Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world around him, he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped being cute…” Narrating run-ins with the police (“The minute they see me, fear me”) and confrontations with himself, the speaker in this collection must learn to navigate a world that sees him as a threat. When Did We Stop Being Cute? reflects on the beauty and horrors of life in the United States, telling a personal story that shows Black lives and how they matter.Trade Review“Rhythmic, musical, and at times nostalgic for a past that never was, Martin Wiley’s poetry offers a piercing view into the life of a young mixed man as he processes his world, his grief, with nuance, biting humor, and brutal honesty, using the microcosms of a school, a deli, a neighborhood, to examine the fraught experiences of minorities in America.” * Jeni McFarland, author of ‘The House of Deep Water’ *“An artist tells us who they are through their work. At times this telling is subtle, and then there are times it is bold and brazen. In Martin Wiley’s When Did We Stop Being Cute?, the repetition of the theme of ‘coming of age’ is turned on its head. This transition from boyhood to adolescence for a young black male from a mixed racial background is fraught with peril, substance dependency, and difficult choices. There are juxtapositions between first kisses with pep rally backdrops and wanting ‘to drown in the miracle of my own survival.’ These poems reveal a truth that we should be honored to witness. The lies that America tells itself about the serenity and safety of the American suburb are laid bare for all to see. The false bravado of empty masculinity is examined and left wanting.” * DuiJi Mshinda, poet and author of 'Traces of Inifinity' *Table of ContentsPart One: The minute they see me, fear mePrologue: Early evening at the abandoned schoolWe can’t afford to be innocentThere ain’t no need for yaPeace is a dream (Kids in America pt. 1)All alone with you makes the butterflies in me ariseKind hearts don’t make a news story (KiA pt. 2)Something like a phenomenonForever’s gonna start tonight (KiA pt.3)Jimmy Got Nothing made himself a name (KiA pt. 4)If I could find a souvenir just to prove the world was here (KiA pt. 5)After: mathPart Two: Hey kid walk straight, master your highPrologue: Late night at the abandoned schoolLook right through me, look right through meGlory days, or The true story of two guys coming down a mountainAnd we mean to go on and on and onPast the days of yes y’allin’We’re all ice cream castles in the summer timeA self-made monsterYeah yeah they do it all the timeUnruly boys who will not grow upAfter: shockPart Three: But life is just a party & parties weren’t meant to lastPrologue: Early morning at the abandoned schoolThe world is collapsing around our earsSubtle innuendo follows(And so, by the way, I thank you)When they reminisce over youA white hot spotlightYou, you said you’d wait until the end of the worldWe still play our little gamesEpilogue: I thought we'd get to see forever...Excuse me for a moment, I’m in another worldYou don’t have to worry about meAfter: allAcknowledgements

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Book SynopsisCartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.Trade ReviewEvery single poem in Alexus Erin’s Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erin’s full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into love—this is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asides—it will make you hungry. - Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian WomanIn Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality's patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much more—a giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky. – Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker's voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life. – Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Alabama Poet Laureate Alexus Erin’s words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erin’s poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erin’s words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric. – Nabila Lovelace, author of Sons of Achilles and editor at DivedapperAlexus Erin knows there is a "tide to turn" — these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence investigates the complexity of life at the intersections: between Blackness and being "wholly and entirely a woman," between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hang there — "gravity negated by fear" — all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. "How else does one encounter the God / question?" Truly, an expansive work. - Adam Falkner, author of The Willies

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Book SynopsisPoems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.Trade Review“This gorgeous debut felt like it came to me from another time and held me spellbound. I’m awed at Knippen’s skillful tensions, crafting rhetorical movements that seem at once bold and simple. Deeply imagistic, these poems manage to simultaneously be rooted and sensory, as well as elusive and incantatory. Knippen deftly weaves ghosts and lilies, wrens and windows, nouns serving like legends on a grief map. Knippen’s language draws us closer to an unnamed loss until we feel the heat of the wound, but not the death itself. But more than the ghost, the wonder. More than the longing, the lyrical leap into what we don’t know is coming but trust will be beautiful.” -- Traci Brimhall“From its first poem, this marvelous first book makes way for Knippen’s affinity for likeness, not as simple mirroring but likeness in total, compelled to include dissimilarity, and this habit of mind results in image-dependent poems that gather, layer, re-gather in a precarious and lavish state of being between. Knippen’s poems can bear the weight of their layered, sensory-driven realities because he’s clearly devoted to language as the most supple and true means of navigation. Rare for poets of his generation, he gives voice to being drawn toward as often as he surrenders to his will to say. Encountering these poems is exciting; the world and our thinking about it both enlarge.” -- Kathleen Peirce

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Book SynopsisCaroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.

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Book SynopsisIn 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QTPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more.

