Poetry

Contributors: Samuel Ace, Chase Berggrun, Sherwin Bitsui, Sophie Cabot Black, Jericho Brown, Anthony Ceballos, Marianne Chan, Jos Charles, Brendan Constantine, Cynthia Cruz, Steven Espada Dawson, Megan Denton Ray, Martín Espada, Megan Fernandes, Sarah Gorham, Joy Harjo, Mary Karr, Sophie Klahr, Michael Klein, Dana Levin, Ada Limón, Zach Linge, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Airea Dee Matthews, Joshua Mehigan, Tomás Q. Morín, Erin Noehrem, Joy Priest, Dana Roeser, sam sax, Diane Seuss, Natalie Shapero, Katie Jean Shinkle, Jeffrey Skinner, Bernardo Wade, Afaa M. Weaver, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Phillip B. Williams, Ocean Vuong

"Jerusalem" is a stucco cottage
Filled at all hours with angels,
Devils, and assorted orphans
Who dance and drink
And hand-tint engravings.

Blake himself is up in the attic
Night and day—
Even in eternity, he's still scribbling.

Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, he has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he is professor of English.

"Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda."—The New York Times Book Review

"Her language is refreshing, musical, attenuated."—Anne Waldman

Simone Muench lives in Chicago.

“This is my favorite book by Debra Nystrom so far. It’s beautiful.”––Ann Beattie

“A fearless and elegiac book, deriving from those struggles which many of us know all too well—the final illness of the poet’s mother, the physical and mental decline of her father, and the emotional sufferings of her imprisoned brother. . . . Bad River Road arises from necessity.”—David Wojahn

Debra Nystrom grew up in South Dakota, where she returns each year to family land on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. She has published two previous books of poetry, Torn Sky and A Quarter Turn. She teaches at the University of Virginia.

Present Vanishing is a book where East and West meet, where Zen contends with social satire, often on the playing fields of American landscapes. In Dick Allen’s new poems, almost every word is a search for calm in the midst of contemporary chaos. Paradox is everywhere: the present vanishes, even as it unscrolls before us.

Author of six previous poetry collections, Dick Allen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is also the recipient of the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and the Hart Crane Poetry Prize. He recently retired from his position at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

I hear the dinner plates gossip
Mom collected to a hundred.
My friends say get on board,
but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap

lying by the fire. That's why
when radios broadcast news,
news broadcast from radios
gives air to my kinship, Dickey,

who says he'd go dead if ever
I discovered him to them.
I took care, then, the last time
bedrooms banged, to tape over

the outlets, swipe the prints
off DVDs, weep up the tea
stains where once was coffee.
Not one seep from him since.

“It’s impossible for me to imagine poems more fully integrated or more fully realized than those in this book, and it’s heartening to me that these poems were written by someone young.”—Michael Ryan

In Gabriel Fried’s debut volume, the reader weaves through details of daily life, dream-life, and the afterlife. In the process, we find ourselves unexpectedly amidst biblical and mythological stories so intimately retold that they seem populated by friends and relatives.

Gabriel Fried lives in New York City, where he edits the poetry series at Persea Books.

"Nostalgic"

Jar of feathers becoming,
finally, another map:
cloistered homage to a decade of geese
haunting the grid of our
steadfastness.
Un-find the coveted

ibis; kiss the scarlet of the robin's
blurred departure.
In the end, we were landmark,
compass, same as the lingered-over
pond, the marsh
where cattails remained when all else
left. Ragged in salt,
cloud-headed.

Paula Bohince's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.

From the powerful drama and formal boldness of "The Status Seekers" to the various theories of criticism in "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters," Kathleen Ossip's second collection takes up the crazed threads of modern experience and all its contradictions. Each poem, each new approach is an attempt to extract something concrete from an era not yet past. Yet as the poet probes and wonders, she gradually reveals another narrative, built on strangled emotion and subdued lyricism. The Cold War is jagged and thought-provoking. It questions the origins and premises of contemporary American culture.

"My Reptile"

Little frilléd lizard

with your big mouth
and your clutch of egg.
Pure urge iguana
—I wanna wanna
wanna—heavy pet
in a moist habitat.
Your dewlap licks
down my spine;
your creep yearns,
yearns your crawl,
like a small machine
that you rev and
rev and rev until
the engine floods.

