Search results for ""Wave Books""

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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Constellating four central topics—ghosts, colors, animals, and bees—in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, “metaphysical I,” which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In deceptively simple language carrying profound insights directly to readers—with a sense that is at once bold and subtle—Lasky serves as an encouraging guide through the startling, sometimes dangerous, always exhilarating landscapes of feral poetic imagination.

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Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a place within national and global struggle.

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“Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air.” —NPRIn these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation “as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet’s search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America.The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories.There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can’t really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache.Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

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Poems that break language apart from the inside. Brolaski's third collection combines Latin, pop culture, etymology, politics, and sex in linguistic experimentation. It asks the reader to let go of expectations and be open to a sonically immersive experience. The poems are as radical as they are romantic, rewriting the rules of grammar and creating a personal vernacular. Julian T. Brolaski is the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books 2009). Julian lives in Oakland, and is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country band The Western Skyline.

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"[Wolff's poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."-Bookforum Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff's internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning-, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative-two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels. From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)": I'm really digging this blue sky after so much rain with my regular menstrual cycle my Def Jam progesterone cream the blow-in (in my pocket) (ripped out) from in-flight music magazine "touching cloth" like the Romantics do. Insert jitney. Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. Her second, Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

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"One of the great original voices of our times--a pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence."--Jack Kerouac "Robert Lax's poems [prove] yet again that the gift to be simple is the gift to be free, that less is more, and that least may sometimes be most."--John Ashbery Poems (1962--1997) gathers thirty-five years of Robert Lax's work, rarely published and largely composed in solitude on the island of Patmos. Compiled and edited by the poet's former assistant John Beer, this selection reflects--through meditative sequences in striking vertical columns--Lax's rigorous attention to the world around him and his relentless aspiration to new ways of writing. love & death are blood & bone love & death are bread & stone love & death are rose & thorn (love & death are sheep & shorn) Robert Lax (1915--2000) published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose with small presses and worked as an editor for the New Yorker, Jubilee, and PAX. From 1962 to the end of his life, he made his home in the Greek islands. John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. For two years in the late 1990s, he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently lives and teaches in Oregon.

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"A most inquisitive poet who relishes living inside her expansive vocabulary."--C.D. Wright A web of wholly original madhattery, Flemish showcases serious language play and the skill of a master craftsperson. Caroline Knox is writing at the top of her game, and reading her is a pleasure not to be missed. Our font is full of construction- paper fish, made by the church school for us to each take home one of, a reverse tithe. Caroline Knox is the recipient of numerous awards and has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

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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, and as I Heart Your Fate makes clear, he is only getting better."--Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty In his third collection of poetry, Anthony McCann fuses the worlds of dream, art, love, and brute humanity, taking the redemptive power of the romantic to new and surprising extremes. "I don't have a body to feel afraid," writes McCann, and these poems, bald and imaginative, almost convince the reader it must be so, save for the fact that they are so vitally, essentially human. From "Of the Mockingbird": So that once again, beloved readers, I find that I have died. I die each time inside my body each time I eat your food-- O World (By which I always mean THE LIGHT) Or let's just say there's a forehead between my body and the light and it deactivates the World Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. His previous books include Moongarden and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and works with Machine Project.

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"While others are busy catching their own reflection in the storefront of poetry, [John] Godfrey goes to work on the damage and squalor of the overlooked. His genius rings true."-Peter Gizzi With an enemy like daylight who needs the psychology dime Hips do the work and I cross the world A longtime resident of Manhattan's Lower East Side, John Godfrey works as a registered nurse in New York City, where he cares for homebound AIDS patients in Brooklyn and Queens. City of Corners is his sixth collection of poetry.

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"Remember when I told you about the memory competitions?" asks Dara Wier in her latest collection. Memories, apologies, and misunderstanding compete in this series of lyric poems that are intricately connected in their ability to recollect and speak to one another.

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"It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake."-Brigit Pegeen Kelly, National Poetry Series judge A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety of intimate perspectives and using a range of innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture, and circumstance, alive and speaking. Tyehimba Jess' numerous awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A native of Detroit, he is a proud alumnus of the Chicago Green Mill Slam teams and Cave Canem. His first nonfiction book is African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (Citadel Press, 2003).

