Poetry Books

Book SynopsisA must-have resource for aspiring actors: both monologues to audition with and a step-by-step guide on the best monologue audition preparation!Great Monologues: And How to Give Winning Auditions is primarily for actors looking for excellent acting monologues for their monologue auditions. There are original monologues written specifically for auditions, as well as monologues from award-winning playwright Glenn Alterman’s plays. There are comedic, dramatic, and serio-comedic monologues for all audition calls.Great Monologues also offers a step-by-step process to prepare for all monologue auditions. The monologues offered run from one minute to five minutes, thus covering all audition times. There are also a number of in-depth interviews with major casting directors, directors, and theatre company artistic directors. If you are an aspiring actor in need of an audition monologue, or want the best advice on how to properly audition with a monologue, Great Monologues: And How to Give Winning Auditions is a must-have in your collection!

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Book SynopsisThe notion that women can have it all—powerful careers and physical beauty—is a myth. Hillary, Made Up provides an insightful view to this from the perspective of beauty products in an ode to Hillary Clinton. The beauty rituals that half of Americans take part in has never seen much poetry, but Marianne Kunkel delves into just that. Hillary, Made Up brings to light the unfair standards to which Americans hold successful women, and shows Hillary Clinton's political career from its beginning in the 1970s to her run in the presidential campaign. The collection tells this story through the lens of sexism, allowing readers to see the role that gender discrimination played in Hillary Clinton's ultimate loss to President Trump.

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Book SynopsisNo airline has ever lost both of its pilots while in flight. It finally happened on Marist Airlines Flight 212 when both officers became medically incapacitated. The only person on board with any flying experience was a 53-year-old woman with just 40 hours of flying. The question passengers, air traffic control, and Marist Airlines kept asking as she took control of the flight was...would she be able to safely land the plane?

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Book SynopsisAristophanes’s satirical masterpieces, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. His plays revealed to his contemporaries, and now teach us today, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Until now English translations have failed to capture Aristophanes’s poetic genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, offers “effortlessly readable and genuinely theatrical” (Simon Armitage) versions of four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, provocative and lyrically ingenious comedies, finally giving twenty-first-century readers a sense of the subversive pleasure audiences felt when these works were first performed on the Athenian stage.Trade Review"Aristophanes was a funny, often obscene, social commentator, and he was also a brilliantly fluent, wide-ranging poet, whose lyric rhythms were recited and sung to music, with dancing. It’s very rare for modern translators to convey his poetic virtuosity or make any attempt to bring his meters to life. But Aaron Poochigan has achieved this feat, crafting polymetric translations that convey the whole range of Aristophanes’s larger-than-life characters and provocative, alternative reality scenarios. This new Aristophanes is zany, sharp, inventive, vivacious, and surprisingly relevant for our times." -- Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey"Poochigian has reanimated this quartet of Greek dramas with an approach that conveys all the comic energies, political urgencies, and philosophical concerns of the original plays. Alive and alert to the evolutions and mutations of contemporary language but tuned to the pitch and rhythms of ancient literature, these energetic and adroit twenty-first century translations are both effortlessly readable and genuinely theatrical—as lively on the page as they will be on any stage." -- Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom"Luckily for us, Aaron Poochigian has re-animated Aristophanes, in glittering translations of four of his most 21st-century-appropriate plays. It will be interesting to see whether directors bring these versions to life." -- Willard Spiegelman - The Wall Street Journal

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when the faith and community we once held close sours into an experience of tragedy? In Since Sunday, we find a poet who is rebuilding a sense of faith after fleeing religious abuse. Doubt, shame, uncertainty, and the pains of loss create the ground from which these poems grow. After severance from her religion, established values, and sense of direction, Tomaselli embarks on recovery as an active and intentional pursuit. The poems reveal a resilience that must be lived as a daily effort to cope with trauma and to root oneself in the present. Through wit, vulnerability, and rich lyrical language, Tomaselli invites us to walk with her through loss and on to a persistent process of discovery. The poems chronicle a cultivation of awe, unearthing a fresh faith rooted in the present realness of everyday experiences. Stripped of the orthodoxy that both grew and crushed her, she reconstructs a new core of trust for herself. Here we learn with the poet to seek celebration in daily life and to foster a sense of beauty from the mundane.