Gin and bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. Catherine Wing's poems are soaked in her cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. It riddles, aiming askew for a straight answer: how do we make our way through this world?

“[Ander Monson’s] poems celebrate defiant excess. In this land of scarcity, right-living involves using up what you have, where you have it; otherwise someone might wreck, steal, or use it and you might not get any. A carpe diem for obscure, doomed youth.”—Stephen Burt

Inspired by the cult Japanese video game Katamari Damacy, these poems increase in size and momentum, rolling more and more into their orbits as they go. Formally inventive and fun, The Available World examines the beauty and terror of excess.

Ander Monson lives in Tucson, Arizona.

"[Jarman's] poems explore faith in its many manifestations, but there is something here transcendent that speaks to everyone. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Bone Fires collects work from over thirty years and charts Mark Jarman's spiritual development as he grows from a poet of childhood and nostalgia through adulthood and the struggles of faith. The section of new poems includes work published in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and in the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. A landmark collection from one of our nation's most distinguished poets.

“These are ambitious, moving poems, deft, panged, and stunning.”—Dean Young

“Existential chilliness, mourning, and dread find a uniquely compelling voice in Thomas Heise's poetry. . . .”—Alan Williamson

"Horror Vacui offers an often vertiginous account of how death imposes [an] irresistible fact on minds bent on both accommodating and resisting this one inevitable yet impossible truth. . . . And it's this property of being barely held together that makes Horror Vacui so striking. . . . an extraordinary mood piece."—Ray McDaniel

In his haunting debut collection Horror Vacui, Thomas Heise explores the fear of empty space, a mysterious and abiding absence that is a pronounced presence in this poet's lyrical voice.

"Michael Mazur's approach to the Inferno gave me inspiration and guidance in understanding Dante. The monotypes, nourished by the artist's intense engagement with the poetry, are themselves acts of translation, embodying vital principles."—Robert Pinsky, from the preface

A unique collection that revisits Dante's classic with translations by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and full-color artwork by internationally renowned artist Michael Mazur. This rare and stunning collaboration is sure to be sought by both collectors and readers alike.

"Eleanor Lerman's poems have sociological savvy, philosophical rue, historical recognition, and vernacular resilience. They sing a song that is bravely gloomy, but they sing it with a fierce and earned dignity."Tony Hoagland

“Lerman is as sly as a pool hustler, mapping complex constellations on the dark felt, setting gleaming images into spinning motion, then sinking each whirling sphere into a corner pocket.”Donna Seaman, Booklist

Eleanor Lerman has been a Chinese museum guide, a harpsichord kit workshop manager, and a comedy writer. She has received a National Book Award nomination and an NEA grant. She lives in New York.

“Reading these absolutely terrific poems, with their southern colloquial drawl and sober Buddhist insight, is a bit like having a sage old sleepy tiger purr in your ear while you lie at the edge of the swamp in back of Billy-Joes's pickup truck.”—Dazed & Confused Magazine

“Sustaining, inspiring, even rescuing.”—Will Oldham, musician

“A true beast of a man with insight and beauty to spare.”—Harmony Korine, filmmaker

“Brett Eugene Ralph can look at a woman dancing alone, ‘eyes closed, lips parted, held aloft / in one hand half a mango, / a gigantic butcher knife / clutched in the other,’ and know immediately that she’s praying.”—Andrew Hudgins

Brett Eugene Ralph lives in rural western Kentucky. His country-rock ensemble, Brett Eugene Ralph’s Kentucky Chrome Revue, can be heard in seedy dives throughout the South.

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies.

“We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.”

Contributors include: Kay Ryan, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Molly Peacock, Amy Uyematsu, Jorie Graham, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.

"Ultimately, the lyrics in Hoodwinked read as odes to mortality. They marvel nonstop, unsentimentally, and with necessary ambivalence, at the world as given and the human inability to consistently rise to the exhausting challenge of making every second count. These poems constantly acknowledge that 'all flesh is grass.' They make us hear the wondrous, terrifying hum of impending obliteration, while at the same time never growing immune to beauty, never ceasing to be curious about what the grass itself makes of our common temporal conundrum."
—Amy Gerstler, from the introduction

Inherent untrustworthiness—of received opinion, the trompe l’oeil deceptions of nature, and the workings of our own unfaithful minds—is given its proper menace in David Hernandez’ Hoodwinked. In poems that range from the backyard to Iraq and back again, Hernandez disturbs the surface of contemporary life to reveal barely submerged worlds that, impossible to fathom, make fools of us all.

