Poetry

A poetic exploration that reimagines form and language through celestial patterns

Informed by mystery, chaos, order and writing as container, A Winter Triangle explores poetic space and form amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or "points," like its namesake asterism, this collection is inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé's idea of composing poetry from the "senseless splendor" of the skies as well as the designs for automata by 12th-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

Inventing a new poetic form, the septentrional, which trembles in its own process of becoming throughout the length of the book, Marcella Durand questions the potential of poetry in the face of artificial intelligence, climate change, and political turbulence in which language is often twisted into the opposite of its own meaning. By counting the seven syllables of the septentrional, and opening spaces (caesura) within the poetic line to provide breath and rejuvenation amid exhausting world events, these poems resituate poetry as an alternate space in which to reimagine the given forms of constellations and how we imagine order out of seeming chaos. Thus the question is opened as to whether the poet may ever make sense of the "senseless splendor" of the skies, or simply convey them as they are through poetry, holding the infinite within the finite, for a time.

Durand reads the "dustlike" script of the calligraphic galleon, a ship created entirely out of words, as art and struggles to understand the burning Wolf/Dog star which stands between law and lawlessness. Is there actual connection between stars in the constellations we have invented? Can we find room for composition within the broken loops of infinity? At the point between old and new, bow and arrow, chaos and order, A Winter Triangle asks us to face the overwhelm of change—self-inflicted, invented, planetary and real.

A collection of poems spanning six decades of life, love, loss, and rebellion amidst the planetary transformations of the working class and capital, from the acclaimed Marxist philosopher and writer George Caffentzis.

"I have never considered myself a poet, yet, from my adolescence, poetry has been a constant company in my life. Only recently, however, I have begun to collect poems that I had scattered through notebooks, back-pages of articles and other occasional spaces. The desire to see them as one work is partly stimulated by the recognition of recurring themes, at times in syntony with those inspiring my political writings. Among them are the memories and the nostalgia for the Greek world of my childhood, my grandmother's house facing the Taygetus mountain, the pleasures and troubles of love and political organizing, and, with the passing of years, the mourning of dead friends and comrades, and above all the never-ending pleasure of playing with words. This book collects some of the poems that have accompanied this journey." —George Caffentzis, from the Introduction

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.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando

Hubo una edad en que «hicimos todo lo que había que hacer», pero, de pronto, los años se agolparon —no sabemos exactamente cuándo— y una retahíla de vocablos —«ausencia», «desamor», «lejanía»— nos dejó solos con las preguntas: «¿adónde van los días que pasan?» «¿Cuál será el porvenir de mi pasado?».

En Desde entonces —recopilación de poemas publicados entre 1975 y 1978— el verso libre, la prosa poética y el poema extenso dialogan en el gran teatro del mundo que la palabra ha montado, como acto de rebeldía contra el olvido.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

An invaluable legacy that invites us to keep reading, writing, and dreaming

There was an age when "we did everything that had to be done," but suddenly, the years piled up—we don't know exactly when—and a string of words—"absence," "heartbreak," "distance"—left us alone with the questions: "Where do the days that pass go?" "What will be the future of my past?"

In Desde entonces (Since Then)—a collection of poems published between 1975 and 1978—free verse, poetic prose, and the long poem dialogue in the great theater of the world that words have set up, as an act of rebellion against oblivion.

This anthology of over 300 poems brings together America’s diverse spiritual traditions in one volume.

Includes poems by Kim Addonizio, Jimmy Santiago Baca, George Bilgere, Chana Bloch, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Stephen Dobyns, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dunn, Terrance Hayes, Bob Hicok, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, William Matthews, Jeffery McDaniel, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ed Ochester, Linda Pastan, Natasha Tretheway, and many more. 

The poems are unselfconscious, and they detail with grace the pleasures and difficulties of aging, and the evolution of personal relationships through a life.

This is not the Antarctic of polar expeditions or scientific discovery. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves at the end of the world. Harpoons, escape plans, seal meat, and endless ice populate this world of distant Antarctic coordinates. Where pages are intentionally left blank, something new emerges: the fullness of emptiness, the frightening textures of snow on a continent that is filled to the brim with it.

Listed as a “New & Noteworthy” Poetry Collection by the New York Times and named by New York Public Library as one of 2020’s “Best Books for Adults," Grimoire is a stunning sophomore collection not to be missed. 

The Animal Indoors, winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Terrance Hayes, traces the experience of a Black queer woman as she seeks refuge from an unsafe world.

Natalie Homer's debut poetry collection explores the wilderness in all of us to find rest and divine providence.

In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol of shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal. Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s Under the Broom Tree is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. 

Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, 'Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.' Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.

This young poet demonstrates an uncommon mastery of craft, writing in forms including the sonnet redoublé, sestina, canzone, and villanelle. With all her linguistic skills, Sears’s work remains approachable, offering readers a striking blend of honesty, humor, anguish, joy, and surprise. Drawing influence from contemporary poets like Mark Jarman, Erica Dawson, and Tiana Clark, Sears cuts a path of her own.

speculation, n. by Shayla Lawz won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and imagines a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.

Shayla Lawz’s debut collection brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. 

The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.

The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the stunning debut by John Belk and winner of the Autumn Houe Press Rising Writer Prize, looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. 

Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. 

Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus "Buff" Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.

Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles; the poems in this debut collection consider societal issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.  

 Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, immigration, and feminism, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers. While working from her own experience of raising children, she writes, 'You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.' Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter through the myth of Demeter and Persephone. 

This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.

Bittering the Wound by Jacqui Germain, selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize is a firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest.

Part documentation, part conjuring, this debut collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them.

 Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes—from mid-protest to post-protest—and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye.

The Scorpion’s Question Mark, a formally inventive debut collection of poetry driven by narrative and character, was the winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Poetry Prize.

In this stunning debut, JD Debris writes about characters who live on society’s outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book’s heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sánchez as he avenges his sister’s sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy “man in dusk-colored glasses.” As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves.

The Scorpion’s Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts—boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion’s tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension.

Discordant by Richard Hamilton, winner of the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Evie Shockley, is a collection of lyrical poetry offering multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism.

Hamilton’s second poetry collection is a searing examination of injustice both within the United States and abroad, from criticisms of the US military-industrial complex and failing healthcare system to nuanced observations of marginalization through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Their poems look closely at increased austerity measures, commitment to mass incarceration and private prisons, disdain for workers and labor resistance, the expansion of the US military budget, the disappearance of federal subsidies for the working poor, failing schools and teacher shortages, market inflation and price gouging, and the rising tide of right-wing fascism.

Hamilton’s lyrical writing brings together free-form essays and personal narratives full of keen-eyed and urgent observations. Told from the perspective of a speaker who is unemployed and pensive, Hamilton shows how history haunts us while keeping the present in the foreground, constantly challenging oppression that has long been commonplace.

Murmur, the second poetry collection by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, explores the complexity of race and the body of a Black man in contemporary America.

Barnett's sophomore collection considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. 

A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

Taking to Water, the debut poetry collection by Jennifer Conlon, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize, questions gender and embraces queerness through the lens of the natural world of North Carolina.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s poetry collection of gender questioning, is concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. 

In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety—wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

In Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches, the poems that bask in the beauty of nature, queerness, and love while exploring how dichotomies form identity

This collection is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third book of poetry explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” 

Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.

Named one of the "Best Books of 2024" by the New York Public Library, Book of Kin draws on the poet’s Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”

Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman, Ghost Man on Second centers on strained family relationships and the search for new homes.

Erica Reid’s debut collection traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. 

Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.

“Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.”

In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa’s writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando.

Cada minuto es un «enigma irrepetible» y la existencia, «vagos vestigios de ceniza en el aire». Pero «en medio de esta indiferencia», sucede lo improbable: el acontecer poético propicia el diálogo con el otro, con el mar, con los animales que pueblan el planeta. La poesía consuma el milagro hasta que el silencio destroza el encanto.

Los poemas de Islas a la deriva —escritos entre 1973 y 1975— contienen el mensaje de un náufrago en el tiempo, prueba material y definitiva de su paso por esta vida.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

An invaluable legacy that invites us to keep reading, writing, and dreaming.

Each minute is an "unrepeatable enigma" and existence, "vague traces of ash in the air." But "amid this indifference," the improbable happens: the poetic event fosters dialogue with others, with the sea, with the animals that inhabit the planet. Poetry consummates the miracle until silence shatters the enchantment.

The poems in Islas a la deriva—written between 1973 and 1975—contain the message of a castaway in time, the material and definitive proof of his passage through this life.

A wise and energizing book of poems suffused with music, mysticism, tenderness, and wit.

Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is a manifesto of the unmanifest. Deeply, devotedly hybrid in influence and expression, this wild collection of poetry draws on rabbinic linguistics and kabbalistic meditation, free jazz and hip-hop, Marcel Duchamp and the Magid of Mezritch—all to reveal the permutational quality of language itself: its instability, resistance to containment, and divine fault lines. In these times when answers are plentiful and questions impoverished, Pearlstein’s insistence on the materiality of nothingness reveals that in fact nothing really matters. 