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Book SynopsisThe poems begin where language fails, where speech becomes disembodied, and syntax skids to a stop that dissolves into gesture. Where its form reaches an end, formlessness offers a space ripe with possibility. Here we find Harpo, reaching into the frustrated endpoint of language to find a method for its resurrection. Fry sees that language becomes a tool for alienation and uses the poems in Harpo Before the Opus to excavate paths back to tenderness. These are poems from the edge, pulling language out from its failure and into a fervent interrogation of its possibilities. What was once a tool of capitalistic alienation now serves as material for building connections. In spiraling explorations of rhetoric, these poems allow language to break from its prescribed structures, and instead, it becomes a gestural embrace of feeling and being. Fry utilizes a Marxist lens to scrutinize and reinvent the use of language. In Fry’s hands, language is rendered a visceral and sensual material, forming poems that are both deeply felt philosophical inquiries and wildly playful exercises of wit.

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisIn Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.Trade Review"In one of the late poems included in this generous selection of his work, Frederick Morgan refers to 'life’s daily chances.' Every preceding page in the book proves that from first to last, Morgan was fully alive to those chances and able to respond to them in ways that turned vigilance into a form of self-affirmation. In the more reserved formalities of his early work, and the comparative freedoms of his later poems, readers will find a consistently marvelous generosity of spirit—one that allows the work to explore personal matters as dexterously as it investigates matters in the wide public world. Epilogue may collect a lifetime’s writing, and therefore inevitably contain a good deal of remembering, but one of its many distinctions is to retain a strong appetite for beginning—for seizing on those 'daily chances' and turning them into brightly-seen and durable actualities." —Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate (1999–2009) "Two features tie all the poems in Epilogue together: their limpidity of style and their tireless effort, through memory, dream, story, and fable, to tell the truth. The candid clarity of Morgan’s voice, consistent through changes of experience and mood, is precisely what enables the poet and his readers to apprehend that truth."—Rachel Hadas, author of Poems for Camilla "This final work —not always 'safe for work'—reveals a poet still full of life, but a life 'faced as honestly as Morgan faces our morality,' notes David Mason in his insightful introduction. All the while, 'Morgan’s poetic is that of an ordinary man, albeit a thoughtful and cultivated one, among other things a body in time.'”—James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion

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Book SynopsisBeloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.Trade ReviewDreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didn’t know existed. If this book were a house, it’d be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, it’d know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessner’s work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what I’ll end with, or better yet, alive.—Bob Hicok, author of Sex & LoveIn Francesca Bell’s nimble and swift translations, Max Sessner’s poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depths—Sessner’s poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. I’m grateful to have them.—Joshua Weiner, author of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

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Book Synopsisnight myths before the body is an ecofeminist interrogation of identity, vulnerability, and relationship that dismantles the boundaries between the body and the natural world to reclaim expressions of power and womanhood. What are the stories we tell our bodies about our bodies? What are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves? night myths before the body illuminated the dichotomies contemporary women grapple with every day: identity and expectation, self-preservation and doubt, freedom and entrapment, wildness and cultivation. By dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world, Abi Pollokoff's evocative debut deconstructs the essence of womanhood, carrying the reader into a communing at once vulnerable and insistent. night myths before the body is a resounding interrogation of being human in a posthuman world.

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Book SynopsisIn her mesmerizing sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen weaves constellations throughout, of stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history, making shape and meaning of what's around us and even who we are. In this riveting sixth poetry collection,Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, The Reign of Terror, when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as one of today's most formally astute poets, Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, Heritage, a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, significant leaps into literary sovereignty. Blood Wolf Moon Captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It's a book you can't put down.

