—BooklistTable of Contents1 Dedicated Forest Stray Animal Prudence Cooper’s Hawk Farm Evening in the Blue Smoke At the Champion Avenue Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center AccuWeather: Real Feel Keelson Dahlia Foreshortening Cognition My Father Bad Hobby 2 Empire Fountain The Rule of Three Helvetica Omphalos The Ghost on the Handle Predator Satiation AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs Birds Are Public Animals of Capitalism Personal Item The Children “Where I Am Going”/“I Dare to Live” Topless Mint Morning 3 Latecomer What Kind of Fool Am I Conqueror School AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking Window Trace Wisdom Aftermath My Mother Ohio Spring Jingo Snow Moon & the Dementia Unit Scarlet Experiment Lucky Star Inactive Fault, with Echoes Notes Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisSomewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.Pavlić’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlić agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlić’s own.But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlić recognizes something of his big sister everywhere.Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself. Trade ReviewPraise for Call It in the Air“Pavlić’s elegiac, genre-bending work considers the life and death of his elder sister, Kate, questions whether individuals can ever understand each other, and writes into and against the stronghold of personal loss and grief.”—Publishers Weekly, Top Ten for Fall 2022“Pavli​​ć offers a vulnerable, visceral portrait of life and grief.”—Publishers Weekly"We talk so much about permission, but seldom do we talk about soulful persuasion. More than any book I've read this decade, Call It in the Air pushed me to accept the absolute experience of grief, in all its abundance. Pavlić at first appears to do the heavy work of grief and assemblage for us, but he does more than that; he holds us slightly as he asks us to name what we see as we float, fall, and flee. Call It in the Air is simply one of the greatest elegies I have ever read."—Kiese Laymon“Call It in the Air is an intimate record of grief and turmoil within family, sister, and self. Their voices cut across time and geography, from the early 1970s to the present, from ‘Near Buena Vista, CO’ to ‘Denver I.C.U.’ to ‘Salida, CO,’ and out along ‘I-80 E,’ forming a cartography of pain and failing body—eyes, liver, kidneys, feet, hands, and ‘nails black from the inside-out with blood.’ As he traverses between place and memory, his dying sister and himself, Ed Pavlić paints an intensely beautiful self-portrait: ‘I sit with a tissue, dizzy-ready.’ Ed Pavlić and Kate Pavlich: eternally bound by a love ‘misspelled.’” —Don Mee Choi“At the center of Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air is a profoundly honest and deeply loving account of a brother’s bottomless grief. In language that is at once haunted and haunting, vivid and vulnerable, this book reconciles the darkest shadows of our memory with the light those we love leave behind.”—Lacy M. JohnsonPraise for Another Kind of Madness“The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavlić’s] first novel . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune“An ode to Chicago, Kenya, and soul music as humanity’s worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlić’s remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness, literary tropes and images are pried loose.” —Colorado Review“[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlić’s prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shame’s relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together.” —Publishers Weekly“Pavlić delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavlić taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way.” —Booklist“This remarkable project, with its lyrical play and experimental structure, shrinks the moment between event and emotion—as well as the distance between text and experience—down to a dot.” —Africa is a Country“Ed Pavlić’s Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavlić guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors I’ve never read or imagined. Pavlić’s narrative audacity and descriptive skill make every sentence and scene in Another Kind of Madness equal parts sorrow song, blues, funk, and of course jazz. I’ve not read a novel in recent history that so absolutely blurs, bruises, and complicates the space between mourning and morning. I am wonderfully devastated by the soul, scope, and execution of Another Kind of Madness and thoroughly inspired by this new kind of novel that is as at once wholly innovative and in deep conversation with so many Black American literary traditions.”—Kiese Laymon, author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America“Reader beware. You imagine you hold a book in your hands, but it is a song, a rhythm of words and phrases that shudder the soul. You will wander with its wanderers, and every few minutes you will need to put the book down to hear again what you have just read. It is not enough that Chicago, Lamu Town—midwestern American, coastal Kenya—and other worlds shift and shimmer and suck you into the madness the book proposes, but you will depart the text with its lyrics ringing in your heart.”—Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust“A fiercely vibrant meditation on how the interior life that eludes us returns through the sounds, secrets, and graces of others, through which Ed Pavlić rekindles, in his inimitable way, the meanings of ‘lyric’ and ‘soul.’”—Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance“Like a song that lingers in memory, Another Kind of Madness offers us a narrative that both moves and refuses to move, that leaps and at times seems to vanish. By this lyrical rhythm, Ed Pavlić defines diaspora as here but also everywhere and nowhere. In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.”—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank“Another Kind of Madness is a deliriously gorgeous novel. It is both hallucinatory and cogent, both African and Western, both stormy and gentle, and painted with a language that vibrates the bones. Ed Pavlić, whether we’re talking poetry or prose, is a master vernacularist, an adept cartographer of the human heart, and an artist with such subtle observational dexterity that one might imagine he’s directly in touch with the sublime.”—Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps

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Book SynopsisFrom the celebrated author of Philomath, an astonishingly inventive collection of poems illuminating human, planetary, and personal survival. Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity, she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a Lazarus speciescreatures thought vanished, even while they live. Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla's space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like The Euthanasia Coaster, a Desert Theater, and Paradise Lust.Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.

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Book SynopsisCalled the "Tenth Muse" by the ancients, Greece's greatest female lyric poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 b.c.e.) spent the majority of her life on the famed island of Lesbos. Passionate and breathtaking, Sappho's poems survive only in fragments following religious conspiracies to silence her. Sappho penned immortal verse on the intense power of the female libido; on the themes of romance, love, yearning, heartbreak, and personal relationships with women. This work retains the standard numerical order of the fragments and has been arranged in six sections. Distinguished poet and lecturer Paul Roche's translation of The Love Songs of Sappho is enhanced with his brilliant essay, "Portrait of Sappho," as well as a lucid historical introduction by celebrated feminist and classicist Page duBois.

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Book SynopsisRomano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and soul that display a profundity the post-modern reader only thinks he possesses. In an expanded collection of Rilke’s sonnets, Rick Anthony Furtak not only makes this lyrical masterpiece accessible to the English reader, but he proves himself a master of sorts as well. His introduction that elaborates on Rilke’s marriage of vision and voice, intention and enigma, haunted companionship and abandonment is a stand-alone marvel for the reader. Furtak’s praised translation of Sonnets to Orpheus (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is surpassed in this much broader collection of verse that also includes the original German text. It is Furtak’s great achievement that Rilke resonates with the contemporary reader, who uncertain and searching wants to believe that the vision of existence can mirror much more than his own consciousness. In his feat of rendering Rilke in English, contextualizing the philosophical meanings of verse, and presenting literary romanticism, Furtak provides a formidable contribution to the vindication of true poetic voice.

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Book SynopsisA New York Review Books OriginalA master anthology of Russia’s most important poetry, newly collected and never before published in EnglishIn the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence “Twelve”; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life. It was a transforming moment—not just for Russian but for world poetry—and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

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Book SynopsisNothing More to Lose is the first collection of poems by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish to appear in English. Hailed across the Arab world  and beyond, Darwish’s poetry walks the razor’s edge between despair and resistance, between dark humor and harsh political realities. With incisive imagery and passionate lyricism, Darwish confronts themes of equality and justice while offering a radical, more inclusive, rewriting of what it means to be both Arab and Palestinian living in Jerusalem, his birthplace.

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Book SynopsisZone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett’s fifty-year engagement with the work of France’s greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire’s poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett, this new edition of Apollinaire stands out not only for its compact and judicious selection of the essential poems but also as the work of an important American poet. The Washington Post has said, “No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett’s translations.”

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Book SynopsisJ. H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late-modernist poet. His work, as it has emerged since the 1960s, when he was close to Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, is marked by a remarkable combination of lyricism and abstraction, at once austere and playful. The White Stones is a book that is central to Prynne’s career and poetics, and it constitutes an ideal introduction to the achievement and vision of a legendary but in America still little-known contemporary master.