Lucy / your secret book / that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt— / Not having to have an ending / Not having to last. . . .

And so begins Jean Valentine’s provocative new work, Lucy, a poem that pays homage to the three million-year-old skeleton of the earliest known hominid. With a deep sense of gratitude and profound longing, this poem celebrates the creative power of the female by introducing us to one of our oldest human ancestors. In a dreamlike and often fractured syntax that is vintage Valentine, Lucy, the “wildgood mother” of our species, can once again be heard.

“Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won’t let go. In poem after poem, he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation. Wright’s search breaks all the barriers of time, space, action, for its dramatic narrative simply refuses to acknowledge the usual unities, as though all time were this time, all places this place and all actions one.”—Philip Levine, from his citation for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Charles Wright was named chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 1983, he has been at the University of Virginia.

Winner of the 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Dan Chiassonn

From "The Above Song":

Foie gras has been outlawed. So has gravitas,
faux grass, middle class. Soon: the past.

Julia Story lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

“Her poems make vivid what has become dusty, and return us to, as real art does, the brilliance of initial perception.”—Jane Hirshfield

“The mythmaking in these poems is fierce and wildly original—this is a thrilling new poetic voice.”—Nick Flynn

Monica Ferrell was born in 1975 in India. A former Discovery/The Nation prizewinner and Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently teaches in the creative writing program at Purchase College. Her first novel, The Answer Is Always Yes, was published by Dial Press in May 2008. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Josephine Jacobsen left behind a legacy of almost a dozen books and several considerable honors, including a position as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1971–1973), the 1988 Lenore Marshall Award, the 1993 Shelley Memorial Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s highest honor—the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry—in 1997.

Contents of a Minute is a treasure of recently discovered and previously unpublished poetry. Written with the spare eloquence and freedom of mind which Jacobsen was so well-known for, this collection of poems pays tribute to a woman ahead of her time.

“Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection’s imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, and creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros. . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth Reddy

“The Preacher’s a poem with polyphonic voices, enormous range, and many of Stern’s familiar icons: his animism, his city grit, his philosophical fragments, his irony and justice quest, his reaching for the strain of memory.”—Ira Sadoff

Gerald Stern is the author of fourteen poetry books, including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fifteen years, and he is the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.

“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier

“In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan

The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.

Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

“Fragment of the Head of a Queen makes it clear why Cate Marvin is becoming one of our essential poets.”—Rodney Jones

Cate Marvin’s new poems, their wrought music, unblinking focus, and hard-edged sensuality, are wreathed with an entirely different silence than her first collection. The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen—seeming to rise up through centuries—is their tutelary spirit.

Cate Marvin is the author of World’s Tallest Disaster, awarded the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Robert Pinsky and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2002). She teaches creative writing in Staten Island, New York.

“Kinesthetic, compassionate, unflinching, sometimes narrative, sometimes surreal, C. E. Perry’s poems turn this world’s full ripeness and strangeness as a farmer turns soil—that out of disruption and loss, something new might take root, grow, and sustain.”—Jane Hirshfield

“Reading C. E. Perry you suddenly discover a deeply intelligent, sane, courageous, fresh voice. It surprises you as any such voice would. I am delighted with the breadth of interest and the wisdom.”—Gerald Stern

C. E. Perry graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and from Dartmouth Medical School. She is a family medicine physician at a community health clinic in San Francisco.

Jaime Sabines is a national treasure in Mexico. He is considered by Octavio Paz to be instrumental to the genesis of modern Latin American poetry and “one of the best poets” of the Spanish language. Toward the end of his life, he had published for over fifty years and brought in crowds of more than 3,000 to a readings in his native country. Coined the “Sniper of Literature” by Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, Sabines brought poetry to the streets. His vernacular, authentic poems are accessible: meant not for other poets, or the established or elite, but for himself and for the people.

