Search results for ""Wave Books""

"His voice finds shape within every fragment. It is a voice that is at once forlorn and passionate and preoccupied with beauty...Joshua Beckman's poetry wears its heart on its sleeve."--Slope "Through repetition, rhythm, and a pervasively taut but accessible voice, Beckman sweeps us through his poems."--Rain Taxi One of poetry's genuinely necessary voices, Joshua Beckman offers a magnanimous vision of the poetic and social landscape, masterfully combining traditional and contemporary concerns and speech patterns in attending to a degraded, yet wondrous world. Take It is a gift of profound generosity. I feel now like I am saying sorry for something, when what I am saying here is that the unknowing spirit is greater than the knowing spirit, that no matter what emboldened structure descends to stand before you in its plan and fullness, you do not know what it is. Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of Shake (Wave Books, 2006), multiple collections of collaborative work, and numerous translations. He lives in both Brooklyn and Seattle.

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"He's a poet for our time like Ginsberg was for his."--Eileen Myles "Conrad's work shows us that the body itself is the first source of alienation and estrangement from the self, and is thus the true subject of poetry. Only by engaging this body ...can we achieve transport."--Bookforum What is the best Love you've ever had in this world? Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you're busy, you're a poet with a penny in your mouth...Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world. CAConrad's (Soma)tic exercises desire to literally crack open existence as we know it. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon is an essential how-to book for anyone interested in breaking through their perceived limitations to become a more politically and physically engaged writer. Incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process, these twenty-seven exercises and their corresponding poems confirm Conrad's unwavering belief in poetry as a necessary practice for being. CAConrad, a 2011 PEW Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five books of poetry, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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"I adore [Caples'] prescription to read widely and even perversely; and his breezy style is engaging." --Don Share "Caples' discussions are careful, nuanced, personal, and opinionated." --Steven Fama "Caples is part of a younger generation of writers reinvigorating contemporary poetry by combining modernist and Language-poetic verbal angularity with the sheer enthusiasm and lustiness of adolescence." --Publishers Weekly "Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment." --Rain Taxi From "Theory on Retrievals": The concept of the poet-critic has always been a compelling one to me; it's hard not to admire 19th century French poets like Gautier, writing elegant prose in newspapers on topics the general public was more interested in reading about than it was in reading his poetry. (I've never been one to hold the general public's lack of interest in poetry against it; that's the way of the world.) The compensation was that being a poet gave one a certain license as a critic to roam among all the arts. Retrievals is a book of essays written over the course of ten years about underrecognized poets, unfairly discredited critics, and artists obscured by more famous relations. Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999), Complications (Meritage Press, 2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013). He is the poetry editor at City Lights Books, and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Oakland.

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Love Three is a study of a seventeenth-century devotional poem by George Herbert; an essay on eroticizing power; and a memory palace of sexual experiences, fantasies, preferences, and limits—with Herbert’s poem as the key. It is unlike anything you have ever read—a deep, attentive reading of a text and a broad analysis (personal, historical, philosophical) of humanity’s most enduring theme.

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“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.” —Boston GlobeAnselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics—and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences—these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life.For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast aboutFor bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believesIn me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out glidingBy storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s feltIn the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmareRhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking outA line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . .Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.

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Winner of the Big Other Book Award for poetry and finalist for the Believer Book Award.If The Cloud Corporation is, as John Ashbery called it, “the poetry of the future, here, today,” then Timothy Donnelly’s third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future yet further pressed to the end of history. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and Alexander the Great.

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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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"[Meister's] enviable combination of lyrical talent and existential preoccupation . . . is not a peaceful, divine perception but rather a distillation of despair . . . derangement seems almost justified."—Will Stone, The Times Literary Supplement Ernst Meister's brief, afflicted poems attend to the writer's lifelong obsessions with being and mortality. First published in 1976 and appearing for the first time in English in its entirety, it is a collection equal parts philosophical rigor and lived experience. We had a face-off in the light. Dust floated around us, tenderly. Ernst Meister (1911–1979) was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize.

