Poetry

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD IN POETRY

“After the explosion: the longest night.”

In Wilder—selected by Rick Barot as the winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm. Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos—and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan’s hopeful words are fissured by erasure—yawns wide.

Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. “Some of us didn't have lungs left,” writes Wahmanholm. “So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky—when we were told to pay attention to our breath—we had to improvise.” The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is “black at noon, black in the afternoon.”

“Deft and insightful.” —WASHINGTON POST

In her “resonant and witty” (Washington Post) second collection, Karen Leona Anderson transforms apparently prosaic documents—recipes and receipts—into expressions of human identity. From eighteenth-century cookbooks to the Food Network, the recipe becomes a site for definition and disclosure. In these poems, the pie is a cultural artifact and Betty Crocker, icon of domesticity, looms large. And like a theatrical script, the recipe directs action and conjures characters: Grace Kelly at a party. Shoppers at a postapocalyptic mall. From the little black dress ($49.99 at Nordstrom) to an epidural ($25.00 co-pay), Anderson reveals life in the twenty-first century to be equally hampered and enabled by expenditures. Amidst personal and domestic economies, wildness proliferates—bats, deer, ocelots, and fungus—reminding the reader that not all can be assimilated, eaten, or spent.

Receipt is like the lovechild of Anne Sexton and Adam Smith, illuminating the ways in which our lives are both constrained by pieces of paper, and able to slip through the crevices of cultural detritus down to the rich current of animal feeling beneath.

In all these poems
I’m partly somewhere else.
With you, without you,
walking toward you or away,
but you are there, your small face
watching from the shadow of a doorway
or a set of stairs, from behind a curtain or a table.
Sometimes I see you at the piano.
You stop playing, turn to me,
and in that pause,
tell me something necessary.
 
  
Poet Karen Enns takes the reader on a lyrical journey, wrapped in the vicissitudes of seasons and weather—while observing human and other-than-human lives. Enns invites us to peer and is concerned always with the locations and dislocations perspective implies and creates.
 

Writers across the globe speak out against sexual assault and abuse in this powerful new poetry anthology, edited by Sue Goyette

These collected poems from writers across the globe declare one common theme: resistance. By exploring sexual assault and violence in their work, each writer resists the patriarchal systems of power that continue to support a misogynist justice system that supports abusers. In doing so, they reclaim their power and their voice.

Created as a response to the Jian Ghomeshi case, writers including Joan Crate, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, and Beth Goobie are, as editor Sue Goyette explains, a “multitude, resisting.” The collection could not be more timely. The work adds a new layer to the ever-growing #MeToo movement.

Resistance underscores the validity of all women’s experiences, and the importance of dignifying such experiences in voice, however that may sound. Because once survivors speak out and disrupt their pain, there is no telling what else they can do.

"The Long Walk carries a lifetime's force of meaning. A deeply beautiful book." Anne Michaels



In The Long Walk, Jan Zwicky bears witness to environmental and cultural cataclysm. Both prophetic and acutely personal, these poems extend her previous meditations on colonial barbarism and ecocide, on spiritual catastrophe and transformation. The voice now penetrates the steepest darknesses; it possesses extraordinary reach and density. Zwicky is one of North America's finest poets, and in this book she gives us her most profound work to date.

A collection of poetry that tackles queer identity in rural Canada

Sadie McCarney’s first full-length poetry collection grapples with mourning, coming of age, and queer identity against the backdrop of rural and small-town Atlantic Canada. Ranging from pellet-gunned backyard butterflies to a chorus of encroaching ghosts, Live Ones celebrates the personal and idiosyncratic aspects of death, seeing them as intimately wedded to lives well-lived. Personal myth-making collides with grocery shopping, ancient history turns out to be alive and well in modern-day Milford, Nova Scotia, and the complexities of queer female desire call out to us from beyond the grave.

In McCarney’s exuberant imagination, the past, present, and future rarely stay where they’re put.

Diane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories—in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other’s stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for, and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.

Scene of the Crime exposes the poet’s inner criminality, where matricide and mother tongue engage in diabolic discourse. Confessing her outlaw sexuality, Ransom grapples with feminist theory and disembowels postmodern philosophy. Delighting in the multiplicity of self, language and desire, Ransom fires puns dead-aimed to riddle any interpretive reduction.

Sharon Hashimoto explores themes of what is heard and misinterpreted, what is left unexplained, and what is passed down in The Crane Wife. In these pieces, the Sansei poet leafs through old photographs—one of which is of a newlywed couple with the groom’s image cut away. Here is the rediscovered piece of barbed wire from outside the Heart Mountain concentration camp. That wire, a lei, and a car trip to an empty lot are all bits of evidence. Her questions address grandparents, mother and father, siblings, and the next generation. Hashimoto also reinvents Japanese folk tales and explores the different voices of the members of a downed JAL jet. Her poems travel in new directions in an attempt to fill in the gaps.

