Poetry

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES • AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION • Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

“One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time.”—Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry • "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."—Library Journal • “Your favorite writer’s writer.”—Entertainment Weekly • “Percival Everett is poised for a big year.”—The Wall Street Journal • Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets.”—Pasadena Star-News • “Wry and epigrammatic.”—Publisher’s Weekly • “A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry.”—Amsterdam News 

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

As the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin.

In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.

Within these pages, the poet is joined by a “sticky trickster-self” named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower’s tall tales.

Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

In Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, Jason Schneiderman confronts the rise of extremism and antisemitism in the United States while grappling with the end of his marriage and finding his feet as a newly single gay man.

Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman’s signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman’s most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confront the agonizing in order to make way for joy and, yes, love.

Letters Written and Not Sent is the lifetime work of poet William Louis-Dreyfus, written over decades, culminating a passion for poetry, art and social justice. He passed away just days after the book was completed.

Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty. His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself. Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem. A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems. As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter. This is the book that he wished to send into the world.

With all the power of a long-brewing storm, the brilliant poet Jenny Factor finally returns to make public the interior work and spoils of decades in Want, The Lake, her second poetry collection.

This book of fifty-two poems spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.

What Monsters You Make of Them interrogates ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and ancient cities.

Stand astonished at a painting, venerate the mugshot of a poet, riff on a comedian’s quip, and recall a mentor persevering through grief. Speak of headhunters, of word origins, of saints and gods stitched into a newfound pantheon, of the multiverse as a source of reincarnation. Visit ancient cities, national parks, a sundry of gardens, and the ruins of a farmhouse. A teacher fails to help a student. A student explains war to her teacher. Seize back the forgotten. Kneel to not knowing. Interrogate ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and know What Monsters You Make of Them.

The Bearable Slant of Light asks what the burden and gift of madness brings to a family, to our world.

What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.

Deer Black Out is a(n obsessional re) mediation of violence and trauma through the trans/coalescence of identities surfacing and resurfacing within a manuscript of serialized poetry, influenced by HD, Zukofsky, and Ronald Johnson. It's sort of like a body, the movement of which you can only recognize emerging within a field of static. Just the outlines. A deer! In ramifying lines, this poetry creates a self-reciprocating dialogue with the very act of self-replication. The language exists as the prosthetic support that co-creates and conditions the Baerself's emergence into the real.

FINALIST FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD IN POETRY 
WINNER OF FEATHERED QUILL BOOK AWARDS
SHORT-LISTED FOR PATERSON POETRY PRIZE
SHORT-LISTED FOR MILT KESSLER POETRY BOOK AWARD
COMMENDED BY ERIC HOFFER AWARDS

The poems in Allison Joseph’s latest collection are smart, shameless, and empowered confessions of the best kind. In semi-autobiographical verse highlighting in turns light-hearted and harsh realities of modern black womanhood, these poems take the reader down “A History of African-American Hair,” visit with both Grace Jones and the Venus de Milo, send Janis Joplin to cheerleading camp, bemoan a treacherous first pair of high heels, and discuss “vagina business.” Funny, but never flippant, and always forthcoming about the author’s own flaws and foibles, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman is sure to keep readers entranced, entertained, and enlightened.

Through the creaking of bedazzled branches and the soft rustle of jeweled leaves, deciduous qween explores the queer world all around us—how we, like our environment, wear and shed different identities in our performance as human, as drag queen, as ancient tree. This collection reveals in the natural world those ephemeral moments which reflect our own truths and confront our fear of death, of loneliness, and of failure. With an air of Southern Gothic mysticism, the poet reflects on a childhood spent in Houston’s bayous, an adolescence rife with curiosity and shame, and a young adulthood marred by the loss of his mother. How do our bodies and minds find equilibrium as we learn to let go, yet long to remember? The title poem, “deciduous qween, I–V,” binds the collection in a five-part sequence, pondering those things that are lost in the seasons of our lives: teeth, antlers, body, shape, and leaf. And it’s those sharp edges of loss and the scars they leave behind that linger here, like bark stripped from a swaying willow, or a family bereft of its matriarch. 

