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The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn’s sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn’s work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaudí, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America’s fascination with violence and death, revealing that “a human being in love with mystery is never finished.” This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems—an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them—new life seeded out of a decaying order: “a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.” Written during the poet’s immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

The stories in I’m Here dramatize life in the Alaskan interior, describing the difficult lives of people in Fairbanks, Alaska as they move through the long, brilliant days of summer into the deep winter months. These are characters living on the tenuous edge of things—on the economic edge caused by poverty and disillusion, on the dividing line between outsider and insider, and on the literal edge of the Alaskan wilderness. The stories in this collection move from beauty to danger and back again with decisive grace, although the lingering effect is not shock, but empathy toward people simultaneously alien and oddly familiar.

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

The 2015 Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winner, chosen by Carl Phillips.

An arresting whisper of a debut, As Burning Leaves is a record of what remains. It moves through the visible world with precision and heart—delivers us to a space of aquatic light, to bruises flowering and moonlit streets covered in clothing. This collection emerges from channels of film, contemporary art, and meditations on the body: “less / if you dare winter / if you cut a star into your leg / if you find the green in the muck / less if the clouds disperse to allow blue inlets.” As Burning Leaves traces a path of queer failure that questions notions of desirability, self, and otherness. Jesiolowski asks what art is for, recalibrates the room of the stanza, proposes names for touch we never use. This book has an internal navigational system, a pact with the phenomenal. It courts the fleeting and rests in the stigma of a sunflower, lets us taste smoke in snow. “. . . the folk song says that we need a little sadness—so we invent the passing of railcars . . .” Elegant and cutting, radical and intimate, this is a book to find, to hold, to give.

“A witty, sultry, and thoughtful new collection."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

Obsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower.

Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release.

From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,” the painfully funny, “His Other Girlfriend,” to the longing in “Visiting Baudelaire,” and the sad, sweet final poem, “Fish’s Lament,” Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone—even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the “chosen baby.” This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.

Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth’s poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.

“Each of these marvelous poems engages as instantly as a photograph: you read two or three words and you’re on the scene, recoiling in horror as Trotsky is murdered or twisting uncomfortably as your daughter buys her first bra. There’s no need to ‘develop’ Stephen Gibson’s pictures; they enter your mind so fast that you can’t help feeling that what’s happening on the page has already happened and that, very likely, you were there when it did. He’s a poet for other poets to learn from, for no one else writing today uses language as economically or to more immediate effect.”

—David Kirby