In this translation of his fourth book, Tarumba, we find ourselves stepping into Sabines’ streets, brothels, hospitals, and cantinas; the most bittersweet details are told in a way that reaffirms: “Life bursts from you, like scarlet fever, without warning.” Eloquently co-translated by Philip Levine and the late Ernesto Trejo, this bilingual edition is a classic for Spanish- and English-speaking readers alike. Secretive, wild, and searching, these poems are rife with such intensity you’ll feel “heaven is sucking you up through the roof.”

Jaime Sabines was born on March 25, 1926 in Chiapas, Mexico. In 1945, he relocated to Mexico City where he studied Medicine for three years before turning his attention to Philosophy and Literature at the University of Mexico. He wrote eight books of poetry, including Horal (1950), Tarumba (1956), and Maltiempo (1972), for which he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award. In 1959, Sabines was granted the Chiapas Prize and, in 1983, the National Literature Award. In addition to his literary career, Sabines served as a congressman for Chiapas. Jaime Sabines died in 1999; he remains one of Mexico’s most respected poets. 

Philip Levine (translator) was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. Philip Levine lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University.

“[Baron] Wormser is a beautiful writer of the meditative-narrative poem in the compassionate and lucid style of Frost, Hayden Carruth, and Donald Hall. Like those writers, his poems dignify rural lives, but also explore the national soul with particularly American integrity and frankness. Conversational, civilizing, thoughtful, and often funny, too, there are many extraordinary poems in these Scattered Chapters.”—Tony Hoagland

Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir. He directs the Frost Place Conference and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program. He served as Poet Laureate of Maine and now lives in Vermont.

Paul Praeder—an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman’s Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad’s Captain Kurtz—is a new and disturbing addition to the pantheon of American literary characters. His story unfolds over his 30-year correspondence with a young poet, and it is a story of lost moral compass, in which artistic integrity is traded for commercial success, and friendship and fidelity fall to lust and greed.

James Baker Hall is currently the Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

“To read this book is to be reminded of how many major poems have their root in prayer.”—Grace Schulman

“The thirty prose poems that make up Epistles are as compellingly modern in their form as they are timeless in their quest for spiritual truths amid radical doubts.”—David Lehman

These are compellingly modern prose poems in the style of Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians.

Mark Jarman’s book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets’ Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award. Jarman is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Eleanor Lerman, whose last collection, The Mystery of Meteors (2001), was named by Library Journal as “Best of Poetry, 2001,” returns with a dazzling, funny, and seriously mature new book.

In Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, Lerman boldly wrests contemporary mysticism from a hard-knock New York Jewish consciousness. She’s a solid witness to the 1960s, Cold War, Vietnam, sexual revolution, and drugs. However, in her favor, she’s traveled through baby boomer irony, bought the T-shirt, and found her way back.

Eleanor Lerman has been nominated for a National Book Award, received the inaugural Juniper Prize, and was the recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a lifelong New Yorker.

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies.

“We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.”

Contributors include: David Huerta, Alberto Blanco, Coral Bracho, Ricardo Castillo, Vicente Quirarte, Rafael Vargas, Alicia Garcia Bergua, Fabio Morábito, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Myriam Moscona, and more.

“With Stevensian proliferations and Dickinsonian refractive speed, Enter Invisible puzzles without ruse, conveying a lightning-quick mind, always electric, fiercely inventive. The descriptive angularities, formal variance, and musical resources are sassy, tricky, and intriguing, full of razzle-dazzle and enormously beguiling, even as a tragic sense simmers within their marvelous contraptions. Catherine Wing is confident enough to entertain us and skilled enough to leave us haunted by what makes us laugh.”—Dean Young

Catherine Wing grew up in Kentucky. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and, most recently, her MFA in poetry at the University of Washington in Seattle.

These are poems for grownups who believe in life and death. They are chastened by the press of the second part of life, and reading these poems is like walking through a museum of priceless artifacts—at night, alone, in silence—our heels echoing down marble corridors. Gradually we come to see that even these language exhibits, these brilliantly made dioramas, are fading. We know it. The poet knows it. But the fact that she has made them anyway, against that knowledge, means everything.