Nothing Is for Everyone was published by Deuteronomy Press and is distributed by Ayin Press (via Publishers Group West). 

An urgent, poetic exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language. 

PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language. 

By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future? 

Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.

“Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle.”
—Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents

Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.

Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”

Una historia de amor. Un testimonio literario inédito desde las primeras palabras, las primeras frases, escritas en 1947, en el joven Jaime, apenas un estudiante de veintiún años, se vislumbra ya el genio y talento de quien habría de convertirse en el poeta contemporáneo más querido y leído en lengua hispana.

"Los amorosos: Cartas a Chepita es un documento literario, histórico y amoroso, imprescindible. Un formidable alegato lírico y un estar dentro de la mentalidad poética del autor". Carlos Monsiváis.

A love story. An unpublished literary testimony from the first words, the first sentences, written in 1947, in the young Jaime, barely a twenty-one-year-old student, the genius and talent of who would become the most beloved and read contemporary poet in the Spanish language is already glimpsed.

"Los amorosos: Cartas a Chepita (The Lovers) is an essential literary, historical, and romantic document. A formidable lyrical plea and a glimpse into the poetic mindset of the author-." Carlos Monsiváis.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando

Desde la ventana de una casa un parque resalta por su pozo y su torre de mampostería. Eme observa al mismo individuo de ayer que está sentado en la misma banca leyendo el mismo periódico. Su identidad es un misterio y objeto de una serie de hipótesis: ¿será un desempleado, un corruptor de menores, un padre sin hijo, un amante desdeñado, un nostálgico que vuelve a su terruño?, ¿un perseguidor?, ¿un criminal de guerra?, o quizá no es sino el producto de la paranoia de un hombre acuciado por una culpa que lo ha mantenido oculto y acechante tras las persianas durante veinte años…

En Morirás lejos José Emilio Pacheco erige una galería de espejos formada por distintos segmentos sostenidos en varias líneas temporales: la destrucción del Templo de Jerusalén, el levantamiento del gueto de Varsovia, el Tercer Reich y un presente que une a dos desconocidos cuya identidad —¿quién es la víctima, quién el victimario?— el lector tendrá que desvelar.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

An invaluable legacy that invites us to continue reading, writing and dreaming

From the window of a house, a park stands out for its well and its masonry tower. Eme observes the same individual from yesterday who is sitting on the same bench reading the same newspaper. His identity is a mystery and the subject of a series of hypotheses: is he unemployed, a corrupter of minors, a father without a child, a scorned lover, a nostalgic who returns to his homeland?, a persecutor?, a war criminal?, or perhaps he is nothing more than the product of the paranoia of a man beset by a guilt that has kept him hidden and lurking behind the blinds for twenty years...

In Morirás lejos José Emilio Pacheco erects a gallery of mirrors made up of different segments held in various timelines: the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, the Third Reich and a present that unites two strangers whose identity – who is the victim, who is the perpetrator? – the reader will have to reveal.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando

«La poesía tiene una sola realidad: el sufrimiento». Es «una enfermedad de la conciencia, un rezago / de tiempos anteriores a los nuestros», «precio que algunos pagan / por no saber vivir» o, por el contrario, por pretender vivir demasiado «puliendo, desgastando un idioma ya seco», para «hacer que brote el agua en el desierto» y que las palabras se interpongan en la desesperada marcha del tiempo.

Libro fundamental de la poesía iberoamericana, Premio Bellas Artes de Poesía Aguascalientes (1969), en No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo —reunión de poemas publicados entre 1964 y 1968— la poesía se detenta como única alternativa contra el olvido.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

An invaluable legacy that invites us to continue reading, writing and dreaming

"Poetry has only one reality: suffering." It is "a disease of conscience, a remnant / of times before ours", "a price that some pay / for not knowing how to live" or, on the contrary, for pretending to live too long "polishing, wearing out an already dry language", to "make water gush out in the desert" and let words get in the way of the desperate march of time.

Fundamental book of Ibero-American poetry, Aguascalientes Fine Arts Poetry Prize (1969), in No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (Don't Ask Me How Time Goes By) —a collection of poems published between 1964 and 1968— poetry is held as the only alternative against oblivion.

In October 2023, upon witnessing the escalation of Palestinian genocide, Ktunaxa poet Smokii Sumac began writing poems reflecting on the stories of Palestinians in Gaza who were risking their lives to share news of the genocide of Palestinian culture, literature, and life. These 100 poems offer a witnessing of the escalation of colonial violence, both current and historical, across oceans, lands, cultures, and people, and the reckoning one has in the face of a genocide.

