Search results for ""Wave Books""

Matthew Rohrer's latest collection explores the space between wakefulness and sleep, that drowsy loosening of consciousness called hypnagogia. Comprised not of dream-poems but poems that strain to hear dreams' faintest messages squeaked through into waking life, The Sky Contains the Plans lays bare an imagination in which the mundane and surreal contort each other into a new kind of primordial reality.

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The poems of Noelle Kocot's latest collection are ones of acute astonishment, tracking the intense spiritual and ecstatic elements that pervade the everyday world, the "fine surges of torrential / Probabilities" amid the "flotsam strewn under this compromised / Heaven." Bleak yet full of glory, these poems are a quest that showcase a poet at her visionary and poetic heights, where every turn of line, every sudden appearance, is one to arrest our attention and thought.

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

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Written from 1969 to 1971, West Coast Beat poet Philip Whalen's "Scenes of Life at the Capital" is a lasting testament to the ambition, range, powers, and devotion of this crucially important American voice. Positioned among the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, Whalen looks across the ocean to address the new frontiers, political problems, and transformative hopes of the United States of the 1960s—so much of which still resonates today. In this new edition—with a deep and enlightening afterword by David Brazil—Whalen's poem is further cemented as a fundamental work in American literary history.

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Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.

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Lisa Fishman's sixth book of poetry is centered on bodies and where they are in relation to each other--whether a body is of plant; of person; or of words, and whether a body is personal or civic; singular or collective; alive or dead. The contradictions of lyric unfold, in this most unconventional elegy, by means of perception so steady it can change. 24 Pages and other poems extends backward and forward, with the presence of many, such as John Clare and Friederike Mayrocker, helping along the way. As if a corridor could open or the EAR's two missing letters -- h e a r t -- e a r t h -- wherever an animal pops out of the water such as a hooded merganser appeared to do a somersault diving under, not like a mallard more like a child or a ball -- it didn't come up until it did Lisa Fishman is the author of six books of poetry, including 24 Pages and other poems, F L O W E R C A R T, Current, and The Happiness Experiment. The first Lorine Niedecker Poet-in-Residence in Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island, Fishman lives in Orfordville and Madison, Wisconsin. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

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Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire. Like fried potato chips -- I believe so, utterly so -- The hush-hush proving ground was utterly proven as history -- Hardly=History -- I believe so, eerily so -- hush hush -- Now watch this performance -- Bull's-eye -- An uncanny human understanding on target -- Absolute=History -- loaded with terrifying meaning -- The Air Force doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration -- Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.

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"Hoa Nguyen's poems probe dailiness to divorce us from our base assumptions about how language might present the world to us. Her poems comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet."--Bookslut "Phrase by phrase Nguyen's work can be conversational, playful, funny, angry, acutely self-aware, and loaded with sensory information."--Anselm Berrigan, from the introduction Red Juice represents a decade of poems written roughly between 1998 and 2008, previously only available in small-run handmade chapbooks, journals, and out-of-print books. This collection of early poems by Vietnamese American poet Hoa Nguyen showcases her feminist ecopoetics and unique style, all lyrical in the post-modern tradition. [BUDDHA'S EARS ARE DROOPY TOUCH HIS SHOULDERS] Buddha's ears are droopy touch his shoulders as scarves fly out of windows and I shriek at the lotus of enlightenment Travel to Free Street past Waco to the hole in the Earth wearing water I'm aiming my mouth for apple pie Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC, area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint. She is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks and lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University and curates a reading series.

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"Basking in the twilight of Late Romanticism, Meier ...finds the rays seductive but damaging ...Meier's sophisticated debut promises further developments."-Publishers Weekly on Terrain Vague Domesticity, nature, and heartbreak inhabit this seriously playful second collection. Through precise description and inventive vocabulary, Meier's poems are relentless in their efforts to sincerely address contemporary uncertainty and love. A great book for readers looking to rediscover Romantic poetry: "Embrace was a word first used of forts, / until the one body fell down inside the other body, and was lost."