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"I like being in the world of Craig's poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight."--James Tate Thin Kimono continues Michael Earl Craig's singular breed of brilliant absurdist poetry, utterly and masterfully slanting the realities of daily existence. Michael Earl Craig is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006) and Can You Relax in My House (Fence Books, 2002). He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a certified journeyman farrier.

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Selected by Mary Ruefle for the National Poetry Series, this singular book transcends time and convention. S.A. Stepanek resurrects Whitman and Blake to weave a mantra of biblical, domestic, and political themes unified by repetition and manic religious energy. I worship the Great Credulity laughing. Golden leaves as lips, butterhands, dainty veins in wings, liquid architectures, rain.

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"Pantheism and synesthesia are his visionary rules ...severe, contagious fun."-Boston Review "How much of what we call 'seeing' is actually 'believing?'" Geoffrey Nutter asks in his dazzling second collection. The quiet, daring "water voices" of these poems carry the reader into their serious play, in settings as varied as the Tappan Zee Bridge and the inside of a flower, turning language 'touchable' and words into music. Geoffrey Nutter was born in Sacramento, California. He is the author of A Summer Evening, winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997 and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, daughter, and son.

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In her latest collection, Dorothea Lasky brings her signature style—a deeply felt and uncanny word-music—to all matters of creativity, from poetry and the invention of new language to motherhood and the production of new life. At once a personal document as it is an occult text,Milk investigates overused paradigms of what it means to be a creator and encapsulates its horrors and joys—setting fire to the enigma that drives the vital force that enables poems, love, and life to happen.

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Of Nikolayev’s accomplished first book, Robert Kelly writes: "Nothing escapes his formal insistence to renew. . . . A wild, generous book, full of invention." Monkey Time is the Winner of the 2001 Verse Prize, selected by Lyn Hejinian.

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Previously only available in hardcover, and after a long period of being unavailable, one of Wave''s most popular titles, A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, is now available in paperback.Through brilliant collaboration, Robert Bononno and book designer Jeff Clark translated one of Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. This bilingual softcover edition not only includes Mallarmé''s original preface, but also matches the typography of the last round of proofs that Mallarmé was correcting at the time of his death. Clark''s presentation is both visually stunning and typographically radical, mirroring the dark mystery of Mallarmé’s poem. With a keen understanding of poetics, Bononno’s translation offers myriad interpretations, while capturing the visionary spirit of the original. Together, Clark and Bononno have created a singular version of A Roll of

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In Furniture Music, Montreal legend Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. And the author is less a single voice than an assembler, ventriloquizing not only present voices but also a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.

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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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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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WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges Citation Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

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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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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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"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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"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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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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"Illuminated, feral, Kocot's creativity engenders an excitement comparable to being twelve years old, exposed to good poetry or music or art for the first time...One can't help but to be unsteady, but believe in that instability...She leaves us hanging in the best way: always about to fall, always about to be saved."--Nick Sturm, Coldfront "Characterized by an utter irreducibility, Noelle Kocot's poetry displays an elemental movement of thinking and suggests a poetics of vision."--Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Rain Taxi Noelle Kocot's poetry resets hierarchies in favor of a world outside of time or telescope. Soul in Space is a masterful combination of Kocot's intimacy and authority over poetic form, and leaves a brighter and weirder world in its wake. But now, back to our story, It has coffee in it, a naked river. Blessed are we who rapture An electric wire, blessed be The falling things about our faces, Blessed is the socket of an eye That lights the body, because In the end, in the very end, it's Just you. You and you. And you. Noelle Kocot is the author of six collections of poetry. Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry (2012 and 2013) and in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (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. She lives in New Jersey.

