Search results for ""Wave Books""

In Michael Earl Craig’s sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar.Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the “Italy of God,” or the milking rituals in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, Iggy Horse is a book that articulates the sadness and strangeness of American life with the poetic observations of true satire.

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“some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between.” So writes poet, critic, theorist, and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten in his latest poetry collection perennial fashion presence falling. Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.

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In her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.

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Laynie Browne's latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language, and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation Browne's exquisite collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.

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The newest collection from Cedar Sigo, All This Time, pays homage to artistic influences that have shaped his poetic practices. Lyrical and haunted, these poems call attention to the experience of living as an embodiment of art, reminding the reader that poetry is like an open-air structure; it is open to all who are curious enough to welcome everything in.

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In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of life’s ephemerality.

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Former 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.

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With 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.

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2021 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.

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A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021An NPR Best Book of 2021An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021In Hoarders, Kate Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects our cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender. In the absurdist tradition of Kafka and Beckett, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition.

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In 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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With his fifth collection of poems, Michael Earl Craig delivers a fresh set of tableaux that have us squinting aslant at the ordinary. Dexterously constructed, the scenes, conversations, letters, instructions, stories, bios, and little fables of Woods and Clouds Interchangeable twist the comedic into shapes of startling seriousness, making us laugh at the same time they widen the dimensions of the world we live in.

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A power ballad was a hair metal band's voyage into the softer side of rock, compromising to the integrity of the genre, but genuine and trailblazing. So too is Caples' Power Ballads. His poems and prose pieces are bizarre and hilarious, in which Dylan and Bowie sit alongside the French surrealists, with the occasional turn into heartfelt romanticism.

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Rhythmic and energetic poems, exciting to hear read aloud. Sigo is a Native American and gay poet, and we expect that this book will particularly interest both communities. In 1995 Sigo was awarded a scholarship to study writing and poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado where he studied with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, and Joanne Kyger, among other poets. Many of these poems are addressed to other poets, helping readers relate his work to a larger poetic history. Sigo has lived in San Francisco since 1999 and is active in the poetry scene there, which is one of the most vibrant in the country.

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"Zucker is a poet of bottom-scraping, blood-chilling existential anxiety, one among many, and a poet of New York City, one among many, and a poet of American Jewish inheritance, one among many, and one of the funniest, too."--Boston Review Rachel Zucker returns to themes of motherhood, marriage, and the life of an artist in this double collection of poems. Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations. That Great Diaspora I'll never leave New York & when I do I too will be unbodied--what? you imagine I might transmogrify? I'm from nowhere which means here & so wade out into the briny dream of elsewheres like a released dybbyk but can't stand the soulessness now everyone who ever made sense to me has died & everyone I love grows from my body like limbs on a rootless tree Rachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.

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"One of the wisest books I've read in years, and it would be a shame to think that only poets will read it."--David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review, on Madness, Rack, and Honey "What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle ...any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence."--Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America, William Carlos Williams Award citation Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from recent National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Mary Ruefle. Full of Ruefle's particular wisdom and wit, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts--its paradoxes, failures, and loss--and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness. If only I'd understood that loneliness was just loneliness, only loneliness and nothing more. But I was blind. Little did I know. If only I'd invented salt. I might have died happy. I wish I loved you, but you can't have everything. Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

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"[Selected Poems] offers readers a chance to catch on to one of the most distinctive talents of our time, one of the few who can genuinely startle...Ruefle is clearly one of the best American poets writing, and her body of work is remarkable for its spiritual force, intelligence, stylistic virtuosity, and adventurousness."--Tony Hoagland of all things standing furthest from what is real, stand these trees shaking with dispensable joy ...Mary Ruefle is the winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award and has authored ten collections of poetry; The Most of It, a book of prose; and A Little White Shadow, a collection of erasures. She teaches at Vermont College.

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Berrigan's audience is deservedly broad and loyal: he is among the most respected and well-known poets writing in America today, both for his work, which unceasingly challenges language and the role of the writer-citizen, and for the many hats he wears as editor, educator, and curator. Berrigan comes from a family intimately tied to 20th century poetics: his mother is acclaimed poet Alice Notley, his father, the acclaimed late poet Ted Berrigan. Berrigan served as Artistic Director of the legendary Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church (2004-2007), and hosted its venerated and well-attended Wednesday Night Reading Series. He is poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail and Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He also teaches at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. Berrigan was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry, and has received two grants from the Fund for Poetry. Notes From Irrelevance has nearly limitless possibilities for teaching; its multiple points of entry including the juxtaposition of love for and mistrust of language, its interest in philosophy, politics, and the subjectivity of being in the world, all of which are very current topics of discussion in poetry today.