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Written by 100 American poets, Isn't It Romantic offers an engaging look at how contemporary poets respond afresh to the well-trammeled territory of the love poem. Award-winning poets from across the country lend their voices to this important document of contemporary poetry. The book also features a bonus full-length audio CD of love songs by independent recording artists. Anthology Contributors include: Karen Volkman, Joe Wenderoth, Eleni Sikelianos, Juliana Spahr, Brenda Shaughnessy, Matthew Rohrer, Claudia Rankine, D.A. Powell, Hoa Nguyen, Noelle Kocot, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Young, Brian Henry, Christine Hume, Matthea Harvey, Arielle Greenberg, Thalia Field, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Timothy Donnelly, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Stephen Burt, Joshua Beckman, and more. Contributors to the audio CD include: David Berman, Richard Buckner, Vic Chesnutt, Ida, Doug Martsch, Mark Mulcahy, Megan Reiley, Jenny Toomey and more. Editor Brett Fletcher Lauer is the poetry in motion director at the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of CROWD Magazine. He is the co-editor of Poetry In Motion from Coast to Coast (W. W. Norton, 2002) and his poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Editor Aimee Kelley is the editor and publisher of CROWD Magazine. She received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA from the New School for Social Research. She has worked at non-profit organizations such as the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spinning Jenny, 811 Books and elsewhere. Charles Simic (Introduction) is the author of many books of poems, including The World Doesn't End, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

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Nakayasu's book-length poem uses its tumbling dramatic form to create a new inquiry into "character," "time," "place," "direction " and other elements. Lyrical language and personal, engaging voices take the reader on a dizzying and affecting journey through a "geography of risk." This wholly original work brings poetry into regions hitherto explored only by the most experimental forms of music and plastic arts. Sawako Nakayasu was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived in the US since the age of six. Her previous pubications include Clutch (Tinfish, 2002), Balconic (Duration, 2003), and Nothing fictional but accuracy or arrangement (she (Faux, 2003), and she edits the press Factorial. In 2003 she received the US-Japan Creative Artists' Program Fellowship from the NEA.

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Clumsy acrobats tumbling through the circuses of philosophy, architecture, politics, religion and just about anything else you can think of, Steve Shavel’s wild meditations drift and whirl with spastic brilliance among language’s most earnest and playful coincidences.

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-Greenberg is also a highly visible critic; she has written recent reviews in The Boston Review, Rain Taxi, Verse, and EPR. - Greenberg teaches at Columbia College, Chicago, and has taught at Bentley College in Boston. - Greenberg will have poems in the Sept/Oct. 2003 issue of American Poetry Review, and extensive publication in other literary magazines in Fall 2003 and Spring 2004

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Of Beckman’s follow-up collection to his APR-Honickman award winning first book, Tomaz Salamun writes: "There are no similarities with Apollinaire or Ginsberg, except with what they were doing to Time while they were young." The contemplative poems of this collection unfurl in startling and beautiful new ways.

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"Very fast, very conceptual, funny and magical. Nobody like her. I loved her work then and now."--Eileen Myles Thirty-five years' worth of poems by Susie Timmons, a poet beloved by her peers, previously only available in small-run editions. Her poems are witty, smart, and quick, with a pleasantly surprising clarity and freshness. Susie Timmons was born in Chicago and has lived in New York most of her life. Timmons's first book of poetry, Locked from the Outside, was the inaugural winner of the Ted Berrigan Award, judged by Alice Notley, Robert Creeley, Anselm Hollo, and Ron Padgett.

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Noelle Kocot recalls a break with reality that occurred a decade and a half ago in vivid, raw language, one word per line. The resulting slender columns are sharply focused and intense. There's a cult following for her unique imagination, self-professed in a poem as "filled with pulchritude and peopleness," and her seventh collection does not disappoint. The Singing Language Around The Life Noelle Kocot is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Soul in Space (2013), The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011), and a book of translations of poems by Tristan Corbiere, Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). Her previous works include the discography Damon's Room (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). She is also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Her poems were included in the Best American Poetry anthologies for 2001, 2012, and 2013, as well as in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry edited by Paul Hoover. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry and the American Poetry Review, as well as a residency fellowship from Lannan Foundation. She is the Poet Laureate of Pemberton Borough, New Jersey.