Aleda Shirley is the author of two collections of poems, Chinese Architecture and Long Distance. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Cleopatra Mathis . . . brandishes the gifts of a talented poet who has hit her stride.”—The New York Times Book Review

“As long as we have Mathis’ clarity of imagination, the intricacy and breadth of her engagement with the world and the depth of her meeting of others, we’ll have the warmth to help us deal with our own centers of cold.”—A.R. Ammons

Strong, unsentimentally emotional sixth collection set on the frigid shores of Provincetown.

Taylor's love of literary tales is deeply embedded in-and extended by-her poems. References to Wilde, Rilke, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Charlotte Brontë, and Lady Murasaki are rife, as are characters from fairy tales and children's stories. Even familial figures take on archetypal roles, lending the speaker's personal memory a mythic significance. The most pronounced motifs in Curios suggest a world enriched by fantasy: ghosts, fans, screens, masks, silk, windows, dreams, and curtains. But Taylor makes apparent that her imagination has bloomed not only to augment but to accommodate the world's multifariousness: I wanted everything connected to everything in a logical universe. / . . . In time, the world begins to shape your stubborn mind. ("She's Got Mail")

This debut collection is remarkable not only for its consistent style but also because it showcases a new form of poem-her own invention-a "curio" in itself. In extended lines, usually seven to eight, Taylor delivers deadpan statements and poses questions that are startlingly provocative-more like koans than interrogatives. Her poems range widely and wildly, at times taking surrealistic turns, yet they always maintain contact with the earth. It is a bonus to the reader that Taylor's grounding wire is humor. Even as the poems astonish by their swiftness, daring, and the accuracy of their surprising connections, they make us laugh: Do the stars hiss when they slash across the sky, cooling down? / Get a grip on yourself, said Mother often. ("Excess")

The volume's title, Curios, is remarkably apt. With unexpected images and questions reminiscent of childhood, Taylor riddles the surface of perception. These poems prove that curiosity-and imagination-will get the best of us. This title received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of Ameri

“Ah to be the one for whom the love poems in this sexy, brainy, elegant book were written.”—Linda Gregerson

The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality. In “Love Poem, Unwritten,” Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet’s heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable, our very imperfections opening us to connection and grace. Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (1998). She lives in Granville, Ohio.

“Singer of stories, lyric raconteur, Sydney Lea has evolved—through a long, rich career—into one of America’s most harrowing and honest poets. Ghost Pain is his most eloquent and wrenching book.”—T.R. Hummer

“Ghost Pain is a remarkable book, which takes his work to a new level.”—Stephen Dunn

The eighth poetry collection by the founder of New England Review explores addiction, alcoholism, violence and the uses and inadequacies of art.

“Kimbrell helps us see into the mysteries and losses that haunt our world—primal, incessant, hidden, and true as ‘fog rising from our wordless mouths.’”—David Baker

My Psychic is a book about the soul—what it might be, under what circumstances it might show itself to the rest of us curious, bewildered living. The center sequence of poems elegizing his mother’s death movingly establishes an unbroken continuity between the living and the dead.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He is currently the director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

“There isn’t a page in this book that isn’t bracing. . . .”—Marie Howe

Beginning with the word “defeat” and concluding on the word “alive,” Goodbye to the Orchard testifies that we must remain open in the face of loss, because loss is a given; and that our glimpses of the mysteries—whether of dying or living—are all we’re allowed.

Steven Cramer is the author of The Eye that Desires to Look Upward, The World Book, and Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand. He currently lives in Massachusetts.

The Mother on the Other Side of the World is James Baker Hall's fifth book of poems. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

"James Baker Hall has consistently pursued in his poetry a trajectory that is deeply authentic. It has produced writing of daring and delicacy, over a period long enough to make it plain that this is not a momentary brilliance but a sustained vision. He has been dedicated to making the language reflect the surprise, the turns and leaps of memory and recurrent apparition in which pain and beauty are often indistinguishable. This new collection displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it."-W.S. Merwin

"A delightful collection of poems depicting Hall's life long st

"Comer’s rhythms authenticate what she asserts. Page after page, the recognizably real and the imaginative flirt with and complement one another. . . ."—From the Foreword by Stephen Dunn

In The Unrequited Comer takes up and invigorates the line of American poetry called the "lyric surreal." The late poet James Wright was master of this mode, and Comer has a peculiarly American combination of humor and wild invention.