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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 "[Myles' writing] comes across simultaneously as effortless and utterly gorgeous...To be able to write with such gentleness and force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this."--Ron Silliman Two books meet as one in legendary poet, critic, and novelist Eileen Myles' newest collection. In a world overflowing with technology and its mutant offspring, moments of human ecstasy and connection are as indelible as they are fleeting. Indeed, with every page, the poems of Snowflake and different streets create poet and poem anew. some cars seem to erupt from the tar itself they seem to pull themselves up from below the surface of the land though I don't think land. I mean something flat, something black almost like a water that we're on though a dark water that holds us. Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. She was recently awarded the 2010 Shelley Memorial Award for poetry and, for her novel Inferno, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. She lives in New York.

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From rough optimism to sharp criticism, fifty American poets present new work dissecting the current political climate in America. Wide-ranging writers bring their bold voices to this collection, including Eileen Myles, Matthew Rohrer, Rebecca Wolff, Terrance Hayes, Joe Wenderoth, and Tao Lin. "Walking by Hope Street" Look at the landscape, A lot of damage, no? But we are here together, And of needing me, here The world needs me, We are too alone. And what of our orange daylight, Growing darker as the lamplit Trees grow dark. There Is not enough to say. But our hands, our gentle Frozen hands sift through Things like numbers out of breath. It will all be okay, I promise. Promise who? Promise the faded land. -Noelle Kocot "Literary Agency" Coretta Scott King has died, the other day. Dream unrealized. Lost and found, lost again, bathos my motivation my Elysian dream. The place inside untutored, incorruptible, without relation. That's something to hold onto, and uncontingency dressing the wound. That's sad and just "what it is." It is what it is. That's what I say when I can't bear the news. -Rebecca Wolff

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In-depth interviews with poets have been a popular feature of Verse magazine-and this volume collects many favorites, along with new interviews commissioned for this collection. The poets represent a wide range of aesthetics, ethnicities and politics. Although a particular focus of the book is emerging and innovative American poets, the collection also features interviews with Australian, Scottish, Irish, Czech, Slovenian and Kashmiri poets, as well as established American poets such as Hayden Carruth and Charles Wright. A vital record of contemporary poetry and an engaging read. Brian Henry's poetry collections include Graft, American Incident and Astronaut, and he is the editor of On James Tate. Andrew Zawacki is the author of Anabranch and By Reason of Breakings, co-translator of Ales Debeljak's Arrow's Shadow and an editor of Verse since 1995.

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Complex and intimate, Reverse Rapture is an account of a band of explorers who go sifting through the artifacts and sensations of our times in search of a core. The generous voices of these poems bring the reader along on their quest. In awe of everything, these explorers, and the poems recounting their adventures, create a gorgeous lyrical web filled with new ways of seeing. Dara Wier is the author of eight previous collections of poems, most recently Hat on a Pond and Voyages in English. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The American Poetry Review, she teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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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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"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces--from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." --Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and grief--as love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen's writing as "a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways." As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment. A Brief History of War And what if Jupiter is your faith a balloon but I call you by the improper names I'm stained by the world here To be brave and endure the losing To be brave and be the losing Luck Brutal 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 in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.

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Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

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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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“There is no other poet who writes like Torres. Elaborate, chanting, pointed, and granite in their ‘octaves of shine,’ his poems have it all. They are a real and gritty pleasure to read, a necessary tonic to these toxic times.” —John YauWhat does a book want to be in anyone’s hands but an infinite word object? XoeteoX is a dare into perception, traversing territories of language, sound, and the visual page. At the intersection of identity, performance, and typography, these poems compel reader and word into being, presenting a pact towards understanding and the mutual beyond.between you and mea skin of cognition — a container holding us together — connecting usyour skin is incredibly porousyour existence — unfolding within ita journey leading back to its creation —a right now — in the making that forms the beginningof what you end — right nowEdwin Torres is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), and editor of the forthcoming anthology, Out Of Each Other: An Anthology Of The Body In Language (Counterpath Press). He has performed worldwide and taught his process-oriented workshop, “Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of The Body,” across the nation.