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A gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse from poet Matthew Rohrer. In a Russian-doll of fictional episodes, we follow a midlevel publishing assistant over the course of a day as he encounters ghost stories, science fiction adventures, Victorian hashish eating, and robot bigfoots. Rohrer mesmerizes with wildly imaginative tales and resonant verse in this compelling love letter to storytelling.this nightthey all seemed asleepfor a while the stark shadowsheld meonly my mind movedwildly behind my eyesuntil I heard a tinysong coming from the driversong of a bandit’s brokenheart, song of his betrayalI slept and dreamed I was awakeMatthew Rohrer is the author of Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

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Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust''s madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi''s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving th

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"One might argue that nothing is sacred in Caroline Knox's work, but it would be truer to its spirit to say that everything is sacred here-and all are welcome."-Rebecca Frank, Boston Review "Caroline Knox reminds us how whangy and interesting it all is."-C.D. Wright "She is often obscure, but her allusions are as much a sign of camaraderie as of scholarly pretension, her poems a pert crystallization impossible in more narrative poetry."-The New Yorker Caroline Knox once again demonstrates that she is a master at lyrical billiards, sending all levels of diction in surprising and comedic directions. No subject matter is off-limits for her examination. Her vast range of experiment is exciting, and the ensuing poems are games, dreams, and riddles. This collection is art on the page for the eye and the ear. From "Poem": Of milk, these persons make the butter until have what are cheeses when they're at home; of cheese, hors d'oeuvres of sandwich are manufactured sandwich islands. The workforce custom subsume draft cereal. Forasmuch as we are not birdlike, we pig out, crikey, put away comestibles big-time. Caroline Knox's most recent publications are Flemish (Wave Books, 2013), and Nine Worthies (Wave Books, 2010). Quaker Guns (Wave Books, 2008) received a Recommended Reading Award 2009 from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Six poems are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Second Edition. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (1996, 2006), The Fund for Poetry, and the Yale/Mellon Visiting Faculty Program.

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During 2014, Wave Books editor Joshua Beckman traveled around the country giving lectures on poetry. Collected here as two books in conversation—and inaugurating Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series publications—these talks provide a rare and unique insight into a deeply literary life. In The Lives of the Poems, Beckman offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment, a sort of echolocating—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books.

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Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2014 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry Winner of The Believer Poetry Award "The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form...Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory."--The Rumpus "There was a time some of us believed poetry and poets could save the world; CAConrad never stopped believing it."--The Huffington Post From "M.I.A. ESCALATOR": The ultrasound machine gives the parents the ability to talk to the unborn by their gender, taking the intersexed nine-month conversation away from the child. The opportunities limit us in our new world. Encourage parents to not know, encourage parents to allow anticipation on either end. Escalators are a nice ride, slowly rising and falling, writing while riding, notes for the poem, meeting new people at either end, "Excuse me, EXCUSE ME..." My escalator notes became a poem. CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which he pushes his political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics. CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009), as well as several other books of poetry and essays. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

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"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer--she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes." --Eileen Myles A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader. I was reading a line in a book, then reading a line in another book, and performing small acts in between: I sat at intervals on the toilet, I slept sporadically, I ate kale and "fish food," and called myself "Renee" for a time. Nobody knew who I was at the grocery store, but going there was my big event. I knew the books of these people; I knew these people and I didn't change their names, but when they appeared in my books it wasn't really their stories I was telling, so they didn't need my protection and I could go "Danielle, Danielle" all day. Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. In addition to Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), she is the author of eight works of prose, including the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), as well as a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her most recent work of fiction Morelia is forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 fellowship from The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2016 grant to artists from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in New England with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.

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With breathtaking fervor, Sandra Simonds delivers an extended address to Orlando, which stands as both a city marked by vibrant promises fallen into betrayals and abuses and the specter of a past lover. Developing a series of recurring episodes and detailing an intricate network of relationships entangled in love, pain, anger, and compassion, this book boldly approaches personal trauma and memory in order to better understand the present.