Carrie St. George Comer received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize and taught at Phillips Academy in Andover. She currently lives in Miami, Florida.

For readers eager to experience "the ache of paradise," these poems chart consciousness with obvious pleasure: "Are you not a lucky one/you who hear your own mind think." But here is an intellect made lyrical. To celebrate the sensual core of experience, Halme's seemingly spare language is lush with assonance. In these poems, vowels have a cumulative effect, resounding, finally, in a grandiose vocative o of astonishment and joy.

Kathleen Halme's first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, winner of the 1995 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition, was awarded the Balcones Poetry Prize. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Halme is a 1997-98 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

"Here is a volcanically poised and deliciously balanced book of meditative graces, of provisional lyric holdings, of sumptuous meditations shored against the ruins."-Edward Hirsch

"Most prominent is Halme's sensual commitment to language; her poems resonate with a phonetic lushness illuminating her intelligent imagery. These poems are enjoyable most notably for the pleasure of pure sound. . . . Gently peppered into her poems are flavors of mysticism, portrayed by an efficient and clever selection of words, which result in a pleasurable and unexpected unfolding. Overall, these poems

"Vogelsang’s poetry is both abrasive and generous."—John Ashbery

"Vogelsang has found an interrogating voice at once dissembling and direct."—Stanley Plumly

The poems in Vogelsang’s fourth collection are events of great pressure, tension, and heat. In a language pitched somewhere just above the vernacular, Vogelsang often connects with the classics and grapples with concerns of our time, offering a singular experience—emotionally affecting and intellectually provocative poetry.

Arthur Vogelsang is the author of A Planet, Twentieth Century Women, and Cities and Towns, which received the Juniper Prize. He is the coeditor of The American Poetry Review and teaches at New England College. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

In the form of an eccentric dictionary, this debut brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson. In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” Lee’s poems move through the alphabet in an attempt to limn the border between language and spirit. In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.

"Tate’s originality was confirmed almost thirty years ago . . . testifying to the broad appeal of his wonderfully eccentric and generous poetry."—John Ashbery

These are poems for grownups who believe in life and death. They are chastened by the press of the second part of life, and reading these poems is like walking through a museum of priceless artifacts—at night, alone, in silence—our heels echoing down marble corridors. Gradually we come to see that even these language exhibits, these brilliantly made dioramas, are fading. We know it. The poet knows it. But the fact that she has made them anyway, against that knowledge, means everything.

Aleda Shirley is the author of two collections of poems, Chinese Architecture and Long Distance. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi.

Alice Fulton’s praise of Wormser as an "unabashedly American poet" still rings true in this sixth collection, as does Sydney Lea’s view that Wormser has the gift to "speak, not sloganistically but literally, for us all." What will surprise readers is that each poem accomplishes all of this in only fourteen lines—each loose sonnet simultaneously deft, analytical, and wry.

Baron Wormser is the author of six previous collections—The White Words, Good Trembling, Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems, When, and Mulroney & Others—and is the co-author of Teaching the Art of Poetry. He was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine in 2000 and teaches at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. He lives in Hallowell, Maine.

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

"Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

“Ah to be the one for whom the love poems in this sexy, brainy, elegant book were written.”—Linda Gregerson

The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality. In “Love Poem, Unwritten,” Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet’s heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable, our very imperfections opening us to connection and grace. Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (1998). She lives in Granville, Ohio.

Powers of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. Sven Birkerts, in The Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and Powers of Congress more than meets that claim. Back by popular demand, this is a reprint of an important collection that continues to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics. It will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought.

"She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."—Eavan Boland, Partisan Review

"Powers of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."—David Baker, Poetry

"In Powers of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."—David Barber, Hungry Mind Review

Marketing plans for Powers of Congress
o Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Powers of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books of poems include Felt, Sensual Math, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. A collection of her essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999.

Alice Fulton's poems appear in five editions of The Best American Poetry series, as well as in The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

"Turpin is a poet of unusual gifts. . . a meditative and social poet whose real subject is the connection between one person and another—sometimes, between one person and all others. His material is not local color, but the universal, and the building trades are presented not as exotic but for their likeness to the rest of life."—Robert Pinsky

"This work is so fundamentally substantial and pleasurable that it feels, to me, like an anthem."—Tony Hoagland

Mark Turpin has made his living for the past twenty-five years as a carpenter and construction worker, and his debut collection offers a rare and profound view of manual labor’s laconic, and largely male, world. He lives in San Francisco.