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Book SynopsisA revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer’s Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient “emotional science project” A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and often unheralded—contribution to conceptual art. Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.” This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print. Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.Trade ReviewWhat is illuminated in Mayer’s attempt to record what she experiences as she experiences it is the space where images, interiority, and action flow into each other and carry equal weight. -- Dennis Cooper * DC's *Mayer's artfully artless photographs — which collect streets, landscapes, clouds, weather, friends, family — are often very beautiful on their own. Arrayed in tight grids of small-scale reproductions they become something else: an expansive work of personal cinema, relayed in stills. And Mayer's mighty, long-breath journals provide a dynamic narration, making a work that is large and resonant while attentive to the smallest things. -- Luc Sante * Photo Eye *Mayer’s Memory [contains] more than 1,100 artfully artless photographs collecting rooms, skies, flowers, streetscapes and landscapes, friends and family in vibrant 1970s color. The photos are necessarily small (roughly 2½ inches by 1¾ inches), arrayed in grids of nine, along with intermittent full-page blowups, and as lovely as individual images are, their power is cumulative: a wide-ranging work of personal cinema, in stills. Her journal provides the narration in galloping long-breath prose poetry that feels as spontaneous and alive as the pictures. -- Luc Sante * New York Times *[Memory] has been more frequently exhibited in condensed forms, and the text was published without accompanying photographs in 1975. Now Siglio Press have published a complete edition, interspersing the photographs with her journal entries -- Janique Vigier * London Review Of Books *Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past: it is almost too painful to glimpse the innocence and the freedom of Mayer’s summer from the point of view of our current fearful season. It can seem a dubious advantage to have survived all those disconnected phones, defunct addresses, dead or forgotten friends. At our moment in history, ‘Memory' reads in part as an archive of suspended (in both senses of the word) pleasures. -- Dan Chiasson * New Yorker *It may bear reiterating that when Mayer made these notes on her life, self-conscious as she was, it wasn’t her writing that she meant to make known. Perhaps doing this kind of reading can help us, saturated as we are with sculpted life narratives, keep better diaries. The little uneven crevasses that form throughout the document to which her estate has granted us access are what make it especially satisfying to read, a different kind of historical documentation of how an artist comes to be. -- Thea Ballard * Nation *Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. [...] In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary. * New York Times: T Magazine *An American poet – and synesthete – considers the ever-changing colours of the alphabet. * Frieze *In Memory, the poet shapes a new visual and textual language that explores the simmering possibilities of consciousness. -- Marcella Durand * Hyperallergic *Though Mayer’s writing has exemplified many of the stylistic traits of the New York School—detailing day-to-day life, chattiness, an emphasis on memory, an eschewal of lyric sanctimony—she explicitly rejected her then-contemporaries’ “addiction to style.” Her ambitions here are not stylistic, but relational: the goal was to, without writing a book, get the audience to become “a real reader,” by which she meant she would give them so much access that they might become her. I, sadly, did not become Bernadette Mayer reading Memory—which reassures me that the projects of both Memory and memory are ongoing, after all. -- Diana Hamilton * BOMB *Time travel into summery freedom on a 1971 road trip: this sumptuous book offers a portal into life off the leash. The result is an epic photo-poem: an incantatory work that investigates the nature of memory, monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and intimate in feel. -- Barbara Epler * TANK Magazine *Memory is not strictly a diary, but it pockets the day with similar devices; the entries read like consciousness spilled, even though, after the fact, she used both journal notes and the photos to refine and complete the text. Lines fall and trip over themselves to keep pace with her thought; objects are pilfered from their verbs; words and phrases repeat so many times they end up aural refrains cleaved from ordinary meaning. -- Phoebe Chen * Garage *Each of Mayer’s daily journal entries rolls and eddies as she allows herself to thoroughly investigate the elasticity of language and the contours of her mind. Arrayed in grids, the photographs—of grass, cats, friends, flags, skies, boats, herself, the moon—fix into place the minutiae of her days. * Paris Review *The American artist and poet spent one month in 1971 photographing her day-to-day life in minute detail, sharing both intimate and mundane moments, and delving into the slippery nature of memory. -- Emily Gosling * Elephant *This substantial volume will engage fans of Mayer and introduce new readers to a particular and remarkable voice. -- Editors * Publishers Weekly *A fabled work of installation art that plunged viewers headlong into the fizzing slipstream of [Mayer's] consciousness [...] Her epic's newest form: a treasure of a book -- Jennifer Krasinski * Bookforum *

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award in Poetry Finalist for the 2023 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing In these haunting, layered poems, Lucien Darjeun Meadows affirms the interconnection of human and environmental identity. “What can we do but seek nectar where it blooms,” whispers the porous and questioning speaker of In the Hands of the River. With delicate precision, In the Hands of the River subverts traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia.This debut collection weaves ancestral and personal threads of trauma, reclamation, and survival into a multi-generational and multi-species tapestry that reaches from the distant stars visible in an Appalachian holler to the curl of a clover stem and the touch of the beloved, here and now. Moving across time, yet always grounded in place, these poems address the West Virginian landscape, both in exaltation and extraction, balanced with poems about the speaker's own body, and emergent sense of queer identity, as “a boy made of shards.”Trade Review"In his beautiful collection, In the Hands of the River, Lucien Darjeun Meadows examines the wildness and the wilderness of an Appalachian childhood. Here, landscape is ever-present and constantly on the cusp of change—mountains become scars, insect examinations become executions, and homes are one rain away from gone. His loosened sonnets grow in the woods rather than the garden and strain against the tamed version of the from. His stanza stagger away from the edge with a third that brings us and all our songs to the river." —Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod"In the Hands of the River is a stunning and harrowing debut collection. With exquisite attention, Lucien Darjeun Meadows draws us deeply into an Appalachian landscape where 'mountains rub their shoulders blue / With horizon and a father's scent is an 'open parenthesis of ginseng and smoke.' These poems are so vivid and unflinching, and so richly intertwined with the elements. I felt the title's promise at every turn: held by the river of Meadows' language, carried into music and truth, carving a way toward 'the thrill of light.'" —Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room"Nestled in the hollers of Appalachia, Lucien Darjeun Meadows’ poems serve both as an ode and an elegy to the place of his upbringing. The poems of In the Hands of the River center on the body through which this landscape—and the stories of those who inhabit it—passes through. I admire this book for its unflinching, aching look at the intersection of queerness and Appalachia, for its complicated portrait of an absent father and a son’s self-demolition, for its attention to the beauty tucked within brutality. In the Hands of the River is an important, stunning debut." —Jacques J. Rancourt, author of Brocken Spectre​​​​​​​"Singing deep and clear from the hollers of Appalachia, Lucien Darjeun Meadows offers us an extraordinary debut. The poet speaks at once from the interiors and the precipices of home, of heritage, of body and land, inhabiting both the lip of the well and its source. Each poem, each line, vines this book into a coming-of-age opus that is vivid and lush, fierce and arresting, luminous with wonder and heartbreak." —Jennifer Elise Foerster, author of The Maybe-Bird"What an astonishing debut Lucien Darjeun Meadows has given readers with In the Hands of the River. This collection of poems, with its singular clarity and incisive imagery, documents all manner of beauty despite a life of terror and deprivation. In these poems, West Virginia is a land of natural wonder and terrifying need, where fear scars the land and its people. But Lucien Darjeun Meadows avoids all the cliches about generational poverty in language that soars and drifts, rising like a prayer over this speaker's ever-shifting youth. Lucien Darjeun Meadows loves language, loves song, and loves the hard difficulties of a life lived on the margins, as one who looks at the river and finds in it the salvation needed to witness all this fierce Appalachian beauty." —Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