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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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"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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"Best-known for his gritty and uproarious prose poetry collection Letters to Wendy's, Wenderoth began his career with two books of gimlet-eyed, world-weary, hard-hitting poetry. Now he returns to verse, favoring (as before) relatively short poems, often twelve lines or fewer, most of which crackle with a bleakness that's part gallows humor, part outrage, and part despair."--Publishers Weekly, starred review of No Real Light "A perverse, sometimes pretty, obscene, and confounding collection of one page meditative missives ...trimmed with lunatic fringe."--Rolling Stone review of Letters to Wendy's Whether it's addressing the grotesque in daily scenes or upsetting the norms of professional culture, Joe Wenderoth's fifth collection resonates with his signature intellect and disturbing humor. He is at once an aesthete and an iconoclast who brings inventive force to American poetry. Early Capitalism they are perfecting the pillow with which you are being suffocated now it sings to you and shows you pictures Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of No Real Light, The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self, and Letters to Wendy's. Wesleyan University Press published his first two books of poems: Disfortune and It Is If I Speak. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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"Equal parts punk rock and pastoral, [Rohrer has] a voice that seems unearthly in its ability to be detached and simultaneously tender."--American Poet Approaching pleasure and terror with the same searching and determined curiosity, Rise Up traverses political, natural, and domestic landscapes with gentle agility. Beautifully crafted surfaces give way to sincere depth. Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Green Light (2004, shortlisted for the Griffin Prize), Satellite, and A Hummock in the Malookas. He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing.

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Award-winning poet Joshua Beckman returns with 150 extraordinary short lyrics which build a kind of meta-narrative throughout this haunting and powerful book. This new collection showcases Beckman’s ability, even within the confines of a few brief lines, to suggest and sustain emotions, landscapes, humor and desire.

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"[Santiago Papasquiaro] didn't believe in countries and the only borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics."--Roberto Bolano "Built from the collision of 'low' and 'high' culture--of police brutality and drunken ranting with Modernism and German phenomenology--it is a testament of resistance to political and artistic repression comparable to Ginsberg's 'Howl.'"--Cole Heinowitz Readers might recognize Mario Santiago Papasquiaro as the eccentric and renegade Ulises Lima in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antologia Poetica, 1974--1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro's work. the thesis & antithesis of the world meet like 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress & inexplicably they greet each other: I'm the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacket the sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is Adventure Mario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolano. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998. Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College. Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.

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A Beaker: New and Selected Poems shows Knox’s particular insistence on painterly abstraction, linguistic goofiness, and formal rigor. Free-wheeling allusive artifacts, Knox’s poems are visually precise, at times ornate, and often humorous. Selected from the poems of her three previous collections, and including a full complement of new poems, A Beaker places Knox among the most important and original poets of her generation.

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Noelle Kocot’s ninth collection, Ascent of the Mothers, is a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood. “I am nothing” they write, “Or else I have made myself / Too big for words.” The scope of this book is marked by Kocot’s psychic journey punctuated by a near-fatal car crash, which elicited a new understanding of their spirituality and gender nonconforming identity. Generous, self-aware, and resilient, Ascent of the Mothers is a treasure to behold and be shared.

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With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life/but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.

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“some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seem 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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Timothy Donnelly’s fourth collection of poems, Chariot, ferries the reader toward an endless horizon of questioning that is both philosophical and deeply embodied. “How did we get here?” he asks in his title poem—one of several in conversation with French symbolist Odilon Redon—to which he responds, “Unclear, if it matters; what matters // is we stay—aloft in possible color.” With a similar sensibility to previous collections The Problem of the Many and The Cloud Corporation (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award), Chariot deepens Donnelly’s inquiry into artistic histories, from Jean Cocteau to The Cocteau Twins, while celebrating the power of poetic imagination to transport us to new zones of meaning and textual bliss. The collection also marks an exciting shift in form for Donnelly, who confines these new poems to twenty lines each, so that to read Chariot is to look through a many-paned, future-facing window, refracting and reflecting, letting all the light in.

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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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