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Body & Glass extends Koeneke's experimentations in Etruria with a tightly woven set of more compact poems that brighten and sharpen the lyric's usual corners. The 'anonymous' forms of folk song and epitaph, parable and textual fragment, arrange to sketch the selves, living and dead, who might say them. These are poems of an improvised interiority, shared between the poet and reader but broad enough for multitudes.

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"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."—Eileen MylesA book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint. Afterword by Fred Moten.Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.

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"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."--Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe "Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." --Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects In Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page. pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into corners Anselm Berrigan is the current poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

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"The poems of Anthony McCann are beautiful, brutal, and unerring. They present us with, or return us to, a complicated, violent, poignant, weird, and mysterious world--a world which is very particularly his, and also our own, re-sung. For some time now I have believed McCann to be one of the finest poets writing today."--Maggie Nelson "McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to 'waste the whole day feeling these things.'"--Boston Review Thing Music is full of flesh, of creatures tangled in their worlds. Marked variously by the desert and coastal landscapes of Southern California and the intersections of phenomenology and anarchism, these poems are porous bodies, traversed by light and noise. From "Mouth Guitar": Now the pulsing afternoon takes each belly in its hands lifts it up towards some glass and all that's inside While he crawled on with his body towards vengeance or the state Anthony McCann lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project, and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.

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"The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time."-John Ashbery Christian Hawkey constructs a visionary world rich with fantastic imagery. In blurring the line of reality versus imagination, this turbulent dreamscape calls into question the frightening and surprising nature of the actual world. Christian Hawkey's The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hawkey is co-founder of the international poetry journal jubilat, and he teaches at Pratt Institute.

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The bold and surprising imagination of Joe Wenderoth is everywhere present in these essays moving fluidly between aesthetics, obscenity, America, censorship, and the craft of poetry. Fans of his previous work know he is one of those rare figures who travels between pop culture, poetry, and cultural critique, and all will be thrilled to find his uncompromising and inimitable sensibility on brilliant display. Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore. His books include the novel Letters To Wendy's (Verse Press, 2000) and the poetry collections It Is If I Speak and Disfortune (Wesleyan, 2000, 1995). Agony: A Proposal is forthcoming from Verse Press. He teaches at the University of California Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

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This remarkable second book from Diane Wald was a finalist for the 2002 James Laughlin Award. Michael Burkard writes "The Yellow Hotel is a sensational book."

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Dara Wier’s poems call to mind "the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska . . . [and] draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence."—Harvard Review

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Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer PrizeListed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2022Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in PoetryAmerican Book Award–winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.

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In these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.

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Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon''s fifth book of poetry, All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it. “You almost let your ego go,” he writes, “but oh—/maybe tomorrow.” Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet’s address shifts in these poems from “I” to “you” and back again, inviting his audience to shift along with him. Out of that agility, All About You builds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic “we”:  “imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh - full of chatter - / Hush now / Come on, let’s run - ”

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As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.

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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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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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Guard the Mysteries is a compendium of five talks that the poet Cedar Sigo presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture series. Retracing the ways in which he first encountered the realm of poetry, Sigo plumbs the particulars of modern critique, identity politics, early influences, and poetic form to produce a singular ‘autobiography of voice.’ Across these lectures, Sigo explores his childhood on the Suquamish Reservation, while paying homage to revolutionary artists, teachers, and thinkers whom have shaped his poetic aesthetic. Simultaneously timeless and extremely timely, these talks ponder the presences that California Buddhism, LGBTQ+ experiences, and Native Nations occupy in the poetic world and the world at large.

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

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"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman's latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman's book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

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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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Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Joshua Beckman’s latest collection of carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.

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Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Joshua Beckman’s latest collection of carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.

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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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Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and echoic resonance, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection.

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

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Through heartbreaking, often comic, genre-non-conforming pieces spanning the past 10 years, Rachel Zucker trains her relentless attention on marriage, motherhood, grief, the need to speak, depression, sex, and many other topics. Part poetry, part memoir, part lyric essay—and not limited by any of these categories—SoundMachine is a book written out of the persistent feeling that the human voice is both a meaningless sound and the only way we know we exist.

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