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Book SynopsisDerek Chung’s poems capture the East-meets-West synergy of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture, while tracking the city’s myriad transformations over the past two decades. Though his poems bear the influence of Anglophone poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, Hong Kong is at the heart of his work. Writing through the lens of a father, restaurant-goer, dreamer, flaneur, protester, and more, Chung captures a city in motion—and the joy, loss, and heartbreak that comes with loving Hong Kong.

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Book SynopsisA debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by an award-winning South Korean poet and novelist.By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim Solah’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world lurking with quiet dissonance and horror. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, including documentary, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer's relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves. While BTS light up the charts and Korean films gather international awards, Lim's poems paint a strange and disorienting map of the consciousness of the so-called "spec" generation that calls their country Hell Chosun. This is a voice on fire from a world on fire. Readers from Seoul to Seattle to Slovenia to Singapore will find it familiar. Since that world is also the one in which we all live. Curated by Jake Levine, the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series publishes new English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by both mid-career and up-and-coming poets who debuted after the IMF crisis. By introducing work that comes out of our shared milieu, this series not only aims to widen the field of contemporary Korean poetry available in English translation, but also to challenge orientalist, neo-colonial, and national literature discourses. Our hope is that readers will inhabit these books as bodies of experience rather than view them as objects of knowledge, that they will allow themselves to be altered by them, and emerge from the page with eyes that seem to see “a world that belongs to another star.” Trade Review“Lim Solah is a rare poet-seer who looks so closely at creatures great and small that she plunges in and inhabits them. In doing so, her introspections take us face to face with the city of Seoul, full of gusto and disgust, showing us the best way to see something is to become it. A post-human prayer book, urban survivor’s guide, and primer on the meteorology of awareness, this is a tome of ecstasy—open only to those courageous enough to venture outside themselves.”—Loren Goodman, author of Famous Americans“Lim Solah is a joyous, irreverent auteur whose remit remains unapologetically visionary: ‘I want to see a giraffe. I go to see a giraffe. // I fail to see a giraffe / so I make a giraffe.’ Quizzing the quiddities inside our everyday mundanities, here is a poet “peep[ing] into the rifts in the air” ... Lim's enchantments are incantatory responses, laboring playfully toward a powerfully estranging logic. Read these poems: see, sense, feel as if for a first time.”—Dan Disney, author of ither, Orpheus

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Book SynopsisSoliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “I” to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.

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Book SynopsisThe first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poética Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica’s global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica’s art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.Trade ReviewAs this book reveals, Oiticica was interested in language as early as 1964—a discovery that will undoubtedly lead Oiticica scholars to reevaluate established perceptions of his development as an artist. -- Antonio Sergio Bessa * Author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing *Penned during the crucial years of Oiticica’s artistic and personal coming-of-age, these secret poems reveal a lyrical and intimate counterpoint to the transgressive interventions the artist staged in public during this same period. -- Irene V. Small * Author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame *As this elegant volume reminds us, the experience of language as an event is key to the not-so-secret poetics Oiticica’s work so staunchly enacts. -- Mónica De La Torre * Author of Repetition Nineteen *

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Book SynopsisLisa Fishman's sixth book of poetry is centered on bodies and where they are in relation to each other--whether a body is of plant; of person; or of words, and whether a body is personal or civic; singular or collective; alive or dead. The contradictions of lyric unfold, in this most unconventional elegy, by means of perception so steady it can change. 24 Pages and other poems extends backward and forward, with the presence of many, such as John Clare and Friederike Mayrocker, helping along the way. As if a corridor could open or the EAR's two missing letters -- h e a r t -- e a r t h -- wherever an animal pops out of the water such as a hooded merganser appeared to do a somersault diving under, not like a mallard more like a child or a ball -- it didn't come up until it did Lisa Fishman is the author of six books of poetry, including 24 Pages and other poems, F L O W E R C A R T, Current, and The Happiness Experiment. The first Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence in Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island, Fishman lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago.Table of ContentsThe book was open, with its double That the plant may leaf But winter now and less repeats, in winter time of all the world Notebook entry # Margaret are you The cat’s face / the fox’s face / 6 rides 5 dollars in June Holding a bird you find almost no body under the wings As if a corridor & have you A scarecrow grew night by night in the field “The streem of lyf now droppeth on the chymbe” Sun flew over 24 Pages September 20 – 21, 2013 Amtrak, Orfordville, Riverhead September 22, 2013

