Search results for ""Wave Books""

"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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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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"O'Brien's [is] a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."--Rain Taxi "Whether in a poem composed using words and phrases from the Patriot Act, a sestina with dauntingly common repeating end words, or in flat-out theory, O'Brien shows himself to be capable of portraying the muddled traffic of life in the Internet age."--Publishers Weekly (starred review for Metropole) In his most autobiographical collection to date, Geoffrey G. O'Brien explores--via the "promise of happiness" in great works of art--the dream of a working freedom not relegated to Sundays. Crossing traditional poetic material with contemporary political struggle, O'Brien captures the complex feelings of the present. Here again just a few minutes To see what we've done with what they let us have. Like spring in Washington, D.C. The way we're taught to imagine days As reprieves from other days, cherries snowing Inexpressiveness, the nation's capital An experience of how it is to be Caught up in pink and white again. Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from University of California Press. He is the co-author (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2012). O'Brien teaches at UC Berkeley and also for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

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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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"Woodward seeks news rather desperately from outer space-and finds it in that huge vacancy, the human heart."-Jorie Graham Short, energetic, interlinked poems describe the daily and sometimes surprisingly routine nature of grief. Relying on youthful sincerity rather than nostalgic rumination, this 2005 Verse Prize winner is a sweet, sharp, and honest elegy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, “CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious.” The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

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With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. The poems in Giant Moth Perishes teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.

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2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRYA collection inspired by Hoa’s mother, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe, is verse meditation on Vietnam’s diaspora.Hoa Nguyen’s latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.

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

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In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing literary convention. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, and playfully jagged.

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

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

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

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