Vulnerable, eloquent, compassionate, and enduring, Born Sacred is an in-time reflection honouring the shared histories of Indigenous Peoples of North America and of the people in Palestine. Sumac offers this collection as a small piece of life dedicated to Palestinians and resounds the collective call for solidarity in our shared liberation.

A dreamlike collection of poetry that intertwines an embodied experience of the natural world with mythology, memory, and the creative process

Woven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, Dog and Moon inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it to create a sort of Indra’s Net, with couplets echoing and reflecting across his poems. They are a series of juxtapositions: nature writing placed in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging.
My ribs, the mattress’s ribs—I can’t sleep. This is a war,
says the newscaster reporting on the winter storm.

A war with Mother Nature.
When a metaphor is taken too far it becomes a projectile.

Try to talk to someone when they’re snoring:
their responses are all the same. The mind races.

Happiness is only a purchase away,
but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?

Time moves differently depending on your bedsprings.
From a net of clouds, the moon:

so much of writing is trying to remember
your thoughts from other states of consciousness.

An inexplicable need to follow
the pathways of unseeable sparks and insects in the blankets.

A collection of poems about nature and power

To Ibn al-Muʿtazz and his Abbasid contemporaries, the hunt was more than a diversion—it was the theater for their poetic and political endeavors, captured here in fifty-nine Arabic hunting poems, or ṭardiyyāt. The poems of In Deadly Embrace describe hunting expeditions with animals trained to hunt, including saluki hounds and birds of prey. Many were composed after these outings, when the hunting party gathered to enjoy the game they caught.

Poetry was central to Abbasid society and served as a method of maintaining networks of patronage and friendship; the poems in this collection reflect these power dynamics and allowed Ibn al-Muʿtazz—prince of the realm and in line for the caliphate—to explore his own relationship to social and political power and to demonstrate his fitness to rule.

Ibn al-Muʿtazz was an influential poet and literary theorist of the Modernist school of poetry. In Deadly Embrace merges the Modernists’ new techniques and styles with age-old themes: military prowess and wisdom, fitness to rule and comradeship, the camaraderie of the hunt and the cult of heroic masculinity. Groundbreaking and evocative, the poems paint vivid pictures of hunting scenes while posing deep questions about our attentiveness to the natural world and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman.

An English-only edition.

Winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.

Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.

Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.

Un legado invaluable que nos invita a seguir leyendo, escribiendo y soñando.

Frágil testimonio «del momento que pasa», «la poesía es la sombra de la memoria, pero será materia del olvido»,

palabras «que dicta en su fluir el tiempo en vuelo». 

Los días no volverán, aunque cada día amanezca; 

la vida deja su estela remanente que no conduce a ningún lado, 

pues «a todas partes vamos a no volver. 

Estamos por vez última en dondequiera». 

Con poemas escritos entre 1969 y 1972, en Irás y no volverás José Emilio Pacheco plasmó una huella antes de que ésta fuera borrada por las arenas del tiempo, mediante su oficio que es remembranza y nostalgia, último «testimonio del momento inasible».

A fragile testimony "of the moment that passes", "poetry is the shadow of memory, but it will be a matter of oblivion",

words "that dictates in its flow time in flight". 

The days will not return, even if every day dawns;  

Life leaves its remnant trail that leads nowhere, 

because "we are not going to return everywhere. 

We are for the last time everywhere". 

With poems written between 1969 and 1972, in Irás y no volverás (You Will Go and You Will Not Return) José Emilio Pacheco captured a mark before it was erased by the sands of time, through his profession that is remembrance and nostalgia, the last "testimony of the ungraspable moment".

“Between God and the soul, there is no in-between,” said Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic, and that idea frames the poems in this collection.

Norris’ central idea is that mystery is the core of being. It is in us and around us. Given a chance, something deep inside will show up as longing, something that can’t be explained but needs expression. This is what she begins to call “soul singing.”

A well-known writer and poet now in her eighties, Gunilla Norris offers this collection of short prayers, tender moments of awareness, even humming, that express her yearning for and experience of connecting with the Source of all. Norris’ expressions have a universal feel, and speak across a spectrum of traditions. Above all, Soul Songs shows how sometimes we simply can’t help but lift our hearts and sing for the soul’s sake.

Heavenly Inspirations Manifested (HIM) is an anointed collection of thought provoking and spirit filled poems. Young and old alike will be drawn into the world of modern day soliloquy through its pages. The poetic expressions speak to the existence of mankind and will compel one to thoroughly search and examine the condition of the human heart, soul and mind. Readers will move from revelation, inspiration to the power of manifestation of the glorious hope and endless wonders of God!