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Book Synopsis2016 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for poetry 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award finalist Named a top poetry book of spring 2016 by Library Journal Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. So, while I lead this choir, I still find that I'm being led...I'm a missionary mending my faith in the midst of this flock...I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter; they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather. Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.Trade ReviewEncyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant, this outsized second volume from Jess celebrates the works and lives of African-American musicians, artists, and orators who predated the Harlem Renaissance. --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review It's been a decade since Tyehimba Jess's debut, and this sprawling, extraordinary book shows he's used his time well. --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR This daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture (e.g., poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Scott Joplin, and Booker T. Washington) to capture the African American experience from the Civil War to World War I. An impressive follow-up to leadbelly. --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, Starred Review Olio is one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade...Through photos, drawings, interviews, foldouts, tables, facts, fictions, and yes, so many strong poems ... Olio assembles and raises the voices of an essential chorus: "Listen to how we sing while we/ promises unto ourselves not to die." -Boston Globe The content of this book really is a remarkable one...Tyehimba Jess gathers the histories of the lives--untold lives of many of the African-American artists who sort of built the blues and jazz and the sound that...we consider quintessentially American. And he's written these poems as history in a variety of voices, in a chorus. -All Things Considered Once I closed these pages I came to the conclusion that Tyehimba is our Langston--not necessarily in terms of style or lyrical sensibility, but in terms of proficiency and historical impact. It is the rigor with which this book archives history, offers new narratives and context for the "characters" it contains that leads me to the conclusion that readers a century from now will count this among the treasures that are emblematic of this era. -African Voices If you've been wanting to get into poetry but haven't been willing to give up the power, characters, and length of a novel, Olio is the book for you. -Lit Hub A tremendous, and tremendously accessible, book of poetry. -Brooklyn Magazine I don't want to overstate the case, but there is no way around it: Tyehimba Jess's Olio is a tour de force. -On the Seawall Tyehimba Jess's second book, Olio, is a book without rules, blues on the page. It weaves new and reimagined facts with poetry, prose, and biographies of first-generation freed slaves who performed in minstrel shows. A spellbinding and lyrical melange of verse, Olio resembles its namesake--a minstrel show's hodgepodge variety act that later evolved into Vaudeville, "the heart of American show business." -Tupelo Quarterly Historical personae has long proven to be a useful protest tool against oppression, and is, for this reason, not new to African-American poetry. Olio, though, is so ambitious, so relentless in its pursuit of the antebellum realities that remade our country, with its entrance into the canon we are jolted awake by a hundred alarms, a century's racket. -Oxford American [T]he variety that Tyehimba Jess packs into Olio amply supports his goals of celebrating African-American musicial genius and bearing "wit-ness" (in the dual sense of affirming truth and acknowledging intelligence and agency) to "first generation freed voices," especially those of never recorded nineteenth-century artists. At 235 pages, Olio is so plentiful it is impossible to read in one sitting. Not only does its format invite browsing, but Jess encourages readers to "weave your own chosen way between the voices." -Hudson Review This 21st century hymnal of black evolutionary poetry, this almanac, this theatrical melange of miraculous meta-memory. Tyehimba Jess is inventive, prophetic, wondrous. He writes unflinchingly into the historical clefs of blackface, black sound, human sensibility. After the last poem is read we have no idea how long we've been on our knees. --Nikky FinneyTable of ContentsIntroduction Jubilee Proclamation Submission to Crisis Magazine Jubilee Blues ******** Blind Tom plays for Confederate Troops, 1863 General James Bethune and John Bethune Introduce Blind Tom What Marked Tom? Mark Twain v. Blind Tom Blind Tom Plays for a Packed House, 1873 Millie McKoy & Christine McKoy Recall Meeting Blind Tom, 1877 What the Wind, Rain and Thunder Said to Tom General Bethune v. W.C. Handy, 1885 Charity on Blind Tom Eliza Bethune v. Charity Wiggins General Bethune on Blind Tom Duet: Blind Boone meets Blind Tom, 1889 Blind Tom plays on . . . One Body, Two Graves: Brooklyn/Georgia ******** Jubilee: Isaac Dickerson (1852–1900) Interview: Della Marie Jenkins Jubilee: Eliza Walker (1857–?) ******** Mille and Christine McKoy Millie-Christine On Display Millie-Christine Are Kidnapped Millie-Christine’s Love Story Millie Christine Buy Land step right up . . . Millie Christine’s Syncopated Star of Sonnets ******** Jubilee: Ben Holmes (1846–1875) Interview: Sam Patterson Jubilee: Minnie Tate (1857–?) ******** Mirror of Slavery/Mirror Chicanery Pre/face: Berryman/Brown Freedsong: Dream Gone Freedsong: Dream Dawn Freedsong: So Long! (Duet) Freed Song: Dream Long Freedsong: Of 1850 Freedsong: Dream Wronged Freedsong: Dream of My Son Freedsong: Dream Strong Freedsong: of 1876 Freedsong: Dream Song ******** Jubilee: George White (1838–1895) Interview: Blind Boone Jubilee: Maggie Porter (1853–1942) ******** Apparition in C Roots of Boone Apparition in E? Blind Boone’s Blessing Apparition in F Blind Boone’s Vision Apparitions in F? Blind Boone’s Escape Apparition in G Blind Boone’s Rage Apparition in B? Boone’s Pianola Blues Apparition in C ******** Jubilee: Greene Evans (1848–1914) Interview: Carmen LeDieiux Jubilee: Ella Shepard (1853–1942) ******** Bert Williams/George Walker Paradox The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide All Coons Look Alike to Me! 1 Coons Songs Must Go!/ Coon Songs Go On . . . 1 All Coons Look Alike to Me! 2 Coons Songs Must Go!/ Coon Songs Go On . . . 2 All Coons Look Alike to Me! 3 Coons Songs Must Go!/ Coon Songs Go On . . . 3 Dunbar-Booker Double Shovel Table 2-3/Table2-5 ******** Jubilee: Thomas Rutling (1855?–1915) Interview: Lottie Joplin, Pt. 1 Jubilee: Jennie Jackson (1852–1910) ******** WPA Interview: E. Shoe My Name is Sissieretta Jones WPA Interview: E. Shoe O Patria Mia WPA Interview: E. Shoe ad libitum WPA Interview: E. Shoe forte/grazioso WPA Interview: E. Shoe ******** Jubilee: Indigo (Choral) Interview: Lottie Joplin, Pt. 2 Berlin v. Joplin: Alexander’s Real Slow Drag Jubilee Mission ******** Alabaster Hands Forever Free Hagar in the Wilderness Hiawatha Dying Cleopatra Indian Combat Minnehaha Colonel Robert Gould Shaw Provenance We’ve sung each free day like it’s salvation (choral) ******* Last Letter Home ****** Appendix Presenting: The Dunbar/Washington Double Shovel Presenting: The Bert Williams/George Walker Paradox Presenting: H. “Box” Brown Dream on . . . Duet Notes on Jubilee and Syncopated Sonnets The Trotter Interviews Timeline Bibliography Acknowledgments Thanks