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Book SynopsisFollowing on from Zoospeak, Scottish poet Gordon Meade''s reflections on the lives of animals in zoos and aquaria as photographed by Toronto-based award-winning photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur and gathered in her book Captive, EX-POSED turns its attention to McArthur''s 2020 curated collection Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene. Organized into seven sections that cover the experiences of nonhuman animals in factory farms, industrial fisheries, live markets, entertainment, religion, fashion, and amid the climate crisis, each of Meade''s poems takes the form of an elegy "penned" by the nonhuman animals who, due to many different circumstances, find themselves on death row. As with the source material in Hidden, the tenor of EX-POSED is direct and unapologetic, with each poem attempting to capture the essence of the creatures and the horrific situations in which they find themselves. "It''s my hope," says Meade, "that my words can give voice to the creatures in EX-Posed so that they might be both seen and, in some small way, also heard."

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Book SynopsisPoet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories—in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other’s stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for, and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.Trade Review"In a world where we count deaths in headlines—from violence, fever, war—you have found your way to this book of birth stories—spells of beginning, woman power beyond any man’s heroics, the long wait, severe endurance, and the first clean breath. Gleaned from the poet’s own journey, from stories offered by all directions, from paintings, from ancient lore, the tiny percussion of the fetal heart, and the moon’s persistent hints, these poems will enchant, frighten, and deepen you. Reading, you will be born again and again by the oldest drama we know. Turn from the brittle news and behold our deeper psalms." —Kim Stafford, Poet Laureate of Oregon, author of Singer Come from Afar "Emily Wall has captured the joy, terror, love, and all the messy mystery of childbirth, as well as those first daunting moments of parenthood. I love these poems not just because they are true, but because they are real."—Heather Lende, author of If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name"[Wall's poems are] developed from the stories of new mothers, experienced mothers, grandmothers, lesbian mothers, a foster mother, doctors, a woman who miscarried, a woman unable to conceive who found other ways of mothering, biblical mothers, and even a woman in a painting. They capture the range of emotions — from fear, pain and heartbreak to hope, gratitude and tremendous joy." —Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News

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Book Synopsistender gravity charts Marybeth Holleman’s quest for relationship to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss—the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. “do not think,” she says to her mother, “that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart.” Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: “step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is.” In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, we hear in Holleman’s exquisitely attentive immersion clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.Trade Review"The poems range from kayak-level considerations of ocean life to close looks at a wetland sundew to views of the moon, comets, and the cosmos. They are, however, more than observations and celebrations of nature; they interrogate questions of life and death, responsibility to human and non-human beings, and the contradictions we all live with. "—Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News"Again and again Holleman interrogates humanity’s preoccupation with itself, panning out to remind us that the larger world does not bother itself over these momentary matters. However, there is also a delicate emotional undercurrent running through tender gravity—Holleman is not simply reminding us about the death of glaciers and the warming of the planet. Gradually the poet permits a small glimpse into a personal tragedy—the loss of her brother, a victim of gun violence—and it becomes clear that she is taking solace in this larger sense of cosmic indifference." -- Erica Reid, The Colorado Review