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

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

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Book SynopsisThe North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.Trade ReviewPraise for Dreaming the Mountain“[Dreaming the Mountain] is a collection of great depth and longing. Sy is attuned to the gossamer impermanence of clouds and dreams, of all that we know shifting, disappearing, returning. He names what goes and comes across a thousand years.[. . .] If there’s loneliness in these poems, it’s the loneliness of a soul aware of his small place among a mysterious immensity, an immensity that includes the butterfly wing, the bending grass, the wet eyes of a love. And it’s the loneliness that somehow, powerfully, makes one feel less alone.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe “Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life.”—Rachel Abrams, Tricycle Magazine“[Dreaming the Mountain] embodies the Zen view that everything we experience is simultaneously present and evanescent. [. . .] the best way to describe anything, physical, emotional, or spiritual is to shine light on it from more than one direction. Which is what Tuệ Sỹ does luminously—Lola Haskins, On the Seawall “Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible.”—Poetry Foundation, Harriet BlogPraise for the Seedbank Series“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books“Through its cultural-linguistic contribution to narrative diversity, Milkweed's Seedbank series is a vital tool in imagining the futures possible for humanity beyond the anthropocene. Bringing works from Greek, K'iche', German, Russian (and more!) whose authors are deeply rooted in their homelands, each voice encountered has resonated with me on a seemingly cellular level—shifting and changing both who I am and can be. I will continue to press these books into the hands of compassionate readers and cannot wait to share the forthcoming titles in the project!”—Erin Pineda, 27th Letter Books"Milkweed as a publishing house has long been championing literary works both fictitious and true to life centered around culture, nature, and environmentalism. The Seedbank series serves as both a marvelous introduction to the books Milkweed provides and as a collection of essential stories that ought to be on everyone's radar. The words behind these front covers highlight life-changing experiences, knowledge, and ways of life from communities that are seldom otherwise heard from in the publishing world through an authentic cultural lens. What I've read from the Seedbank line is phenomenal, and I look forward to spending time with future works in the series."—Andrew King, Secret Garden BooksPraise for Martha Collins’s Translations“A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century in supple and complex poems.”—AWP Chronicle“Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap [in Black Stars], movingly translated by Martha Collins and the author. . . . We, as readers, are enriched.”—Arthur Sze, author of Sight Lines“A delightful aspect of My Da’s poetry [in Green Rice] is the surprising way it summons human feeling from the ancient landscape, from river and field, from fruit and fragrant tree, culling a contemporary self from timeless images. In carrying this across into English, My Da could not have found better translators than Thuy Dinh and Martha Collins.”—John Balaban, author of Empires“[Nguyen Quang Thieu’s The Women Carry River Water] is both timely and necessary for those who are interested in learning more about contemporary Vietnamese culture, literature, and poetry. The translations are perfect.”—Ngo Nhu Binh, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction xiOn the Translations xixKhung Trời Cũ 2A Piece of Old Sky 3Cánh Chim Trời 4Bird Wing Sky 5Hương Ngày Cũ 6Scent of Past Days 7Mưa Cao Nguyên 8Rainy Season in the Highlands 9Tóc Huyền 10Black Hair 11HoàiNiệm 12ARecollection 13Hận Thu Cao 14NobleAutumnRancor 15Mộng Trường Sinh 16Dream of a Long Life 17Kết Từ 18Last Words 19Những Năm Anh Đi 22The Years Away 23Một Bóng Trăng Gầy 24ASlenderMoon 25Phố Trưa 26Street at Noon 27Tự Tình 28Reflection 29Chân Đồi 30Nightmares in the Forest 35Một Thoáng Chiêm Bao 36Fleeting Dream 37Những Bước Đường Cùng 38End of the Road 39Bóng Cha Già 40My Father’s Shadow 41Ước Hẹn 42Promise 43Cây Khô 44Dried Tree 45Những Phím Dương Cầm 46Piano Keys 47Bên Bếp Lạnh 48By a Cold Fire 49Tống Biệt Hành 50Leave-Taking 51