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Book SynopsisWritten from 1969 to 1971, West Coast Beat poet Philip Whalen's "Scenes of Life at the Capital" is a lasting testament to the ambition, range, powers, and devotion of this crucially important American voice. Positioned among the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, Whalen looks across the ocean to address the new frontiers, political problems, and transformative hopes of the United States of the 1960s—so much of which still resonates today. In this new edition—with a deep and enlightening afterword by David Brazil—Whalen's poem is further cemented as a fundamental work in American literary history.Trade ReviewWhalen's poetry is not difficult. Great poetry never is. Anybody can understand exactly what is being said, though it may take several readings to appreciate how deeply considered his "meanings" are. The poems are wise, not smart. They aren't grim. He reaches us, mostly, through wit and a cranky insistence upon joy. Most important, he makes poetry of the actual language of the street.—Lew Welch, San Francisco Chronicle, 1969 Whalen's "gibberish" stems from a koan-like affinity for paradox. It's infectious, like a laugh. His poetry immerses me in the great and mirthful doubt deep in his head—his revelations feel like my own. I feel that Whalen is saying, "Here: You have written eight hundred pages of my collected poems." And what a beautiful gift it is, from the poet, from the comic, from the Buddhist, from the gentle heart.—Max Ritvo, Parnassus A poet who simultaneously wants freedom for and from everybody, Whalen's writing has completely resisted the terms of American social and literary engagement that have been set down as unspoken law this century.—Anselm Berrigan, Jacket Magazine Many poets today look on themselves as the saviors and martyrs of their time. Whalen, on the contrary, is not concerned with revolutions and social panaceas. If he sees the big man at all he sees him in the small situation: tripping over a pebble on his journey to deliver a rose. Out of themes that are often seemingly mundane and prosaic he creates poetry of significance because his vision is peculiarly his own and because the clarity of his intelligence is capable of grasping and arresting meaning in seemingly ephemeral and unimportant subjects.—David Kherdian Whalen's singular style and personality contribute to his character in verse as a bawdy, honest, moody, complicated songster of the frenzied mid-century, an original troubadour and thinker who refused to take himself too seriously during the great revival of visionary lyric in American poetry.—Paul Christensen, Dictionary of Literary BiographyTable of ContentsContents Scenes of Life at the Capital Afterword: Curious Elision, by David Brazil

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Book SynopsisSimultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

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Book SynopsisThe five poem-essays of Chris Nealon's The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that's both teeming and fluid.Table of ContentsCONTENTS The Victorious Ones You Surround Me White Meadows The Shore Last Glimpse

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Book SynopsisThe debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers.

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Book SynopsisDepression & Other Magic Tricks is the debut book by Sabrina Benaim, one of the most-viewed performance poets of all time, whose poem 'Explaining My Depression to My Mother' has become a cultural phenomenon with over 50,000,000 views.

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Book SynopsisA debut poetry collection meditating on joy and vulnerablity from an outstanding new voice.