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In his introduction to this, Richards’ debut collection, Tomaz Salamun writes "It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it. How he restores internal time to the work of art."

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- Rohrer's newest collection, A Green Light, is due out from Verse Press in May 2004, and will generate renewed interest in his backlist. - Rohrer’s first collection sold extremely well, and he continues to be one of the most talked-about poets of his generation. - Rohrer is a poetry editor of the highly visible New York magazine Fence.

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Unlike many Wave titles, this paperback edition follows the hardcover by one year and will arrive in the market enjoying a year's worth of very strong publicity and word-of-mouth, attracting new readers with the new format and lower price. All of Mary Ruefle's books are continually among Wave's topselling titles. We expect this newest collection to sell similarly to her Trances of the Blast hardcover. My Private Property is comprised entirety of short prose pieces, similar to her prose poetry collection The Most of It, which is a very high seller and received glowing praise. The collection is a light, pleasant read, offering a more casual reading experience but with a similar appeal to Ruefle's most recent collection of prose, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. Madness, Rack, and Honey was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. The book also received a full-page write-up in the January 16, 2013 New York Times Book Review. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous high profile awards, including the William Carlos Williams award for her Selected Poems in 2011, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

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Beckman's new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is, as Publishers Weekly notes, "the real thing." Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous poetry collections, translations, and collaborative works. His awards include a NYFA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

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"One of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time."—Dwight Garner, New York Times“In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked, and often funny.” —Publishers WeeklyChelsey Minnis’s new collection of poems follows the struggle of a flawed character in a cinematic world. Playing with old ideas of wealth and love from Holly wood’s golden era, these poems flirt with nostalgia without ever succumbing to it, casting a new light on the present through the fantasies of the past.What do you want with me? I’m just a dirty little shoplifter.I’m like a woman in a sequined gown in a dark cave. Can you tell me I’m worse than others?OK, yes, I’m worse than others, but can you say I’m the worst of all?Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.

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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 maddened speech, 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 in peril.

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Sandra Simonds’s Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page, these triptychs are joined or disjoined in several ways—through diction, through the special relation of words (evoking intimacy, touch or, in contrast, alienation), and through thematic similarities or dissimilarities. Each poem is wildly surprising, ranging from conversations between Baudelaire and Jayne Eyre to the enjoyment of macaroons. As a result, the poems energize the confines of this writing space as they invite readers to recall painterly constructions and news headlines, wherein each pillar is in conversation with another, sequentially and simultaneously. With the same lyric attention found in all of Simonds’s poetry, the poems here mark an innovative shift in poetics that is both polyvocal and singular.

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The inaugural book of Wave's new interview series, There You Are combines forty years of interviews, letters, poems, and journals to present a narrative of the remarkable poet Joanne Kyger, who has intersected with the most influential movements of late twentieth-century poetry, yet has remained rooted in her daily practice with a forthright attention to our present moment. One of the major poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, CA. After studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she moved to San Francisco in 1957, where she became a member of the circle of poets centered around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan and soon traveled to India with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. She returned to California in 1964 and published her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, in 1965. In 1969, she settled in Bolinas, California, where she continues to reside today. She has published over thirty books of poetry and prose, including The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964, On Time: Poems 2005-2014, As Ever: Selected Poems, and About Now: Collected Poems, which won the 2008 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Royals, Language Arts, Stranger in Town, Expensive Magic, and two editions of Selected Writings.

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"One finishes a poem feeling as though they have taken part in a singular event that can be returned and mined again and again without exhausting the kernel of mystery around which each poem swirls." —BOMB Cedar Sigo's fourth collection restlessly enacts the pleasures of writing. With a mix of condensed, syllabic poems and longer serial pieces, and with many poems addressed to other poets, Sigo explores the romance of being a poet while also drawing on the color and symmetries of the visual arts of his Native American identity. twin angels at the impasse stripping wire out from the earth bolts of thunder pealed from under the falls stones thrown (from very high) to form a ziggurat an hourglass I almost forgot to intone Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Royals, Language Arts, Stranger in Town, Expensive Magic, and two editions of Selected Writings.