"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan

The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.

Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

"A stunning follow-up to Allen’s award-winning New and Selected. Accessible and profound. "No matter how tactile and specific he is, Allen always retains a sense of the greater world. . . . [H]is pristine poems flow like timelines, drawing unexpected connections between happenings both major and minor, and observations both subtle and life changing."—Booklist

Dick Allen has received the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and The Hart Crane Poetry Prize. His books include Ode to the Cold War, Flight and Pursuit, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic, Regions With No Proper Names, and Anon and Various Time Machine Poems. He recently retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

It is difficult to speak of a poet like Weaver, whose gift is large, lush, and expansive. The difficulty is multiplied when considering a Selected Poems, where the magnitude and range of the poet's accomplishments are fully displayed. One could spend a good deal of time merely on the works of lyrical intensity, such as Weaver's series of poems "Lamentations" which explores the painful permutations of a father's illness and a mother's death. One could marvel over the compressed emotion this series somehow manages to contain and, in the end, to release in the reader.

But this would be to ignore the sharply etched portrait poems, such as "Sub Shop Girl," "Bootleg Whiskey," and "Walnut Cinema." It would not fully explain the straightforward narrative power of poems like "The Robe," in which a young boy is cruelly shown his place in the sexual hierarchy of grown women. And it would give no hint of the poet's ability to compose such recent, experimentally daring poems as "Mojo Momba," "Piggly Wiggly," and the breathtakingly associative "A Composition for White Critics . . . " which, among its many effects, brilliantly satirizes "postmodern" literary ethos.

And to speak of any individual poems would not capture the extent of Weaver's operatic accomplishment in Multitudes. Weaver is a poet of rare grace, power, and honesty. His work will be read simply because the poetry is superb.

Finally, this is a book that embodies the fraught matter of African-American masculinity, in a way that a thousand essays could not begin to match. Multitudes is a clear window into the soul of the African-American male. In this sense it possesses an ambitious, manifest social value that contemporary poetry can rarely claim. Weaver's Selected will be read for the pleasures of its poetry, yes. But it will also be valued for the urgent illumination it provides into one of the central issues of our country and our time.

Afaa Michael Weaver (b. Michael S. Weav

"Harrison's language is exact, sinuous, and compelling, and leads to places we may not have seen before, but know when we arrive. This is a beautiful book."—Henry Taylor

"This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-heightened expectations that are never disappointed, and with sustained delight."—Anthony Hecht

"Here are hauntingly composed poems of remembrance, of happiness and eagerness and regret—of life lyrically embraced, all beautifully rendered by one of our finest poets."—Robert Coles

In poems that balance realistic and surrealistic narratives, irony and sentiment, Calbert records the journey of a woman reeling from a number of losses-her youth, the death of a close friend, religious faith-toward love and marriage. These poems speak directly of and from the self, and in so doing echo Whitman's conversational grace. Calbert writes an updated feminist song of herself, a song that celebrates the pleasure of being the modern "woman as wild card, as other/than wife, mother, lover, friend," the woman who delights in forging herself with wit and wisdom.

The title poem, "Bad Judgment," shows how the little lies we tell ourselves and others can create lives of bad faith, and as much as she would like to be consoled for her losses, reassured about the permanence of her recompenses, Calbert does not seek the easy balm of dogma. Instead of grace or God, per se, she suggests, we have perspective. And Calbert shows that we are blessed, in our quest for simplifying principles, to discover the exceptional.

Cathleen Calbert is the author of one previous collection of poetry, Lessons in Space, published by the University Press of Florida in 1997. She was a recipient of The Nation Discovery Prize in 1991, the Gordon Barber Memorial Award of The Poetry Society of America in 1994, and a writing fellowship from The Rhode Island State Council for the Arts in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1995, Feminist Studies, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is an Associate Professor at Rhode Island College.

"Between 'Don't try anything!' and 'She'll try anything!' fall (or rise: depending on her mood) Cathy Calbert's startling new poems, so cool, so speculative, so disabused, so warm. Our colloquial

Garden of Exile reveals a life enriched by layers of language and culture. Rodr‚guez was born in Cuba and emigrated to the Midwest at age nine via Operation Peter Pan. These poems are psalms that celebrate the pleasures of experience made palpable through language.