In her mesmerizing sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen weaves constellations throughout, of stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history, making shape and meaning of what’s around us and even who we are.

In this riveting sixth poetry collection, Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon Captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.

PEN / REGINALD LOCKETT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN LITERATURE • PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST, POET, AND PAINTER • GEORGIA WRITER’S HALL OF FAME

“A remarkable mind and the talent to match.”—Toni Morrison, Nobel-prize winning author • “A very powerful book!”—Cornelius Eady • “Radiant with attentiveness and loving compassion”—Rikki Ducornet • “A feast to be reckoned with.”—Allison Joseph • “A new book by Major is a literary event.”—John Beckman • “For forty-five years Major has been on the cutting edge of literature.”—Richard Price • “Major is an essential American writer.”—Steve Yarbrough

Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel, taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places. We also experience the seasons in fresh ways. Delicious food, too, is laid before us. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry. Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty. They radiate with lyrical purity. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether as he travels or simply in quiet moments of reflection.

Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

Sex Augury is a collection that practices divination with the symbolism of our radically changed and changeable world. Exercising trans poetics, C. Bain denormalizes the violence embedded in the most intimate strata of American life. Confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported, these poems create their own system of meaning in an environment that is increasingly hostile to meaning of any kind. This collection spans digital culture, gender reversals, and archetypal-mythic vocabularies, alongside close observation of the surround of “ordinary” urban existence. Sex Augury is a work of dyads, not binaries—concepts bound together which nonetheless refuse to form a coherent, harmonious whole; humor and despair, tenderness and brutality, desire and revulsion. These poems bristle with intelligence, acuity of feeling, and refusal to gloss the complexity of our moment into a false narrative of progress.

Praise for Percival Everett:

“. . . Artful and literate, Everett explores the philosophical, the metaphysical, the physical and the psychological boundaries of human life . . .”

—Terry D’Auray

“. . . Everett achieves a primal sense of dislocation, forcing us to question how we determine the limits of the human . . . ”

—Sven Birkets, The New York Times

“. . . The audacious, uncategorizable Everett. He mixes genre and tone with absolute abandon, never does the same song twice. Brilliant . . .”

—The Boston Globe

“. . . An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire.”

—Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

For a couple struggling with infertility, conception is a war against their bodies. Blood and death attend. But when the war is won, and life stares, hungry, in the parents’ faces, where does that violence, anxiety, and shame go? The poems in Patter re-imagine miscarriages as minstrel shows, magic tricks, and comic strips; set Darth Vader against Oedipus’s dad in competition for “Father of the Year;” and interrogate the poet’s family’s stint on reality TV. In this, his third collection, award-winning poet Douglas Kearney doggedly worries the line between love and hate, showing how it bleeds itself into “fatherhood.”

night myths • • before the body is an ecofeminist interrogation of identity, vulnerability, and relationship that dismantles the boundaries between the body and the natural world to reclaim expressions of power and womanhood.

What are the stories we tell our bodies about our bodies? What are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves? night myths • • before the body illuminated the dichotomies contemporary women grapple with every day: identity and expectation, self-preservation and doubt, freedom and entrapment, wildness and cultivation. By dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world, Abi Pollokoff’s evocative debut deconstructs the essence of womanhood, carrying the reader into a communing at once vulnerable and insistent. night myths • • before the body is a resounding interrogation of being human in a posthuman world.

We takes an unapologetically spiritual stance in bridging politicized divides, exploring conscious and unconscious prejudices with lyricism, warmth, and self-implicating humor, how we are shaped by and create our nation by how we see ourselves and others.

The poems investigate what unites us; how the personal is political, and the political is personal; changing our perceptions to heal families, friendships, and country of incivility and villainization by practicing greater compassion; trying to see past egos to souls, as “We” suggests in conversation with Whitman: “I celebrate my being, every atom/of myself and you, lamp and mirror/of all that is”; in a new Preamble to the Constitution; and in the feminist “Peace Hymn for the Republic.” We begins with a non-partisan vision of soul, and ends driving a rural road at dawn in “State of the Union Aubade,” both paeans to our common divinity.