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"Wier is a poet concerned with capturing the fluidity of thought and experience—and not diminishing its forward charge in doing so. Wier's lines have always had a wild whitewater crash to them, overwhelming any vessel she pours them into." —Boston Globe"That's how one human leaves us" ends the first poem of Dara Wier's direct and powerful new collection, a raw and fluid exploration of grief. Wier records her thoughts with intelligence, clarity, honesty, and immediacy, showing us the unraveling of her world and her new consciousness after a great loss.it would not be sufficientto stopthe bleeding grief absence isforthese words wouldhave such lifein and so of themthey would burnin waysso presentwe would beginto smell smoke and think fireDara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including You Good Thing, Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, Hat On a Pond, and Voyages in English. Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi's Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall, and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate. She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. She is the co-founder of Factory Hollow Press in North Amherst, Massachusetts.

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"Thom Gunn, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, all ghosts now, are invoked without sentiment and with plenty of wry humor." --Kevin Killian, Attention Span 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's 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. From "Garrett Caples Rides Again": my concealed carry personality has deformed my trouser content to the extent my permit permits i'm shooting off often in public i'm a blow dart in a wind tunnel aimed in the wrong direction a boycotted russian vodka distiller an assdial away from arrest Garrett Caples is the author of the essay collection Retrievals, two books of poetry, The Garrett Caples Reader, Complications, and the pamphlet Quintessence of the Minor. He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, Particulars of Place by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima. He is an editor at City Lights Books and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He was also a contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has written articles and blogged for the Poetry Foundation and occasionally blogs for blogcitylights.com. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley and lives in San Francisco.

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The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years. Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more. "I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust." --Donald Hall From the introduction, by Anselm Berrigan: For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms.

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John Godfrey's masterful body of work has sustained its attentive, lovesick, unruly energy for over fifty years. The City Keeps brings together the best poems from his thirteen collections, plus some previously uncollected. "Dedicated to those who people the City of New York," Godfrey's work is populated, elusive, and geometric, but also full of tenderness and light. With an enemy like daylight who needs the psychology dime Hips do the work and I cross the world John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.

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"Whatever's smuggled into these poems--the Petronas Towers, Afghanistan cliffs, Lugers and New Jersey--obeys the abstract logic at the heart of descriptive writing: the sweet ease of writing's intangibility, its virtual tease." --Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization. From "A Small Victorian Object": What's that in the mud where the tide is going out? Buttons; bottle caps; small bits of Styrofoam that look like shells or coral; a few dead crabs; a cracked porcelain vessel from the Victorian era for containing the tears shed by those who have survived the death of loved ones. Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), and The Rose of January. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, the University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School, and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics and Cultural Studies at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

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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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With a mix of political commentary and lyricism in a range of forms, Touche evokes an adrenaline rush as the reader is swept up into Rod Smith's unique blend of humor. I am no I I slight I've taught myself to unwrite & then wreathed, saturate, blank the severed glinting worlds rebelieve or they all access overall not-so, a not-so lucid, a lucid one, the squirrels that I live there ^.^ ~ alright then, alright mr squirrel there, yep. Rod Smith edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. Smith co-edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, (University of California Press, 2014).

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Talkativeness is yet another uncanny whistling choir in a reflective and engaging world all Craig’s own.

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"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested with an abiding faith in language to illuminate the advances of personal and political contingency. Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation won the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award. Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit was published by Grove Press in 2003. He is poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

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Gennady Aygi's poems are as pleasurable for the uniqueness and clarity of their crafting as they are for the spirit they express. and -- the fields -- rise -- into the sky from each star -- there is -- a course to every other -- star Gennady Aygi (1934--2006) is regarded as the Chuvash national poet. Relatively unpublished until the 1980s in the Soviet Union, he has been celebrated abroad, nominated for the Nobel Prize on multiple occasions, and translated into more than twenty languages. Sarah Valentine is a poet and scholar who teaches at the University of California Riverside. This is her first book of translations.