Breath in Every Room intertwines parents and children with encounters in the natural world. Ranging from birds in the forest to a boy’s captured frogs, from rattlesnakes in the prairie to a bat fallen from the sky. The book weaves in and out of myth and dream.

Excontemporary, a collection of poems by Beth Baruch Joselow, was published by Story Line Press in 1993. Jousting with form and language, the book combines image and idea in a painterly style. It contains poetry of sharp observation, coalescing gracefully into a thoughtful meditation on the inner life and the everyday. Mark Wallace, winner of the Gertrude Stein Prize in poetry, was among many that met Excontemporary with high praise: “Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood.”

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.

Adele Slaughter’s first book of poems, What the Body Remembers, was published by Story Line Press in 1994. It is an autobiographical collection of glimpses into a childhood fraught with familial violence, alcoholism, and trauma, and the life that has been led in its wake; the failure of a marriage and the experiences that forever mold us as human beings. Through all the abuse and suffering these poems portray, however, the driving theme behind What the Body Remembers never falters: the reader is left with an inspiring picture of courage, perseverance, femininity, and the survival of the truest self. The subject of the work remains always the poet, the speaker, even as great attention is drawn to the circumstance surrounding her, providing an impactful example of how our greatest pains may leave us changed, but not defined, and never defeated. Pat Monaghan called the book “a stunning debut volume.”

In this bold debut collection, Nikki Moustaki explores femininity in contexts that grapple with violence, mental illness, loss, love, and relationships. She investigates these themes through a variety of provocative narratives, settings, and forms: from a prose poem about a gun shop owner ranting about the Second Amendment, to more intimate lyrical poems, to the intense stamina of three long poems that anchor the book in three striking and imaginative settings—the disintegration of an abusive relationship in a backdrop of often-surreally connected narratives; diary-like entries featuring three generations of superstitious women living without men in a strange world of their own creation; and a dressmaker trying to make sense of his changing world while dealing with his ill wife. This nuanced work is intense and articulate, crafted largely by shattering traditional poetic elements, creating new forms, and driving language that never surrenders.

How to Feed a Horse is a manuscript in three parts: One, “Ranch Poems,” activities, contemplations, awareness of the creek environment. Two, “Numerology,” disparate poems that invite us to consider the absurd in our language, politics, history, and human relationships. Three, “Her(e),” conversations with a network of women, some imagined, some historic, some intimate. The author’s preoccupations with climate change and our deteriorating planetary environment surface as she gives herself over to be witness to the landscape, its decline and perseverance, its glory and rich legacy. The poems are also love poems; they show the ecstasy and shock of the now.

Without Asking marks Jane Ransom’s debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative—in her second poetry book, Scene of the
Crime—and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from linear to non-linear and back again, in an unrelenting quest for Truth.

Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn’t afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Driven by her insatiable curiosity and relying on a use of form and elision so deft it amounts to sleight-of-hand, Coles brings these big questions into small spaces in her seventh book, Wayward, moving the reader at mind-speed through brief meditations on love, marriage, and family; the permeable boundaries of the self; death; and perception. Though her subjects are deeply serious, Coles’ primary tools for addressing them include her wry wit and agile intelligence, which, taking nothing for granted, she deploys to examine our basic assumptions about the world and our experience within it. As always, Coles here uses technical skill to move her thinking in new directions—many of them at once.

This full collection of fifty-six poems reflecting on the concept of self, loss, fragility, and the constructs we must create in order to face the transient nature of life was named a finalist in the National Poetry Series, The New Issues Poetry Prize, The Four Way Books Intro Prize, and others. It was also listed as a “remarkable work” in the Tupelo Press 2012 open submission period

Daredevil pilots Lincoln Beachey, Betty Scott, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, Ormer Locklear, Bessie Coleman, and Clyde Pangborn fly at carnival altitudes to thrill millions of spectators who have never seen an airplane. In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience of moving through the air will transform life on the ground. They learn to name the clouds, size up the winds, mix an Aviation Cocktail, perform a strange field landing, and make an emergency jump.

*FINALIST in Poetry for the Connecticut Book Awards 2020*

Unapologetically sensual and forthright, Bell explores desire, loss, faith, doubt, tenderness, and violence; and sex as experience, metaphor, and magnifying lens for relationships.

Bright Stain may or may not become the Sex and the City of poetry, but this knock-your-socks-off debut will likely inspire debate—perhaps controversy―as it inhabits some startling points of view, including those of pedophile priests, serial killers, and prison inmates. Those who miss reading these breathtaking, visceral poems won’t know what their friends are raving about.