Blue Atlas is a lyrical abortion narrative unlike any other. This one-of-a-kind collection follows a Jewish woman and her ghosts as they travel from West Africa to Europe and, finally, to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The speaker searches repeatedly for a new outcome, seeking answers in a myriad of mediums such as an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, and a curriculum vitae. The raw, often far from idyllic experience of a global love affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy is examined and meditated upon through a surreal prism. The Blue Atlas, a genus of the common cedar tree first found in the High Atlas of Morocco and known for its beauty and resilience, becomes a metaphor for the hardship and power of a fully engaged life.

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

The five sections in Kim Stafford’s Singer Come from Afar hold poems that summon war and peace, pandemic struggles, Earth imperatives, a seeker’s spirit, and forge kinship. The former poet laureate of Oregon, Stafford has shared poems from this book in libraries, prisons, on reservations, with veterans, immigrants, homeless families, legislators, and students in schools. He writes for hidden heroes, resonant places, and for our chance to converge in spite of differences. Poems like “Practicing the Complex Yes” and “The Fact of Forgiveness” engineer tools for connection with the self, the community, and the Earth: “It is a given you have failed . . . [but] the world can’t keep its treasures from you.” For the early months of the pandemic, Stafford wrote and posted a poem for challenge and comfort each day on Instagram and published a series of chapbooks that traveled hand to hand to far places—to Norway, Egypt, and India. He views the writing and sharing of poetry as an essential act of testimony to sustain tikkun olam, the healing of the world. May this book be the hidden spring you seek.

*Winner of the 2021 International Association of Authoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Award for Outstanding Book*

*GOLD MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English*

In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present. These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child’s naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge. Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.

Body of Render explores the internal and external impacts on our humanity when political, national, and societal decisions strip away our basic human rights. What does it mean to be an underrepresented individual in a country where the most powerful seat in the land unashamedly perpetuates racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and classist behaviors? The voices document a journey before and after the last presidential election. These poems cry out for reconsideration of our broken systems to find common and safe ground rooted in equitable treatment of each other as human beings. How do we exude love when being a person of color or underrepresented person in this country means the dominate white-male-able-bodied-heterosexual narrative continues to threaten our voices? This collection carves at the physical, the political, the intimate, and the structural with poems that simultaneously create and encourage voice to seek a path toward collective mending.

Meet Oldguy: your regular aging superhero whose powers have dwindled over the years, and whose very mechanics are seriously fizzling. In seriocomic misadventures, Oldguy valiantly attempts to continue his former heroism in a somewhat wry version of Faulknerian endurance, defeating his enemies time and again—if not through superhuman abilities, then at least by “outliving the sons-a-bitches.” With its comic book-style illustrations, Oldguy inhabits a space all to itself—not strictly a poetry collection, not quite a graphic novel—hybrid sure to visually and aurally delight.

Featured in The Writer's Almanac

—Carol Potter

Essential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other.

In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.     

Peripheral Vision, Susan Kinsolving’s fourth book of poems, explores the world from many points of view. She takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. She goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Her poems were described in the New Yorker as “grand and almost terrifying.” In this new collection, she proves herself again. As a guest poet and lecturer, Kinsolving has performed at numerous venues, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale University, as well as Bad Robot in Santa Monica and Bread Loaf in Vermont.

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious. Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.

Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.

AUTHOR OF 2024 INT’L LATINO BOOK AWARD HONORABLE MENTION, VOLCANIC INTERRUPTIONS • CALIFORNIA ARTS COUNCIL RECOGNIZED ESTABLISHED ARTIST FOR CENTRAL CALIFORNIA REGION

“This poetry collection is heart-led, a feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.”—Odilia Galván Rodríguez • “Myths and loss, yearnings and magic”—Cristina García

The poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author’s journey into her Latine/x culture. 

The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

This collection consists of odes to the Mexican American, first-gen experience as well as surreal prose poems with cultural references and settings native to the Los Angeles area.

The collection opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape. “A future prizewinner,” according to former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this collection seeks to celebrate the Mexican American experience while also exploring how surrealism and absurdism can lead to wondrous discoveries about the self, community, and the imagination.

Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems is a new collection that delves into the current raw state of the country and the world, and both new and older poems that explore interpersonal relationships.

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.

As Gertrude Stein might have put it, a cento is a collage is a mix tape is a video montage.

This hypothetical description is fitting in a number of ways. Although the cento form is ancient—in existence since at least the days of Virgil and Homer—it was also used to striking effect in the Modern era: consider, for example, T. S. EliotÆs The Waste Land and Ezra PoundÆs Cantos.

More recent centos include John AshberyÆs \u201cThe Dong with the Luminous Nose,\u201d Peter GizziÆs \u201cOde: Salute to The New York School 1950-1970\u201d (a libretto), Connie HersheyÆs \u201cEcstatic Permutations,\u201d and the \u201cSplit This Rock Poetry Festival—Cento, March 23, 2008\u201d (a collaborative protest poem delivered in front of the White House).

The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford and with an introduction by David Lehman, features an extensive sampling of centos, collage poems, and patchwork poems written by Nicole Andonov, Lorna Blake, Alex Cigale, Allan Douglass Coleman, Philip Dacey, Sharon Dolin, Annie Finch, Jack Foley, Kate Gale, Dana Gioia, Sam Gwynn, H. L. Hix, David Lehman, Eric Nelson, Catherine Tufariello, and many others.

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

*HONORABLE MENTION for the 2022 International Latino Book Awards, Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English*

American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an exploration of the precipice of violence evolved into an excavation of self, a deep meditation on how country, family, and trauma affect the ability to love. The images and words build a poetic space where the body is understood in both physical and celestial terms, giving a spiritual dimension to the collection's larger claim that the political is personal.

Danielle Vogel’s newest collection creates a latticework for repair—the repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated self—but does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of “displacements,” “miniatures,” and “volume,” Vogel initiates readers into the séance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a “new, interrupted unity.” In The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, accord—writing with, reading with—is always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. “It only takes one letter on the page,” Vogel writes, “and we are already inside one another’s lungs.” To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.

Original Grace is the last book in the Snake Quartet. In it, the journey from destruction leads through the darkened rooms of an enormous house where occasionally outside the windows creatures past, present, and future appear—asking for help or solace or trying to break the glass to get in. But the house is made of poetry and is unassailable unlike those who live in it.
By this time, Snake has undergone the transformations from sole survivor into the mythic voice of the collective with all their throats open and in full song. She has undergone the movement from original gender into all genders. The rough linguistic artifacts left from the first book—the dialects and fogginess she experienced living both in and out of a dream—slowly become more coherent as she learns to filter the collective voices back into her personal speech. Original Grace is not just the end of what was but the beginning of what comes next. The sun has gone down. The long wait for a new sunrise is nearly over.

Lexicon is a worthy successor to Allison Joseph’s award-winning breakthrough, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman. This time around, this self-professed “barefaced woman” is setting her sighs/sights on language and what it does for and with and to her. Joseph loves language, making it her slippery passion in poems about childhood griefs and fashion faux pas, movie musicals and empty airports, “rules” for writing and rules for reading. Though Joseph loves language, it doesn’t always love her back—but in her wise, readable, and imaginative way, she persists while documenting the minefields of racism and sexism. Joseph finds joy in the most unlikely of places, and in Lexicon, her adoration for the written word lets us see those places in sharp and evocative relief. All hail this bounty, this Lexicon!

*HONORABLE MENTION in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English*

From the edge of a singularity and across desert roads at night, A Camera Obscura teleports its readers through deep space nebulae and the constructs of cityscapes to arrive at what it means to “see.” Lovers embrace in sonnets and meditations move through artworks and Hubble Telescope images as these poems employ ekphrastic visions to balance the profound displacements in the most mundane aspects of our lives with science, fact, faith, and song. In the ceremonial blades of Aztec sacrifice and the anonymity of undocumented lives, these poems accrete into a solar system of images seen true, seen askance, seen in error, seen entire. A Camera Obscura is the dark room of the imagination where sīgnum—the sign, the act—becomes the tangible testaments of living.