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Clearing navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with rich imagination and a singular incisiveness, “asserting feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines” (New York Times). The women in Allison Adair’s debut collection—luminous and electric from the first line to the last—live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being “the planet’s stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.” And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness. “What if this time,” they ask, “instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.” Adair sees the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, “from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss.” There is a dark tension in this work, and its product is wholly “an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty” (Boston Globe).Trade ReviewPraise for The Clearing “The poems in Adair’s debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when ‘A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.’”—New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry” “Astonishing and luminous . . . [The Clearing] is an alchemical feat, turning horror into beauty as Adair reveals what surges beneath—the violence, want, grief, thrill, and nameless fury.”—Boston Globe “Adair considers in her imaginative debut the intersection of human and animal life, closely examining the experience of womanhood. . . . Like Grimms’ fairy tales, Adair’s poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collection’s lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Masterful . . . Juxtaposing somber images from the natural world (a runt rabbit, a strangled swan, a floor of dead birds, a landscape made of a woman’s hair) against seemingly more durable material like bones, chicken wire, rifles, and coins, Adair’s poems take as their central subject emotional and physical violence against women, which in this collection distorts all of life’s natural processes.”—Literary Hub, “Best New Books to Read This Summer” “The opening poem in the collection feels like a fable and nightmare; a scene out of time. ‘We’ll write this story again and again, // how her mouth blooms to its raw venous throat—that tunnel / of marbled wetness, beefy, muted, new pillow for our star // sapphire, our slugging prospecting—and how dark birds come / after, to dress the wounds, no, to peck her sockets clean.’ We leave the poem a little scared, a little curious, and certainly more aware: The Clearing meditates on what is asked of women, and what is taken from them.”—The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: June 2020” “Adair is capable of a lush lyricism whose beauty is impartial, lighting up the junk of a region, a culture, and a family, its toxic heritage of violence and violation, while haloing the uncluttered space that remains after the mess has been cleared away.”— Los Angeles Review of Books “Electric, brilliant with loss and searching . . . As we read, we are on a journey into the woods with strangers, and The Clearing’s poems capture the beauty and terror of sudden, new site-lines.”—Colorado Review “It’s difficult to believe that The Clearing is Adair’s first full collection of poems. Her once-upon-a-times are generational oral histories, from the Civil War to present day. They will endure, even as the land and these people endure, despite the violence done to it and them, despite the attempts to silence them directly or by neglect. Adair speaks for and through them, allowing their rugged, dented beauty to shine through in exceptional fashion. This assured, layered, altogether extraordinary debut collection will linger in readers’ minds long after the first reading.”—Los Angeles Review “Adair’s lush writing and its underpinning themes of threat, danger, and risk, much of it inherent in the lives of women, make for a nuanced, evocative, and glittering first book.”—RHINO “The poems of The Clearing form an intricate, compelling whole, sensual and musical, haunted (one poem literally featuring a ghost), and committed to focusing on what is often too blurry to see . . . the difficulty of wresting forms of love from forms of violence. . . . The Clearing is a wonderful, exhilarating debut, a book for any who want to live for a while in the realm of the inarticulable.”—Plume “Adair’s poems are set in new stone, a new poetic language for fear, danger, and escape. . . . [Adair] knows that transformation comes from reexamination and reinvention, and she empowers her readers by not only changing the story but reclaiming its protagonists.”