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Book SynopsisVia both associative lyrics and disjunctive narratives, Aflame looks to the intersection of T/time and experience, sex and fatherhood, husbandry and the cosmos, and whether the experiences Aflame dictates are quotidian or ecstatic, these poems stabilize and arrest.Trade Review“Gary McDowell writes “light can travel so fast/ but observation happens immediately” which is probably insight into his great gift as a poet: McDowell’s ability to see into the world of things and work with them or against them. Alfame takes this level of observation and puts it to work in both sinuous and staccato’d lines about the body and breath of his wife; his children; suburbia; a state park; aging; our political rights; and the city of Nashville where he lives. These poems move fluidly between narrative and fragmentation, between the body and the spirit’s flame. These are serious poems which seek to find, particularly in the long title poem, something about existence. This is poetry as ontology. Poetry as love letter. Something meandering between prayer and praise. It may sound corny but if not that ambitious, why even write? The stakes are always high in McDowell’s poems. Or how he tells us, “My daughter’s hand: how I know God is.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty, Judge 2019 White Pine Press Poetry Prize “Reading these poems, I am more than myself. I am etymology and egg, am the mysterious rabbit hole of fact, am as massive and tiny as a star. This book has the patience of a stone and the urgency of a library on fire. It is the prayer I wish could be written in cursive on God’s ear.” —Traci Brimhall on Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016) “Not one line in this collection of dispatches does less than delight and amaze. McDowell’s poems are wise and hilarious. I couldn’t stop reading them.” —David Dodd Lee on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014) “Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral has done the impossible—made an odyssey of the mind that is just as compelling as the eponymous one, only McDowell never leaves home. His ships and sorceresses and capricious gods are domestic. In this amazing undertaking, the poet regards his life, addressing his imagination,…thrilling us with aphorisms that pierce and pervert. ‘Pigeons cant’ tell the difference between night and a vision of night,’ McDowell writes. The difference makes no difference, he suggests, and that’s what makes this book, which is both odyssey and tapestry, poetry at its best.” —Larissa Szporluk on Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014)Table of ContentsI. Desire and Keep Quiet / 7 Binary Code / 9 Sorrow from Far Away Is a Kind of Power / 10 Miranda Rights / 11 What If There Are Deer in the Afterlife? / 12 Upon a Concussion / 13 History Repeats Itself, As Seen from My Hotel Room Window / 15 Marriage, Ten Years In / 18 II. Aflame / 21 III. Long Hunter State Park, Late Winter / 39 Follow Me, Dear / 40 The Lazarus Reflex / 42 Sometimes Spilled Spices on a Countertop Look Like the Night Sky / 43 First Image of the Moon / 46 The Itch / 48 Reading Plath in Early April / 49 First Celestial Body / 50 Entrance to the Underworld / 53 IV. By Age 60 We Lose 200,000 Things / 57 Prayer Is Not Asking / 58 Palindrome / 60 Church / 61 Suburbia / 63 They All Chatter Mouthful / 64 Don’t Shoot the Messenger / 66 Winter in Nashville / 68 The Stars and Our Response / 70

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Book SynopsisProse poems and flash fictions revealing the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of living through Covid, political chaos, and personal upheaval. Peter Conners’ unique blend of prose poetry, flash fiction, and other spare poetic forms pays witness to the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of surviving a global pandemic during one of the most politically and culturally divisive times in American history. As a divorced father living in a blended family with 4 children, navigating a new marriage, and also caring for elderly parents, pandemic restrictions and their attendant scary weirdness hit hard. After a decade of publishing highly regarded nonfiction books about music and counterculture, Conners knew that only poetry could do these strange days justice. The result is Conners’ first prose poetry collection in a dozen years. Moving from raw personal poems like “One of you went” and “My father wanders” to overt political rants “The beaches are filled” and “Welcome to the last” to comically absurd flash fictions like “Superhero” and “Hello, my name is Larry” to meditations on relationships (“A small house;” “The old husband”) and spirituality (“If each martyr;” “Love everyone”), Conners strikes all the rich notes that illustrate our humanity, desire for love and connection, and striving for a rebirth that awaits just beyond the edge suffering.“Part Tao, part surrealist dialogue, Peter Conners has penned a book of precise yet effusive runes from the well-gnawed bones of a man reflecting upon his family and nation at midlife. Here we have poet as citizen, philosopher, father, humorist, husband, we have the pandemic (in actuality and as metaphor), we have passing time, memory, ‘our whole dumb history,’ the theater of self with its ‘copious technical difficulties.’ These are minimalist and thin-trimmed parable-like stories, dialogues, and beautiful confessions that in the end haggle down the price we’ve paid through the last brutal years, encouraging the reader to take our problems and ‘Feed them to the squirrels. Those little fuckers will eat anything.’”—Sean Thomas Dougherty“What you know after reading only a handful of these poems is that they have the ease, and share the privileges, of being loved and cared for by a master — not as common a thing in American poetry as you might think. This is an end-of-days story for precisely our times, presented formally in a fluid blending of at least three distinct genres, managing to celebrate them all to rich effects. These poems capture a litany of almost microscopic moments, resolute in how they are illustrative of our stunningly particular days. I love this book and I want you to read it if you care about looking closely at who we are by looking at who we have been.” —Bruce Weigl “Beyond the Edge of Suffering goes beyond life's edges, and not only in suffering. This brilliant collection by Peter Conners is a genius book of our times, with masks and viruses, nasal sprays, elixirs, diseases, and exams. It is deep and poignant, with lovely and surprising sparks of humor: a tiny porcelain woman, plays in language: bodies, memories, dreams. Diamonds. Martyrs. Prayers and non-prayers. Genesis and ribs. Fathers and mothers and a son and daughter. Crying Superheroes. Weeping willows. Mosquitos and monkeys and the highest house number in America. This collection is so holy-ghostingly good, it will continue to stay with you.”—Kim ChinqueePeter Conners is the author of ten books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including the prose poetry collections, Of Whiskey and Winter, and The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees. He also edited the ground-breaking prose poetry/flash fiction anthology PP/FF: An Anthology, as well as an issue of American Book Review dedicated to prose poetry/flash fiction, and was founding editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction. In his nonfiction books, he has documented music and countercultural communities in such books as Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead; JAMerica: The History of the Jam Band and Festival Scene; Cornell ‘77: The Music, The Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead’s Concert at Barton Hall; and White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. His books have been published by White Pine Press, Da Capo Press, City Lights, Cornell University Press, Starcherone Books, and Marick Press. He lives with his family in Rochester, NY where he works as Publisher and Executive Director of the award-winning independent publishing house BOA Editions. His website is: www.peterconners.com