In five poetic sequences, Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight considers life in a new age of anxiety as technology and violence inform new forms of selfhood and apocalypse seems always around the corner. Starting with a long poem about his own struggle to find peace, the collection is searingly grounded in the personal, anchored to Schneiderman’s own life. The collection moves to a sequence of parables about wolves, which obliquely consider intractable political conflicts and the emotional fallout of relationships that are structured around predators and prey. The next sequences focus on technology and art, looking at how technologies extend the possibilities of the human body, which alters what it means to be human. A long set of poems about Chris Burden explore the artist’s movement from the personal, self-inflicted violence of his early work to the larger questions of political violence that inform his later work. In the final sequence, Schneiderman imagines a series of “last things”—in which finality gives meaning to the people and things in question. In the end, Schneiderman’s project invokes a kind of old fashioned humanism, embracing the ruptures in our contemporary ways of living and thinking.

At the heart of Joshua Rivkin’s debut collection Suitor is a profound wrestling with desire, history, and the big questions of how we make and perform a self in the world. In conversation with the confessional tradition, Suitor begins with a sequence of poems about a mother’s boyfriends and lovers, and how these relationships inform the speaker’s own understanding about eros and masculinity. At the center of the book is a lyric essay, “The Haber Problem,” that moves beyond the self and personal history to retell the story of the scientist Fritz Haber. Later sequences and poems reflect on the past with erotic directness, longing, and lyric intensity. With grace and honesty, the poems of Suitor ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense—to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of 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.

Worship the Pig, Gaylord Brewer’s eleventh collection, is by the poet’s own definition his “Americas book.” The migration begins from his Tennessee home to the Inside Passage of Alaska, then detours sharply south in a return to his beloved Costa Rica, then onward finally to the qualified paradise of Brazil’s Ilhabela. Brewer’s persistent obsessions—translating the call and challenge of the feral world, negotiating some truce with private ghosts—have never been more poignantly and sharply drawn. From chiseled lyrics to more expansive narratives—by turns reserved and raucous, always heartfelt and riveting—these new poems exhilarate. “No schematic for conquest, / no reckless conclusions, // no tenuous argument for connection / beyond the simple truth / of what accrues together.” At mid-career, the author called “the most natural poet in the country” by the Asheville Poetry Review continues to astonish.

These poems are about “the moment inside the body / when joy is not born as much as it is made out of anything / the rest of the world doesn’t want.” 
Using land and South Texas’s flora and fauna as references, these poems explore aloneness and manhood as articulations of want, asking the reader to “take a moan by the hand, see what good it does.”
Thematically, these poems address loss after transformative experiences, admitting to a reader, “All night I might fathom taking back / something precious / that somehow, / long ago, or not so long ago, I don’t know, / ripped off, / yanked from bone, / sloughed off like a husk.” 
These poems are about getting to know one’s body after being distanced from it, of recognizing a queer brown body inextricably belonging to lineages of loss, and then realizing that some new body has emerged from where the old parts were lost, or taken, as in the final sequence of four poems, “Lechuza Sketches,” where the speaker manifests the Tex-Mexican folkloric figure of a lechuza, the human-owl hybrid said to inhabit parts of South Texas and the Northern Mexican border.
In the end, this is a collection of poems about more deeply engaging with one’s queerness, one’s brownness, and understanding that there are parts inside us we never knew existed, or as the Lechuza Sketches speaker offers, “In the world, some part of us is often / unseen / & not glorious. / But what if we are? / Glorious. Seen.”

*Starred Booklist Review*

After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío. Whether it’s biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragón has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua. Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short: a book that is both trajectory & mosaic, complicating the conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas—above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.

"Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is like a newborn scream that’s been held in for eons. Sharp, strong, unapologetic, beautiful, and angry, the writing in this collection is a celebration of language and rhythm, and the words on the page run like the blood from a wound caused by racism. . . . this collection is not just one all fans of poetry should read; it’s one we should be assigning in schools."—Gabino Iglesias, PANK Magazine

What happens when a Midwestern girl migrates to a haunted Southern town, whose river is a graveyard, whose streets bear the names of Southern slave owners? How can she build a home where Confederate symbols strategically stand in the center of town? Can she sage the chilling truths of her ancestors? What will she do to cope with the traumatizing ghostliness of the present-day South?

Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day. This debut poetry collection summons multiple hauntings—ghosts of matriarchs that came before, those that were slain, and those that continue to speak to us, but also those horrors women of color strive to put to rest. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat examines the haunting feeling of facing past demons while grappling with sexism, racism, and bigotry. They are all present: ancestral ghosts, societal ghosts, and spiritual, internal hauntings. This book calls out for women to speak their truth in hopes of settling the ghosts or at least being at peace with them.

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.

RIFT ZONE, Taylor’s much-anticipated fourth book traces literal and metaphoric fault lines—rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Taylor’s hometown—an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault—these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.

Taylor’s ambitious and masterful poems read her home state’s historic violence against our world’s current unsteadinesses—mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—an American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious—a fearsome tremor of a book.

In Elise Paschen’s prize-winning poetry collection, Infidelities, Richard Wilbur wrote that the poems “. . . draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” In her third poetry book, The Nightlife, Paschen once again taps into dream states, creating a narrative which balances between the lived and the imagined life. Probing the tension between “The Elevated” and the “Falls,” she explores troubled love and relationships, the danger of accident and emotional volatility. At the heart of the book is a dream triptych which retells the same encounter from different perspectives, the drama between the narrative described and the sexual tension created there.

The Nightlife demonstrates Paschen’s versatility and formal mastery as she experiments with forms such as the pantoum, the villanelle and the tritina, as well as concrete poems and poems in free verse. Throughout this poetry collection, she interweaves lyric and narrative threads, creating a contrapuntal story-line. The book begins with a dive into deep water and ends with an opening into sky.

A brave, brilliant debut about the African-American experience in the American Midwest. A contemplation of race, masculinity, religion, and class, Testify in a very personal way confronts some of the most critical issues in today's society.

A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.

Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria’s poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.

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.

In her stunning ninth collection of poetry, In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue tells a deeply personal lyric of love and loss through a mythic story. This book-length serial poem follows Elle, a dying woman, as she travels a trans-historical, trans-geographical terrain on a quest to investigate the labyrinth not only as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” At the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage—inspired by Hogue’s own composited experience with loss, in particular the death of her mother. Rooted in the idea of the labyrinth as a symbol for life, as in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe that Hogue would visit the summer of her mother’s death, these poems above all distill, fracture, recompose, and tell only partially—literally in parts but also in loving detail—the story of a life.

"With these poems—sparsely worded, richly lived—Geri Digiorno reminds us again just how entangled the delicate roots and tendrils of family and “individual” identity can become. Her lovingly subjective subjects include family, neighborhood, coming of age, friendship, betrayal, initiation, baptism, masquerade, transformation, sexual discovery and conquest. Sketching poetically, Digiorno—at heart a realist unafraid to risk sentimentality—relives a working-class life begun in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. In clipped, lower-case memoir-vernacular, she tells all, serving up clues to the meaning of life worldwide."

—Al Young

"The poems in Geri Digiorno’s White Lipstick explode with passion and power. Unforgettable and moving, these poems, rooted in pop culture, are ones you will return to again and again. In fearless poems about survival, Digiorno tells the story of an extraordinary woman’s life and tells it with humor and grace."

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan

"These direct and open-hearted poems speak with humor and insight of one woman’s life in the American West. Geri Digiorno’s clear voice draws us directly into the center of her world."

—Diane Di Prima

"I urge you to read this book. Kate Gale has a dream of justice and a wry sense of how hard it is to obtain. She confronts the wrongs of sex, of gender, of husbands and lovers, and sees how easily we confuse our desires with what is right. Somehow, in this process dangerous for a poet, she enters the garden of language and returns whole, humming."

—Benjamin Saltman

"In Ally Acker's poems...the erotic and the spiritual grow...closer...Impressive...Such rare gifts bring call for rejoicing."

—William Matthews

"This is a book about beauty...pain...self-revelation...a brave transparency to existence and all it brings."