—Green Mountains Review “A fiery, magnificent, urgent debut that reminds us of poetry’s ability to clarify perception, create awareness, and make space for us to connect with our authentic selves as we grapple with life’s chaos. Selected by Henri Cole, this book makes room for otherworldly grace, simultaneously allowing us to see the world around us while helping us find our place in it. . . . Adair’s poetry provides shelter where we can pause, ask tough questions, and interact with our mortality through poetic language, compelling imagery, and animated musicality.”—Split Lip Magazine “The Clearing is a book where the process of reading mimics the imagistic architecture. . . . The result is an immersive linguistic world that invites a lingering, engaged contemplation and invites repeated readings and renderings of your own experience into its pages.”—Dasha Bulatova, Empty Mirror “The Clearing traverses chicken-wired landscapes teeming with hunters and wolves, fields empty but for disappointment and danger. Personal trauma is recounted throughout with intimate detail and hard-won wisdom. . . . Her poems unflinchingly face scenes of violence, painful miscarriage, young motherhood, absent men. And as much as The Clearing is a confronting of loss and grief, it’s also a stunning work of reimagining and rebuilding.”—Open Books: A Poem Emporium “In Adair’s stunning debut collection, the verbs are vivid; the metaphors imagistic; the topics ranging through small town secrets, parenthood and childhood, physical love, violence and tragedy. These bold poems are imbued with the grittiness of landscape, biology, geology, and anchored by the recurring motif of searching below the surface like metal detectors or mines for things like fossils and rot, yes, but also veins of gold and memories.”—Ben Groner, Parnassus Books “The Clearing is a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively. Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more. Adair’s poems are haunting and dirt caked, but there is also a tense beauty everywhere. I found The Clearing devastating.”—Henri Cole “‘What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have.’ So begins Allison Adair’s The Clearing, the title poem leading us, tooth by tooth, line by line, into this dark forest of a book. Adair’s phrases are spell-like, their ingredients mixed in surprising, potent ways: ‘the fat matter of memory,’ a caterpillar’s ‘sad accordion hymn,’ the ‘Gregorian green singing grass.’ I would follow this poet wherever her mind goes—even into the deepest woods, into memories of grief and loss—and I would trust her words to lead me out again. The Clearing is brilliant, gutting, completely original.”—Maggie Smith “Adair dives into motherhood, history, and the now to find the currents—loss, violence, yearning—that keep us afloat, that shipwreck us. Her gaze is clear-eyed, precise, and jarring: ‘The dog’s staph-eaten paw / soaking in a Cool Whip bowl’ and ‘the caterpillar inches along, lost / in its sad accordion hymn.’ Her lyricism is astonishing and her attentiveness to sound dazzles: antlers rub against apple bark, bats drown, and music is struck from anvils. Adair’s sensory-rich language doesn’t reconfigure pain into beauty, though. It does something harder—it forces us to contend with the light and the dark inside each of us.”—Eduardo Corral “Adair’s poems chart the measureless ways that trauma is born of violence and loss while reminding us that tenderness and mercy are descendants of grief. Wise, rapturous, and thicketed with hair-raising imagery, this collection has women wading through landscapes teeming with wolves and real-life danger surreal enough to be remembered, rendered as fable. This effect—this devastatingly beautiful book—lingers off the page. It illuminates itself in the moment and at unexpected hours. The Clearing is an extraordinary debut.”—Marcus WickerTable of ContentsThe Clearing I After the Police Have Been Called Letter to My Niece, in Silverton, Colorado As for the Glossy Green Tractor You Were Miscarriage Week Six of the Fire Self-Portrait as Cenotaph Hitching Debt First Plow at Red Mountain Pass Herr’s Ridge, 1983: A Reenactment Fine Arts Angelus Silverton What We Should Really Be Afraid Of II Fable Ways to Describe a Death Inside Your Own Living Body Mother of 2 Stabbed to Death in Silverton Local Music Gettysburg Advice for the New Mother Crown Cinquain for the Tattooed Man I Refused He Waited for Days As I Near Forty I Think of You Then When Horses Turn Down the Road Letter to My Foundling: #235, Boy Memento Mori: Bell Jar with Suspended Child III Western Slope Whale Fall If Imagination and Memory Met Unexpectedly, One Last Time Morning Tea Mine Fire at Centralia Stopping Over the Arno City Life Flight Theory What Falls Behind No Response Recurring Dream Crown Cinquain for a Lost Child, Eight Years Later At the Park One Day, My Six-Year-Old Asks If Mermaids Are Real The Age We Were Local History River Bone Honey Disaster at Gold King Mine The Big Thinkers RD 8 Box 16A (Rural Route) Bear Fight in Rockaway