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Often breathtaking ...this latest collection from Kocot intersperses frantic images with hauntingly simple and loss-laden outcries. Throughout, there is the poet's thwarted longing for an understanding that cannot come: "all poets and poetry elude me,/ especially myself and my own"; Kocot's speaker--a voice simultaneously adorable, helpless and deeply brave--is both obsessed with and frustrated by process: "See, in a poem, things actually/ have to be doing things,/ not just floating around." ...Kocot's most lucid moments achieve a kind of visionary clarity ("The waters are very simple today./ Hospital blue, in error of twilight"), a beautiful refusal to accept the inevitable ("Listen, I said it before, die/ and come back as fire") and inklings of the kind of loss that could yield such a powerful, almost overflowing book: "I wait to go to you,/ smoking and breaking curses under/ the Jackson Pollock fuck you moon." --Publishers Weekly

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A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous. If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream ...There is a floating sadness nearby ...Chelsey Minnis is the author of three previous collections. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in ourselves: "Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary." Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978. She is the author of several chapbooks and has attended Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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With the adventurousness of Ashbery and the gregariousness of Billy Collins, no one's bag of tricks is as bottomless as Caroline Knox's. They're Quaker guns, a creative ruse, the kind you couldn't and wouldn't fire: they're flotsam, jetsam, or any old trees, ships' logs. They're broken masts. They're the Friends of the Friends. Caroline Knox is the winner of the 2005 Maurice English Award and the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

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"One of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature--honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."--Dennis Cooper Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB in 1974. BUST magazine calls her "the rock star of modern poetry" and The New York Times says she's "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant garde." Myles' trademark punk-lesbian sensibility and intimate knowledge of poetic tradition are at work in this eighth collection, where every love poem is political, and every political poem is, ultimately, about love. From "Home": I thought if I inventoried home it would be broad my eyes fling open like a doll's to the virtual space that suddenly resembles the walls the most interesting artists are large; monsters while the people we know are masses of flowers & when I turn on my cellphone I see everyone Eileen Myles has published over a dozen books of poetry, prose, and plays. Formerly the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, as well as a write-in candidate for president in 1992, in 1997 Myles toured with Sister Spit's Ramblin' Road Show. Her books include Snowflake/different streets, Inferno, The Importance of Being Iceland, Skies, Maxfield Parrish, Not Me, and Chelsea Girls (stories).

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"Joe Wenderoth is a brilliant writer, original and subversive, sensitive and strange. I read his work with awe and admiration."-Ben Marcus "Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' ...But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary-a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible."-Cal Bedient This clear-eyed new work from a favorite young poet is searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Joe Wenderoth's determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness. "Luck" So a screaming woke you just in time An animal's scream, or animals'. What kind of animal it was doesn't matter, and cannot, in any case, be determined. The point is you are saved. Your mouth has been opened. Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore and is the author of five books of prose and poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.

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Conscious of politics and of music, these poems continue Conoley's explorations into the questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. This collection takes its title from Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben's notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning. Gillian Conoley's collections include Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, Tall Stranger (nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Some Gangster Pain and the chapbooks Woman Speaking Inside Film Noir and Fatherless Afternoon. Winner of several Pushcart Prizes, the Jerome J. Shestack Award in Poetry and included in Best American Poetry, she is poet-in-residence and professor at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.

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- Knox's last collection was reviewed in The New Yorker, among other venues. - Knox is widely respected both in her generation and among a younger generation of poets. - Except for A Beaker: New and Selected Poems (Verse Press, 2002), this is the only collection of Knox’s work currently in print. - Knox has taught at Harvard and at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

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Former 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.

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Winner of the Big Other Award in TranslationWinner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary WorkFormally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

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The Poetics of Wrongness is a collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016.Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares “I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.” Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde—among many others—into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet’s need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Prescient in their original observations, these expanded talks seek to respond to and engage the many political events since their presentation, remaining timelessly persistent in their galvanizing force.

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2016 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.

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"Rachel Zucker may be Generation X's likeliest heir to the confessional legacy of Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck, and Sharon Olds."-The Believer Rending the terrorizing forces of modern existence from abstraction and placing them directly in our laps, Museum of Accidents is a brutally honest epic of domestic proportions. Rachel Zucker is the author of three collections of poetry and co-editor of Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she currently lives in New York City with her husband and three sons, where she is a certified labor doula.

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"In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality, Lasky's poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be."--Julia Bloch, Bitch "The beautiful thing about Lasky, in all her work, but particularly here, is her ability to create that same sense of earnestness, the sense that she is telling you a secret."--InDigest Magazine, InDigest Picks Go, brave and gentle reader, with Dorothea Lasky to the "purple motel / where the bird lives." Go with her, as you have willingly gone down the dark passages before, with her bare-faced poems for guidance. Thunderbird's controlled rage plunges into the black interior armed with nothing but guts and Lasky's own fiery heart to light the way. Baby of air You rose into the mystical Side of things You could no longer live with us We put you in a little home Where they shut and locked the door And at night You blew out And went wandering ...Dorothea Lasky is also the author of Black Life and AWE, both from Wave Books. She lives in New York.