—Jane Hirshfield

An astonishing debut, how to get over is part instruction manual, part prayer, part testimony. It attempts to solve the reader’s problems (by telling them how to get over), while simultaneously creating them—troubling the waters with witness and blues. ford’s poems witness via a series of “past life portraits” that navigate personal space as well as the imagined persona. These portraits conjure the blues via the imagined lives of the inanimate (a whip, a machete), the historic (a Negro burial ground, Harriet Tubman, The Red Summer), the iconic (Pecola Breedlove, Richard Pryor, Rodney King). At the same time, these portraits focus on the past lives of the author and grapple with themes including sexuality, sexual abuse, and substance abuse.

The collection’s namesake poems speak to bullying and homophobia, blackness, whiteness and gentrification, and even directly address pop culture icons like Kanye West, Chaka Khan, and Nicky Minaj. Grounded in memory and re-memory, these poems pray in the voice of the ancestors and testify on their behalf. ford’s poems not only remind how the history and legacy of slavery placed African-Americans at an unfair disadvantage, but attempt to illuminate the beautiful struggle of a people’s endurance and resilience. The reader embarks upon a journey through these poems, circa 1787 to 2013, and emerges realizing that everything is connected—the ways we live, lie, love, and die—the ways we all get over.

"With rare insight, clarity, and grace, Peggy Shumaker charts both the minutiae of miniature lives and the grand and cosmic movements affecting earth's more imposing denizens. She tracks the profound and subtle dislocations or illuminations of self inspired by the closest regard of our natural world. This volume brims with the gifts and losses, struggles and triumphs that the poet gleans from nature, and which both instruct and sustain us all. Bearing an exquisite beauty and purity, these poems soar."

—Maurya Simon, author of Days of Awe and The Golden Labyrinth

"I doubt that I can praise a poet more highly."

—David Lee

"Despite the lyric tenderness and subtlety of their voices, the poems in iThe Bob and Weave are simultaneously surreal, spooky, and full of brave love for the world's mysteries, visible and invisible. Like an unpredictable wind, this work finds its way into the cracks between everything you think you know, then overflows them."

—Claire Bateman

"Jim Peterson's poems are filled with the things of this world--its horses, hands, stones, and baseball players--but are not themselves its inhabitants. Rather, this poet moves in a realm where 'there is / a space between him and the world and he / tunes it like one string of a violin.' Equally committed to nature, to spirit, to dreams, and to the touch of another human body, Peterson constantly expects 'a message / from something that isn't me / or even like me.' The tensions evolving from this anticipation are by turns erotic, mysterious, and instructively frightening."

—Steven Corey

"With The Bob and Weave, Jim Peterson announces himself as a major American poet. These poems offer insight into both the quotidian and the eternal, and while we hear echoes of his near predecessors--Dickey, Merwin, Hugo, Roethke--the voice in this new collection--assured, resonant, vatic--is entirely Peterson's own."

—David Starkey

This debut collection of forty-five poems explores a range of subjects, including the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, September 11, the war in Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The collection also contains poems about the 2001 massacre of Nepal's royal family, people living with AIDS, the Confederate Flag issue in South Carolina, and the influence of Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin.

“It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.”

—T. Alan Broughton

"Laurel Ann Bogen is an admirable poet with a distinctive voice. In this fascinating book, again and again she transforms her moments of joy, the wounds she has suffered, into a mouth, speaking her terse and immaculate poems, and often, miraculously, breaking into song."

—Edward Field

“Lisa Krueger’s shimmering first collection of poems, Rebloom, is a hymn to the gifts and weight of daily life. Lisa Krueger weaves with stunning simplicity the love, loss, and longing of being, and of being wife, mother, sister, and daughter. She renders daily illuminations behind the veil of everyday routine, the miracles of joy and sorrow. In Rebloom, the final movement amazes us with the great comfort of nature, of the earth, where she seizes renewal of life in the presence of death. Flowers, stem, earth, she sees the whole, and the whole is what heals. By digging, Lisa Krueger aerates the soil of her life, of this our life.”

—Maureen Reed

“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