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"A writer of rare quality."-Henri Michaux Like tiny poetic word searches, these small poems reveal themselves as tightly packed aphorisms, physically manifesting themselves in the world with a wisdom that is somehow simultaneously novel and ancient. Franck Andre Jamme has published twelve books of poems and fragments since 1981, as well as numerous illustrated books. In 2005, he won the Grand Prix de Poesie de la Societe des Gens de Lettres. His work has been praised by Edmond Jabes and Rene Char and translated by John Ashbery.

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Letters to Wendy's is an outrageous, tragic, genre-bending novel written over the course of a year on comment cards from the fast-food chain restaurant Wendy's. Through the letters, the book traces a year in the life and thoughts of an unnamed narrator obsessed not only by Biggies and Frosties, but also by consumerism, pornography, and mortality.

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In his debut volume, Richard Meier risks "an affront to the personal" by dismantling and reassembling the lyric "I." His poems demonstrate a dizzying grace while uncovering a terrain less vague than tremendously powerful. The emotional tenor of Meier's poems work with the strong intellect behind them to produce a captivating collection. Winner of the 2000 Verse Prize, selected by Tomaz Salamun.

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"Rohrer's frequently beautiful, brief poems are rooted in specific images that initially seem unrelated--but which ultimately form a unity as meditations on how the ordinary distractions of everyday life can be seen as the source for almost everything important in life."--Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly The poems in Matthew Rohrer's seventh poetry collection are generated by, and embrace, friendships with the living, the dead, and the inanimate. Friends, family, and the urban peoplescape are gathered together in these poems, with more and more poetic voices joining in, and ending with poems written "in collaboration" with Kobayashi Issa, Yosa Buson, Matsuo Basho, and Hafiz. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LONELIER There is absolutely nothing lonelier than the little Mars rover never shutting down, digging up rocks, so far away from Bond Street in a light rain. I wonder if he makes little beeps? If so he is lonelier still. He fires a laser into the dust. He coughs. A shiny thing in the sand turns out to be his. Matthew Rohrer has received the Hopwood Award for poetry, a Pushcart Prize, was selected as a National Poetry Series winner by Mary Oliver, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He is the co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks., 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. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.

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Winner of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award, this expanded edition of The Book of Frank features additional "Frank" poems and an essay by Eileen Myles. Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a "voyeuresque surreal portrait," The Book of Frank is also, in the words of poet-critic Alan Gilbert, a "candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape."

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Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book.True to its bold title, The Book affirms Mary Ruefle’s legacy as (dubbed by Publishers Weekly) “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday.” With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

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In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.

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In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.

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Highly anticipated poems from beloved contemporary poet Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier).In her latest collection, Dara Barrois/Dixon 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.With the same tender honesty found in all of her poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. 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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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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FINALIST FOR THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY A finalist for both the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and a the LA Times Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Through her many projects across numerous genres, Mary Ruefle has proven herself a singular artist, drawing many fans from around the world to her unique vision. With Dunce she returns to the practice that has always been at her core: the making of poems. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, which is always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.

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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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In Hear Trains, Caroline Knox seeks further contexts for her striking diction and syntax to establish new forms of understanding. With her signature wit and erudition, she plumbs the depths of etymology, reading, art, and nature, of comma splices, cyanotypes, cupboards, and poppits, lashing together the unlikeliest subjects by the very language they have always shared and delighting readers with a real world made startlingly new, fulsomely re-enriched.

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FINALIST FOR THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY A finalist for both the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award and a the LA Times Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Through her many projects across numerous genres, Mary Ruefle has proven herself a singular artist, drawing many fans from around the world to her unique vision. With Dunce she returns to the practice that has always been at her core: the making of poems. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, which is always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.

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Taking readers from suburban carports to wintry Russian novels, from summer tomato gardens to the sublime interiors of presleep thoughts, Magdalena Zurawski’s poems anchor the complexities of our interconnected world in the singularity of the human experience. Balancing artistic experimentation with earnest expression, achingly real detail with dazzling prismatic abstraction, humor with frustration, light with dark, she offers a book of great human depth that is to be carried around, opened to anywhere, and encountered.

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