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There has been growing interest in Ernst Meister because of the publication of two books in his informal trilogy, In Time's Rift (2012) and Wallless Space (2014). We expect much excitement for this final installment. This collection differs from the others in its expansion, both in ideas and the length of the poems. Though he wrote from outside the literary circles of his time, Ernst Meister received accolades for his poetry, including Germany's most prestigious poetry prize, the Georg Büchner Prize. Translator Foust is an esteemed poet with an established fan base. Translator Frederick is a noted German scholar. The original poems, in German, will face the English translations. This book holds diverse appeal to those interested in philosophy, existential questions, and international literature.

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"There is no doubt in my mind or in anyone's mind who knows these poems well that they are major American poetry and will be in anthologies for one hundred years, I mean that good."—Allen Ginsberg"A graceful rigor seems to be Wieners' natural mode; we feel the force of deliberation in his most free forms—he is never casual. The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.

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"If you take a broad squint at our nation's new poets you can find two general strategies: poets who are carrying the torch, and poets who are using it to start fires. And then we have Joshua Beckman. He seems to be doing everything."--Daniel Handler, The Believer "Beckman ...does the incredible work of writing poems full of desire, for a world in the midst of radical upheaval."--Publishers Weekly (starred review for Take It) Joshua Beckman is at his most immediate, attentive, and available in The Inside of an Apple. Beckman's latest collection of sincere, spare poems invites the reader to experience a revelation of consciousness and a generosity of spirit. Let my still dark soul be music. A made whistle floating out a window arranged. Some little thing fell and I picked it up and up it kept on going. Eight dead stars make a sickle, and the earth is covered in grass. Joshua Beckman is the author of nine books, including collections of poetry, translations, and collaborations. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

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"Melding images of natural timelessness with appearances from contemporary culture, Koeneke's collection is easily enjoyed by the well-seasoned bard and poetic neophyte alike."--Bookslut Etruria is a diverse collection of poems featuring found language, ancient Latin, sitcom stars, even Marianne Moore, unified by a threading of ideas and meditations that span the ancient and contemporary. heart, build up your fire like a neighbor getting too drunk at spring's first barbecue Rodney Koeneke is author of Musee Mechanique and Rouge State, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award, along with several chapbooks. He teaches at Portland State University.

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Selected by Alice Notley for the National Poetry Series, Laynie Browne's sixth collection casts a spell. In these fragmented poetic tales, characters disappear and reemerge, their charms reconfigured, their stories unraveling, their happy endings elusive. The book's coda consists of a fantastical poetic dictionary, asking readers to redefine their sense of meaning. Laynie Browne was born in 1966 and grew up in Los Angeles. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Daily Sonnets and Mermaid's Purse. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington Bothell and Mills College.

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In the poem-essays that comprise A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration, “play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.”

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In her latest book, New Life, Lambda Award–winning poet Ana Božičević writes, “For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul.” Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all—surprising. New Life is a book that is Dantesque in its ability to commune with the dead without becoming fixed in the past. Instead, the poems here have a distinct sense of nonlinear time, where each line feels like an ancient bone discovered, only to be reassembled into a chimera of another self. In this way, Božičević continually greets herself as a stranger, reminding us that in some respects every poem is a love poem.

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Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021.As kinetic on the page as they are in person, these lectures offer an urgent critique of the intersections between violence and entertainment, interrogating the ways in which poetry, humor, visual art, music, pop culture, and performance alternately uphold and subvert this violence. With genius precision and an avant-garde sensibility, Kearney examines the nuances around Black visibility and its aestheticization. In myriad ways, Optic Subwoof is a book that establishes Kearney as one of the most dynamic writers and thinkers of the twenty-first century.

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From Mexican-born poet Dolores Dorantes, Copy is a book-length prose poem examining extrication, refuge, and reintegration, presented in English for the first time by award-winning translator Robin Meyers.Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person's disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration.This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

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"Without the copying process," the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, "there would be no life, no reality." Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person's disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

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With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon's poetry (née Dara Wier), the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Wier brings generous attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and the ways in which our stories around them help shape our sense of being. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express "love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage."

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Tomaž is an extended poem assembled from assembled by Joshua Beckman from his recorded conversations with one of the foundational figures of the European avant-garde, Tomaž Šalamun. This book includes photographs and translated original poems throughout, some of which are presented for the first time in English, and it covers the first forty years of his life in his own words. With careful articulation and generosity of attention, Joshua Beckman becomes a conduit for the language of Šalamun, assembling an autobiographic poem in a way that only a poet, translator, and friend could..

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The newest collection from poet, editor, and Bagley Wright lecturer Cedar Sigo, All This Time, pays homage to artistic influences that have shaped his poetic practices. Lyrical and haunted, these poems call attention to the experience of living as an embodiment of art, reminding the reader that poetry is like an open-air structure; it is open to all who are curious enough to welcome everything in.

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2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYEschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular traditions, while examining histories, pop culture, myth, and folklore. Both dazzling and devastating, Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.

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