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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

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Book SynopsisThe Billboard is about a fictional Black women’s clinic in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and its fight with a local gadfly running for City Council who puts up a provocative billboard: “Abortion is genocide. The most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother’s womb,” spurring on the clinic to fight back with their own provocative sign: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #Trust Black Women.” The book also has a foreword and afterword and Q&A with a founder of reproductive justice. As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice.

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Book SynopsisDiamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where her speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in the hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police violence. Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies, as she struggles to find a place, a time, where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly with her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

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Book SynopsisIn their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.“I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community.Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods.Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.

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Book SynopsisA collection of poetry that moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, exploring the ways the speaker’s experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what “disappearing” teaches about Blackness and bodies. Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick’s imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced with imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive. Patrick’s poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. Remedies for Disappearing connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen.Trade Review“In Alexa Patrick’s stunning Remedies for Disappearing, coming of age, Black girlhood, and family history are rendered with crackling electricity and specificity. These poems sister me fiercely, will sister me forever.”—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die“These poems—intimate portraits of desire, of passion, of longing—stir the spirit with their vulnerability, and invigorate the senses with their language. This debut shines. Alexa Patrick is a force.”—Clint Smith, author of Above Ground“Women and men are stars in this book. The corner is a cosmos, and Patrick’s eye is quick enough to capture the constellary shifts, their drama and folly. Just as the stars come and go with the change in daily light, so do these poems, with the turn of each page, give us a fresh and sobering look at where loving is and is not found.”—Kyle G. Dargan, author of PANZER HERZ“In an indelible collection that celebrates the mundane, the marvelous, and the harrowing reality of Blackness, of Black girlhood, Patrick wields the lyric form to create new doorways into houses we thought we knew well. She offers heartbreaking insights to the reader, but requires a great deal too; you can’t engage with these poems without facing the aches you bring with you.”—Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X