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Book SynopsisRemi Kanazi's poetry presents an unflinching look at the lives of Palestinians under occupation and as refugees scattered across the globe. In Kanazi's second collection, he captures the stubborn refusal of the Palestinian people refuse to allow themselves to be erased gives voice to the ongoing struggle for liberation and explores the meaning of international solidarity. we are the boat / returning to dock / we are the footprints / on the northern trail / we are the iron / coloring the soil / we cannot / be erasedTrade Review"Remi Kanazi is one of the most courageous voices of this generation. Before the Next Bomb Drops is a beautiful but urgent clarion call for freedom, justice, and resistance in every pocket of the world, from occupied Palestine to gentrified Brooklyn. Read this book and prepare to be inspired, enlightened, and emboldened." –Marc Lamont Hill, CNN commentator and host of HuffPost Live and BET News "Here is how I consumed Before the Next Bomb Drops: I'd read a page, then put it down, walk around the room for 30 seconds, then another page followed by another mental health break, and then I'd repeat this ritual. This book of poetry was devastating to pick up and impossible to put down. Remi Kanazi has graced us with poems that are an antidote to cynicism and a searing call of urgency for the human rights struggle of our times. If you are immersed in the struggle for Palestinian lives, your collection of literature is incomplete without this. But if you love poetry and know nothing of the Middle East, I also could not recommend a better book. Remi Kanazi has raised the bar for how art and politics can serve one another for the greater good." –Dave Zirin, The Nation "This is by far Remi Kanazi's best and most mature work. It is also his funniest, saddest and most uplifting. His poems evoke places from Brooklyn to Gaza, and he travels in time from 1948 to a present sometimes experienced through images on a smartphone flitting past desensitized eyes. Writing the lyrics of a movement, Kanazi aims upwards at the powerful and inwards, challenging our own complacency. His rhymes and rhythms, filled with sharp wit, irony and deep empathy, are a great joy to read even as they tackle some of the most urgent political struggles of our day." –Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine "Remi’s verse is a series of indignant letters to the passersby of our historical moment who thought they were minding their own business but who, in fact, are perpetuating the problem with their privileged complicity. Each verse made me sink deeper into my chair and helped unleash a cascade of relieving tears: in anger, in mourning, and in hope." –Noura Erakat, George Mason University and Human Rights Attorney "One picture is worth one thousand words they used to say with regard to Palestine and its suffering throughout the ages. This wonderful, elegant and moving book will convince you that one poem is worth one thousand words and many pictures. It is a poetic, and very accessible, personal journey into the past and present of Palestine that will resonate with anyone concerned with the land and its people." –Ilan Pappé, bestselling author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine "Remi Kanazi asks whether his words 'hurt more than bombs dropped on Gaza?' They may not, but his words, which combine art with a burning desire to narrate, to shout, to shake, to shame and to humanize, create a lasting, almost self-regenerating mind image of the bombs dropped, the houses demolished and the communities uprooted. Kanazi's haunting poems are not written to be consumed; they reserve a place in one's conscience, in one's memory, and–hopefully–in one's praxis." –Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement"Remi Kanazi is one of the most courageous voices of this generation. Before the Next Bomb Drops is a beautiful but urgent clarion call for freedom, justice, and resistance in every pocket of the world, from occupied Palestine to gentrified Brooklyn. Read this book and prepare to be inspired, enlightened, and emboldened." –Marc Lamont Hill, CNN commentator and host of HuffPost Live and BET News "Here is how I consumed Before the Next Bomb Drops: I'd read a page, then put it down, walk around the room for 30 seconds, then another page followed by another mental health break, and then I'd repeat this ritual. This book of poetry was devastating to pick up and impossible to put down. Remi Kanazi has graced us with poems that are an antidote to cynicism and a searing call of urgency for the human rights struggle of our times. If you are immersed in the struggle for Palestinian lives, your collection of literature is incomplete without this. But if you love poetry and know nothing of the Middle East, I also could not recommend a better book. Remi Kanazi has raised the bar for how art and politics can serve one another for the greater good." –Dave Zirin, The Nation "This is by far Remi Kanazi's best and most mature work. It is also his funniest, saddest and most uplifting. His poems evoke places from Brooklyn to Gaza, and he travels in time from 1948 to a present sometimes experienced through images on a smartphone flitting past desensitized eyes. Writing the lyrics of a movement, Kanazi aims upwards at the powerful and inwards, challenging our own complacency. His rhymes and rhythms, filled with sharp wit, irony and deep empathy, are a great joy to read even as they tackle some of the most urgent political struggles of our day." –Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine "Remi’s verse is a series of indignant letters to the passersby of our historical moment who thought they were minding their own business but who, in fact, are perpetuating the problem with their privileged complicity. Each verse made me sink deeper into my chair and helped unleash a cascade of relieving tears: in anger, in mourning, and in hope." –Noura Erakat, George Mason University and Human Rights Attorney "One picture is worth one thousand words they used to say with regard to Palestine and its suffering throughout the ages. This wonderful, elegant and moving book will convince you that one poem is worth one thousand words and many pictures. It is a poetic, and very accessible, personal journey into the past and present of Palestine that will resonate with anyone concerned with the land and its people." –Ilan Pappé, bestselling author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine "Remi Kanazi asks whether his words 'hurt more than bombs dropped on Gaza?' They may not, but his words, which combine art with a burning desire to narrate, to shout, to shake, to shame and to humanize, create a lasting, almost self-regenerating mind image of the bombs dropped, the houses demolished and the communities uprooted. Kanazi's haunting poems are not written to be consumed; they reserve a place in one's conscience, in one's memory, and–hopefully–in one's praxis." –Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement