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Book SynopsisOn the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11—an event that caused their downtown apartment to become “suffused with the World Trade Center’s carcinogenic dust”—Dan O’Brien’s wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife’s final infusion, O’Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months. Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating of the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors. As O’Brien explains in an introduction, “The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again.”Trade Review"Our Cancers is an excellent example of Shelley’s secret alchemy, which turns 'to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.' . . . [O'Brien's] skillful enjambments give a hypnotic effect to the stream of poems; lacking titles and punctuation, they lull the reader into a trance-like state which alone, perhaps, makes their content bearable. . . . Writing the truth, he says, 'saved him.' And it has produced an exquisite and terrible beauty in these pages." * Times Literary Supplement *"O’Brien explains that his obligation as a writer is 'To tell others the truth, as skillfully as possible. To make art out of pain. To heal.' Our Cancers tells his truth not only skillfully but masterfully, making from pain a lasting chronicle of art that traces fragmentary moments of healing over time." * North American Review *"[A] powerful [meditation] on being a husband, a father, and a human while dealing with the very real possibility that it could all come to an end." * Katie Couric Media *"Deeply personal and touching. . . . A testament to resilience during ongoing trauma, these poems carve out snippets of wonder and remembrance to eulogize twin disasters. This collection reminds us that there are moments in any given day, even the bad ones, that are worth remembering." * The Fiddlehead *"The title of this new volume of poems by playwright Dan O’Brien is heartbreaking. Our Cancers is an account of the illnesses suffered by both by O’Brien, and his wife, Jessica. In an especially harrowing twist of fate, O’Brien discovers he has colon cancer on the very day his wife receives her final treatment of chemotherapy. . . . The reader is called to witness, to hold the sorrow, to understand. . . . We might wince, look away, or we might gaze and offer a hand. I think that is O’Brien’s message for his readers: anyone one of us can be so afflicted at any time in our lives. Our Cancers then becomes universal, a quiet warning. " * The Key Reporter *"Like all those who write about their own illness and suffering, O’Brien offers up the deepest recesses of his pain for the rest of us to pick over and examine. These are sparse and beautiful poems to live by." * Magma Poetry *"O’Brien’s books are raised far above the run of subjective accounts of recovery." * Wild Court *"Twenty years after the events of 9/11, the dust continues to settle—in the Battery Park apartment and surrounding neighborhoods where Dan O’Brien and his wife lived and worked, in their breath and bodies, and in the brief 24 hours in which the one cancer journey concludes only to find another lying in wait. Love and nothingness curl around the enjambments and white space of these 101 terse lyric poems, each of which finds O’Brien acknowledging in new ways that 'I must find / my way / to live here.'” * Sugar House Review *

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Book SynopsisThe coming-of-age chronicle of a queer Latinx Southerner. In C. T. Salazar’s striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South’s historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion (“a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him”) eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire. “I felt myself become gospel in your hands,” the speaker tells his beloved. And, as the title poem asserts, a headless body “leaves more room for salvation.” Though Salazar’s South is not a tender place, the book is a petition for tenderness, revealing in both place and people the possibilities for mercy, vulnerability, and wonder. The lyric I, as it creates an archive of experience, is not distanced from the poems’ subjects or settings, but deeply enmeshed in a tangled world. In poems with lush diction, ranging from a sonnet crown to those that explore the full field of the page, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking seeks—and finds—where the divine resides: “Praise our hollow-bell bodies still ringing.” Trade Review"An immense tenderness underlies Salazar’s standout first collection. The poems probe the ever-presence of history, family, place, religion, and grief insisting on multidimensionality and the complicated ways the aforementioned entwine with us, for better and worse. . . . The collection left me thinking that perhaps everything lost—beliefs, people, strands of hair to a crow’s nest—might be returned or found, though in altered form, and in this way survive. . . . A gorgeous, open-hearted debut." * Library Journal, starred review *"C.T. Salazar calls his debut poetry collection 'the coming-of-age chronicle of a queer Latinx Southerner.' The book finds complexity, vulnerability, joy, and trauma in these identities, marveling at this striking juxtaposition. Salazar chronicles a tangled history with religion, as well as an enduring search for the spiritual and divine. Ultimately, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking beautifully argues that the divine can be found in everyday people." * Read Poetry *"Having a title that conjures disquieting and curious imagery, C.T. Salazar’s debut full-length collection of poems, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, sparks interest in a reader before the book is even opened. To say that these poems are gorgeous is both an understatement and a simplification of what is contained within the pages. In Salazar’s book, the reader is transported into a world encompassed with juxtaposition – harsh violence and decay against the hope of redemption and a hint of dream-like beauty. . . . Life is often cruel, and in Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, Salazar doesn’t back away from this, but he gives us small glimpses of the ways life is also gentle. In this stunning debut, Salazar asks us to consider whether salvation is worth the sacrifice. He explores the idea of balancing dark with light. Yes, these are gorgeous poems that are often transcendent, and yes, they are wrapped in barbed wire, but they are worth returning to again and again." * The Poetry Question *"In his first full-length collection of poems, titled Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, C.T. Salazar establishes his poetry within several distinct traditions—among them, the literature of the American South, the lyric mode, and the poetry of identity. The poems of this collection move simultaneously through a descriptive terrain and into emotional and spiritual inquiry." * Mississippi Books Page *"In Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, C. T. Salazar crafts a personal mythology of biblical proportions. . . with Mississippi as the rural backdrop. . . . Through sonnets, contrapuntal poems, and expertly executed line breaks, Salazar reimagines sacred imagery. . . as well as perceptions of color and scale. . . . In these poems the Bible is not merely transposed into our modern life but is also a framework for a new and urgent awareness of faith, where faith is not what you believe but a way of reading the world. . . .What emerges is an understanding of the physical world as a living being full of spirit." * Harriet Books *"C.T. Salazar has a way of pointing out the quietest moments and rendering them holy, especially in his latest poetry collection. . . . Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking is a masterclass in power, both in its language and in its intimacy." * Southern Review of Books *"Simply put, this book trains its reader to do what its writer does: it teaches us to leap. The poet gives us practice at hopscotching between sturdy landings, from the small outposts of home and belonging to the patches of certain ground where those who suffered and strived before us found their footing and dropped a pin." * Plume *"Sonically decadent diction and striking imagery exemplify C. T. Salazar's debut, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking. In poems entrenched in religious and bucolic imagery, Salazar imagines a landscape that is both beautiful and mired in violence. As the poet writes, 'Mississippi / burns you last if it loves you.' Salazar, a resident of Mississippi, gives us a book of biblical characters, country, and the struggle to define faith." * West Branch *"C. T. Salazar’s debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, reaches past the cliché of finding God in nature to look for religion in the natural world; and in it, he finds flashes of religious iconography and ritual abundant, if sometimes ambiguous in their implications. Earnestly searching his surroundings for keys and clues, Salazar makes a case for religion’s necessity as a bridge for his speaker to better understand his world, even as religion, to this speaker, is necessarily inadequate and plagued by complications." * Colorado Review *"Salazar’s poetry deliberates on the spiritual experience of connection and desire. His debut full-length collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking focuses on the history of violence in the American South and how an individual’s loss of faith in God could be reconciled by discovering the holiness of human connection." * Oxford Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisA fresh, modern translation of one of Rilke's most beloved poem sequences.