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

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Book SynopsisThe chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy. Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.Trade Review"Urges, observations, memories, directions, and aspirations scissor, smear, and echo one another within and between verses demarcated by austere, unbroken dashes. The book is filled with carbonated queries—philosophical, literary, homophonic, ontological—that burst and fizz on ultramarine’s oceanic, auratic surface. When Koestenbaum asks, 'Isn’t art / a transcendent category?,' the answer can only be an emphatic yes."—Artforum"If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and ’70s would predictably fall for... they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, 'the hurt, pocked portion / of being.'"—Harriet"Koestenbaum, unflinching as he observes and notates his interior, brings a heroic quality to this poetic feat.'"—Rain Taxi"Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another."—[PANK]"This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons... Each collection of trance notebooks reflects the degree to which Koestenbaum is attuned to real-time realities while he composes."—The Brooklyn Rail"The final volume of his 'trance trilogy'—preceded by The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018)—the collection is both a joyful language game and a bracing reminder that queer play is serious business."—The Yale Review"In Ultramarine, Wayne Koestenbaum sifts through four years of trance notebooks to stitch together a revealing collage."—Library Journal"Koestenbaum delves into paintings and the artistic process, using color as a metaphor through which to consider desire and memory."—Read Poetry"There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience."—Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender PoetrySonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism in Kamden Hilliard’s debut collection of poems, MissSettl. In MissSettl, is a funny, joyful, and spiteful debut collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with impish provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism and gender, and race, and money, and property. MissSettl confronts what’s in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.Trade Review"This is life and/or death poetry. This is love poetry to a most infinite degree of love pushing it/us beyond its/our known capacity."—Kirby Chen Mages, The Poetry Project"MissSettl, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s delightfully jarring debut collection, explodes assumptions about language, race, and American (post)colonialism in an age of information overload... A 21st century Dadaist or Metamodernist text, this collection demands that readers rethink the present state (and future!) of American poetics."—Diego Báez, Harriet"The power of these poems—and this interview—comes from Hilliard’s demonstration that there does exist the potential for further capaciousness and plasticity—of language, play, singing, thought, and (importantly) imagination—which can be enacted uncompromisingly against the internal and external sanctions that would seek to limit such efforts."—Peter Mishler, Full Stop"In reading MissSettl, meaning is coming to us already thrown out. Disposed of. As quickly as we’re asked to participate in this sense-making game, we’re cast into the ensuing gunfire of the speaker’s imagination." —Anaïs Duplan, Ghost Proposal"MissSettl uses big words and made-up words because they’re all the same. MissSettl explores first loves, sexual identity, identity, the absurdity of definition, and is constantly seeking to exist without the need for definition, without the need for justification."—Jacob Collins-Wilson, Heavy Feather Review“Kamden Hilliard is one of the most unique poets. Whether writing about blackness, settler colonialism, or racial capitalism, they ‘tricc’ syntax and form into something both ‘skinthicc’ and ‘metaphysiqule.’ MissSettl invites us to party inside the ‘weerd’ language of multiple selves dancing and transforming ‘queerdum.’”—Craig Santos Perez“Kamden Hilliard’s language addresses the present, wherein ‘thot’ replaces thought—and the military-industrial complex and its several violences has proven merely a ‘warflik’ we might choose to watch (or not). I’m continually drawn in by Hilliard’s ‘Nickelodeons,’ not just the one Nickelodeon (which is itself confined to a particular 90s moment we will relive) but the televisual multiplicity of myriad concurrent Nickelodeons that MissSettl evokes. Where else do we get to see, hear, or succumb to the dangerous play Hilliard is embroiled in here?”—Anaïs Duplan“In MissSettl, Hilliard unsettles QWERTY and queers linguistic bedrock to unlock readers from our own stiff poetic leanings and beliefs about the ‘Clotted sign, cloying signifier’ that celebrity and academicians alike accommodate for small change. These poems make hypersense, are tricksters baffling the OED with alphanumeric chimeras and lines so long they yawn at their pantomime because what they mimic bores with bullshit violence: ‘The university didn’t mean to offend that hair ,/ but was just so demographically curious about where you come from.’ MissSettl embraces everything Black and queer and I’m here for it, am shown how fuccd I am through these critiques of capitalism, ableism, and [insert hetero-entangled-ism]. No book has been this bitingly generous to me in years.”—Philip B. Williams“In MissSettl (Nightboat, Apr.), nonbinary poet Kamden Ishmael Hilliard pushes against everything that inhibits genuine love and genuine self.’”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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Book SynopsisA book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual; struggle and resistance.Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.Trade Review"Pink Noise is delightfully attuned to the living complexity of language, an experience that Holden renders as both conceptual and tactile."—Michael Martin Shea, Colorado Review"In Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An on-coming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for."—Fanny Howe"These poems are flecked with quartz and risk, love and dejection, pink and blood-red ecstatic brooding. Kevin’s line redirects consciousness to the magic of forgotten minutia and overlooked associative deliverance 'from cypress to pine before / fierce queen on a blank stage.' His language sets that stage for a tenderness that is in no way meek, for a sense of divinity found where life is. His is one of the voices that sets the bar for what poetry can do in this world."—Harmony Holiday"A queer lyric—like a queer body—holds within itself culture’s dueling impulses. In Kevin Holden’s singular poetics, libido’s lavish disordering resists rationality’s drive toward 'the war and reality / of our clear / civilization.' What results is a “rose tone row,” a nonce musical system he calls Pink Noise. Here queer experience sings alongside angular, abstract phrases sampled from math and science. Beautifully resisting conventional beauty, Holden makes atonal music whose fine phrasing 'glints, glitters, shines, shimmers, glows.'"—Brian Teare"This book is like a vardøger. I felt it before it arrived—'a former ghost.' Holden’s formations come together, crystalline and spinning, into consummate shape. Geometry, mathematics, gay sex, earth, cosmos, mysticism, and skepticism are held together in these pages as in a polyhedron, semi-transparent, where each facet is visible at a certain angle but from another angle disappears to show a facet on the shape’s opposite side. Beautiful and distinct, this work is filled with discrete infinities."—Edgar Garcia

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

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

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