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Book SynopsisThe collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities. Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others. Fatimah Asghar is the creator of the Emmy-Nominated web series Brown Girls, now in development for HBO. She is the author of If They Come For Us and a recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman fellow. In 2017, she was listed on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list. Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC and a Cave Canem fellow, she holds an MFA from the New School. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

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Book SynopsisWomen's sexuality is used as a weapon against them. In this stunning debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.Trade Review“This brazen debut is good medicine and a needed shout in the world. Black Queer Hoe makes it clear Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a poet we must pay attention to, taking up the reigns of many spoken word and literary ancestors and charging forward into poetics unafraid to be ratchet and bare.” —Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead “Britteney Kapri writes with the tenacity of your favorite emcee and the gumption of your most outspoken Auntie. In her first full-length collection, Black Queer Hoe, Kapri opens the entire conversation with the (un)justification of being labeled a Hoe and the womxn reader will find themselves gasping after each line, these poems serve as a re-introduction to our reflections. As profound as Eartha Kitt, as futuristic in her feminism as Grace Jones as positively unabashed about her body as Josephine Baker and as lyrically provocative as Cardi B; Kapri's multi-genre'd poetic offering is a new home for those unafraid of this brave cruel world.” —Mahogany L. Browne, author of Black Girl Magic and co-editor of The BreakBeatPoets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic “Britteney Kapri is a stunningly talented writer whose words reach out from the page and grab you around the throat one minute while pulling you into a hug in the next. This book is incredible.” —Samantha Irby, author of Meaty