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Book SynopsisIn Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.

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Book Synopsis2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYA collection inspired by Hoa’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnam’s diaspora.Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.Trade Review"I come back to Hoa Nguyen’s poems all the time and every single time I find a new world of meaning" —Gabrielle Calvocoressi, PEN AmericaNguyen remains one of the most powerful, vivid, and even visceral contemporary poets working today. —Dan Shewan, The RumpusTable of ContentsCONTENTS Seeds and Crumbs Ask about Language As If It Forgets Naming Assembles You “Language Points” Autonomous Song We Run on Trash Grass The Flying Motorist Artist Red She Broke the Cup Netting (Language Ghost) Napalm Notes Learning the Đàn Bầu Diệp Before Completion Less Than Slash Three Tryouts for the Flying Motorist Artist Team, 1958 German Tightrope Acrobat Group Paid a Visit to the Vietnamese Hùng Việt Female Flying Motorist Artist Group Tones in the Vietnamese Language Mud Matrix Why This Haunted Middle and Door Hung with Haunted Girl Bones from Vogue Magazine 1970 Sing Ding (Ghostly) Vietnam Ghost Story: High School Clock Tower Revenge Poem Red Shoes Girl Song from On “New Music” (Tân Nhạc): Notes Toward a Social History of Vietnamese Music in the Twentieth Century Crow Pheasant Exercise 14 Oxbow Lake Mother’s River Moon (Traveling with the Traveling Circus, Lower Mekong, 1959) Notes on Operation Hades Mexico Warm Rain Feast of the First Morning of the First Day Last Letter Durian Sonnet Dang You Then a Dang Unrelated Future Tense

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Book SynopsisWith exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. The poems in Giant Moth Perishes teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.Trade ReviewFor years now, Nutter has been quietly writing some of the most beautiful poems in America. —John Ebersole, Kenyon ReviewThank goodness for Geoffrey Nutter, whose poetry seems to be powered equally by sunlight, virtue, wonder, and humility. —Nate Pritts, Rain Taxi

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Book SynopsisFormer United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, “CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.” The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.Trade ReviewCAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence. —Eileen MylesAt a time when I don’t always know how to make sense of what’s going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer. —Jillian Steinhauer, New York TimesTable of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS GOLDEN IN THE MORNING CRANE OUR NECKS ON ALL FOURS I AM A SEAT FOR THE WIND ACCLIMATING TO DISCOMFORT OF THE SYSTEM BREAKING BENEATH US 900 CHOCOLATE HEARTS A MINUTE AT THE CANDY FACTORY AUGURIES CAST ASIDE ONLY IN STACKING BOOKS CAN THE TREE FEEL ITS WEIGHT AGAIN DEATH WILL SET YOUR DAY RIGHT BATHE THE DOOR WITH BLOOD OF THE CENTAUR FOR THE FERAL SPLENDOR THAT REMAINS ALTERED AFTER TOO MANY YEARS UNDER THE MASK EMBEDDED SIGNAL TO SHAKE THE DAY NO ONE HOLDING IT SHUT YOU CANNOT RETURN A STRETCHED MIND GLITTER IN MY WOUNDS WE VANISH INTO ONE ANOTHER AS NEEDED IMPALED BY SHARP POINTS OF WONDERMENT DIVING INTO THE PREMONITION THE ASKING PRICE ENCIRCLING THIS DAY WITH CENTIPEDE COORDINATION CAMISADO ON THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT WHILE THE WARS RAGE ON MEMORIES OF WHY I STOPPED BEING A MAN 45 MINUTES TO RESCUE THE PHOTO ALBUM BEFORE THE GARBAGE TRUCK ARRIVES MURDER IS AGAINST A RULE SOMEWHERE THAT IS NOT AMERICA !! ! VISIT A LIVING BEING TO EAT WHAT FALLS FROM THEIR BODY 72 CORONA TRANSMUTATIONS The (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual: Resurrect Extinct Vibration ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Book SynopsisPart protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu's book-length poem, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight, holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.

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