*FINALIST in Poetry for the Washington State Book Awards*

Erica Jong has never stopped writing poetry. It was her first love and it has provided inspiration for all her other books. In a dark time, she celebrates life. Her title comes from the Brazilian genius Clarice Lispector who was deeply in love with life despite many tragedies. Life challenges us to celebrate even when our very existence is threatened. Never have we needed poetry more. Jong believes that the poet sees the world in a grain of sand and eternity in a wild flower—as Blake wrote. Her work has always stressed the importance of the lives of women, women’s creativity, and self-confidence. She sees her role as a writer as inspiring future poets to come.

**Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Publisher Books Awards**

In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive! Alluring titles to haunting last lines, the poems in Dower’s fourth collection soothe, terrify, and always surprise, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, humor and heartache, Dower’s poetry continues to be quirky, dark, sexy, disarmingly candid, and moving, and here she explores the landscape of death and its intersections with love, longing, obsession, sadness, joy, and beauty. Wise and soaring, these poems bravely imagine another life beyond the one we all know where even the angels surrounding the graves are wearing bikinis, smoking Kool Lights.

Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam’s pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetry

Winner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón, Caitlin Scarano’s collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality. 

The Necessity of Wildfire begins, “To not harm / each other is not enough. I want to love you / so much that you have no before.” These poems chase a singular, thorny question: how does where and who we came from shape who and how we love? Judge Ada Limón says the resulting collection is “hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous.”

Scarano’s imagination is galvanized by the South where she grew up and by the Pacific Northwest where she now resides—floods and wildfires, the Salish Sea and the North Cascades, and the humans and animals whose lives intersect and collide there. In this collection, Scarano reckons with a legacy of violence on both sides of their family, the death of their estranged father, the unraveling of long-term relationships, the complexity of their sexuality, and the decision not to have children. With fierce lyricality, these poems—“stories without monsters, / stories without morals”—resist both redemption and blame, yet call in mercy.

Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? 

Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. 

Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

Powerhouse, world-renowned LGBTQ poet and spoken-word artist Staceyann Chin curates the first full-length collection of her poems.

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book.

According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Letting It Go—A Bereaving Mother, Delinquent Girls, and the Power of Rehabilitative Poetry Therapy

"Anyone who has suffered and cares about our world (that probably includes everyone) will be moved and changed by this book.” ―Elizabeth Lesser, author of the New York Times bestseller Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow 

Experience the poignant real-life story of how author Sharon Charde was saved by her relationship with incarcerated young women at Touchstone, a residential all-female treatment center in Litchfield, Connecticut. And, learn how these young women—confined for crimes such as using drugs, truancy, assault, prostitution, and running away—were rehabilitated by their poetry teacher.

Letting go of grief and loss by writing poetry as therapy. I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent is a book for fans of the acclaimed movie Stand and Deliver. After the death of her child, a grief-stricken psychotherapist, teacher, and writer volunteers as a poetry teacher at a residential treatment facility for “delinquent” girls. Here, their mutual support nourishes and enriches each other, though not without large quantities of drama and recalcitrance. As Sharon and the girls share their losses through weekly writing, they came to realize their unlimited potential and poetic talents.

Healing from trauma. Healing can come in surprising ways across age and social class, as it did for both the girls and Sharon. But what happens when Sharon finally grasps that the most challenging experiences are the best teachers? Narrated in five parts, the book also contains poems written by the girls, as well as excerpts from their writing, Sharon’s son’s writing, and her own.

If you have read books such as Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, The Freedom Writers Diary, Between the World and Me, So You Want to Talk about Race, or Reviving Ophelia; you will love I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent.

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side.

Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.”

The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity.

Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.

In Midnight in the Guest Room Jan Bailey locates the "bliss of the routine" experiences in women’s lives—childhood, love, marriage, sexuality, birth, child rearing, aging—and transforms them into moments of transcendent power and beauty. With uncommon wit and sensitivity she offers us poems about the pleasures of a woman’s soft and unstylish belly; the fierceness of mother love; the desolation of a miscarriage; the hilarious illusion of sexual healing; the unexpected eroticism of breast feeding.

Rooted in the landscape of the South, celebrating the private treasures to be found in the everyday world, her poems speak to us all of the joys and the losses of the seasons of our lives.

The 'Grrrl' phenomenon is a contemporary expression of young women's humor and rage exploding in books and zines, concerts, films, and the internet. In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early 'Grrrl.' 

Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year's Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. 

For longtime fans and those new to Piercy's early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America's best-known and best-selling poets.