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Book SynopsisIn this stunning debut, poet Jose Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Combining wry humour with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender,class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.Trade Review“Olivarez steps into the ‘inbetween’ standing between Mexico and America in these compelling, emotional poems. Written with humor and sincerity, each page looks at immigration, race, gender and class, and how it’s all playing out amid the polarizing relationship between America, Mexico and those who inhabit both.”—Newsweek, “Best Books of 2019”“This striking collection of poems is a testament to art’s power to shine a light on the beauty and nuance of family life and the plight of oppressed populations.”—NPR, “Best Books of 2019”“The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez celebrates his Mexican-American identity and examines how those two sides conflict in a striking collection of poems.”—USA Today“A devastating debut.”—Publishers Weekly “José Olivarez’s indispensable debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, is a boisterous, empathetic, funny-yet-serious (but not self-serious) celebratory ode to Chicanx life in the contemporary United States.”—Chicago Tribune“José Olivarez’s work shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked stories of Mexican-Americans in the Midwest. This identity is illustrated throughout Citizen Illegal in all of its complexities—the connections between Mexican-Americans and labor and the all too familiar feeling of being ni de aqui, ni de alla (not from here, nor there).”—Remezcla“A high-octane take on the rhythms and contradictions of life as a first-generation child of Mexican parents.”—Booklist“Incredible… Olivarez gives us the poem as incantation, using language to transcend the limits of social constructions and the physical, temporal world.”—The Rumpus“A book of poems by Mexican American poet José Olivarez, ties together memory, experience, and humanity. This collection makes the reader sit with the idea of nationhood, assimilation, and how white people are granted immediate access to privileges denied to people of color, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.”—Yes! Magazine“Citizen Illegal is not only a commentary on timely and complicated issues of race, immigration, and ethnicity, but also a celebration, a journey toward a self and a family identity that is grounded not merely in geography but in the veined map of the heart.”—Rhino Poetry“Poets like José Olivarez, a son of Mexican immigrants, are vital to keeping this nation from tearing apart—if only we could get Citizen Illegal, his debut collection, into the hands of the anti-immigrant crowd.”—Foreword Reviews“A poet never arrives ahead or behind schedule, but rather at just the right moment. Through his masterful demonstration of control over the pen, Olivarez has established himself as not only a voice to be reckoned with and mindful of, but also one that deserves to be respected.”—Cultural Weekly“In this collection of poems, Olivarez traces the lines between the country of his parents’ birth and the Mexican-American communities that have formed an integral part of Chicago’s identity. With equal measures of playfulness and razor-sharp critique, he writes of ‘gentefication,’ an imagined process in which the city’s neighborhoods are returned unto the hands that wrought them.”—Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches“Citizen Illegal is a fearless, instrumental, honest collection of poetry. In other words, the book is fire. Skilled, tender, funny, yet undecorated, Olivarez’s poetry navigates the razor sharp duality and utter contradiction of citizenship. These poems helps us carry the weight of biases, the absurdity of our prejudices; they help us seek documentation for our humanity which cannot, by any means, be dictated by policy makers. Let it be said that these poems are also love poems. Olivarez chooses to use his voice, sometimes brutal, sometimes bloody and blistered, to confront our monstrosity, yet he never shies away from love, even when he exposes the lies we keep in order to live. Keep an eye out for José Olivarez: he might be the poet you need when it’s time to cross a line, destruct borders, and still come out on the other side with your dreams intact.”—Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon“Citizen Illegal is a stunning piece of artwork from beginning to end. A vivid journey on José’s real life experiences which open-heartedly allows you to discover many of the things people don’t often talk about: love, anxiety, fear, and hopefulness. This book is inspirational and culturally rich, giving you all types of feelings with first hand insight on what it feels like to be Latino. Poets like José and books like Citizen Illegal are essential to our community.”—Luis Carranza, poet & member of Young Chicago Authors 2017 Bomb Squad“When I read this book, I can hear José reading these poems out loud to me, into a microphone, in conversation. There is not one time that I read his collection that I didn’t cry. I cried of joy, of sadness, of just seeing and feeling the printed celebration and exploration of what it means to be a first-generation Mexican-American. If and when I need to be reminded of the love I have for being a first generation Mexican American, I am able to turn to these moments in this collection: a neighborhood in which we can be as open and loud and soft as we want to be. In this neighborhood, I can also find all the deafening shame and heart- breaking fear my family and I have tried to hide. José pulls this love and this family and these secrets onto a platform we, as a community, can celebrate, acknowledge, laugh, and cry juntitos. Muchísimas gracias a José por siendo tan valiente y integro. Llevaré estas poemas conmigo por siempre.”—Vicky Peralta, poet & member of Young Chicago Authors 2017 Bomb Squad

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Book Synopsis“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”— from the prefaceI was born to grow,alongside my garden of plants,poemslikethis oneSo writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018This new book of poems and essays by Eileen Myles finds our game-changing writer keying lines in the euphoric style that the New York Times has called 'one of the essential voices in American poetry.'Following the critically claimed Afterglow (a dog memoir) and I Must Be Living Twice, their career-spanning selected poems, Evolution is Myles' first all-new poetry collection since 2011's Snowflake/different streets. These new poems upend genre in a vernacular that enacts, like nothing else, the way we speak (inside and out today). From walking around Marfa and New York City with an orange pit bull to Eileen's transcendent acceptance speech as President, Evolution lifts a can of Diet Coke as an End-of-the-World toast to embodiment, irreverence and risk.Trade ReviewI loved Evolution by Eileen Myles: poems that lope along, chatty, restless and limber. -- Olivia Laing * New Statesman *Eileen Myles's essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn't care he has a scar down his face, the thing you just wish you'd said. -- Lena DunhamMyles's poetry is kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary, and timeless. -- Maggie NelsonMyles is often referred to as an 'institution' - the way one speaks of a terrific restaurant that's endured the waves of gentrification as a 'New York institution.' But the word bounces off her: there is nothing official about her, nothing staid or still. -- Ben Lerner * Paris Review *Part of Myles's enduring appeal is that she's experimental in the true sense of the word; every time you turn around, she's up to something different . . . People have started using the word legend when talking about her life and work. * New York Magazine *Myles forces a cultural and a literary reckoning with her life on her own terms, demanding understanding, the text held to the reader's throat. * Los Angeles Review of Books *

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Book Synopsis

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