Rodríguez counts her bilingual lexicon as a double blessing: "Earth's language is a continuous current,/ translating the voices of my early trees along the ground./ I can't afford not to listen." In her liminal world, the lyricism of Spanish and English mingle their most gorgeous incarnations: sinsontes, ciruelas, mamoncillos, meringue clouds, and the cluck of coconuts "deliver a lost dictionary of delight."

Rodríguez is a remarkably deft poet: not only is she fluent in two tongues, she articulates the delicate nuances of daily life. Whether speaking of water, flora, or women in love, she refuses to produce the poof of easy lyric like a rabbit from a hat. Though they nod to heady pleasures, these poems keep their wits. Rodríguez remains self-possessed, intelligent, and interesting, even in her most impassioned moments. She reveals perception as the self's real alchemy and, by so doing, makes the world appear right before our very eyes.

Garden of Exile is the fifteenth poetry title to be published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Since the 1996 debut of the press, Sarabande Books titles have received positive review attention from nationally distinguished media including The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, Small Press, The Nation, and Library Journal.

Aleida Rodríguez was born on a kitchen table in Havana, Cuba. Her poetry and prose have been published in many literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies nationwide, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Southern Poetry Review, and The Progressive, as well as In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 1996), T

“These are ambitious, moving poems, deft, panged, and stunning.”—Dean Young

“Existential chilliness, mourning, and dread find a uniquely compelling voice in Thomas Heise's poetry. . . .”—Alan Williamson

"Horror Vacui offers an often vertiginous account of how death imposes [an] irresistible fact on minds bent on both accommodating and resisting this one inevitable yet impossible truth. . . . And it's this property of being barely held together that makes Horror Vacui so striking. . . . an extraordinary mood piece."—Ray McDaniel

In his haunting debut collection Horror Vacui, Thomas Heise explores the fear of empty space, a mysterious and abiding absence that is a pronounced presence in this poet's lyrical voice.

Thomas Heise holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a PhD from New York University. Currently he teaches at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

Mulroney & Others provides glimpses of Wormser's childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, as well as accounts of Vietnam vets and draft dodgers, socialites and outcasts. Loyal readers will welcome his trademark poise, the elegant balance he achieves with understatement both metrically deft and intellectually intricate. These poems prove Anaïs Nin's insight that "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Wormser's invitation to engage ourselves in seeing is irresistible, especially as he models the process with such impassioned interest. "'I know,' everyone is saying at once/To one another and the word-riddled universe. . . ." he writes. His poems tempt us to trade the obscurity of facile assumption for the powerful illumination of wonder. In Wormser's words, the universe is irrefutably personal.

Baron Wormser is the author of four previous collections of poetry: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), Good Trembling (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), Atoms, Soul Music, and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions, 1989), When (Sarabande Books, 1997), and co-author of Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Paris Review, Sewanee Review, The New Republic, Harper's, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives with his wife in Hallowell, Maine.

"The particular gift in Wormser's work is in the narrative. . . . He is poised to record, to expose, to express, not to pounce. The language can sometimes ambush a reader with wonder, but Wormser never breaks a sweat. . . . Mulroney & Others is one of those rare books of poetry that will have resonance in the lives of nearly every reader. . . (he) mixes just the right amount of cleverness with a smart appreciation for language, humor, humanity, pain and love."-Ba

“Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift. . . .”—from the Foreword by Heather McHugh

Ambitious and original, Karen An-hwei Lee’s first book-length poem is in the form of an eccentric dictionary.  In Medias Res brings to mind the long poems of Anne Carson, though Lee is less concerned with ironies than with mysteries.  In compressed and oddly slanted “definitions,” ranging from one line, “A paper bird unopened until marriage” (“Comparison”), to longer, parable-like narratives, Lee’s poem moves through the alphabet to limn the border between language and spirit.  Often playful and slyly humorous, In Medias Res is an investigation into how God hides in language.  Karen Lee has made a brilliant entry into poetry.

[T]here is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.—from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes

“Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.”—Anne Waldman

“Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate

Simone Muench is poetry editor of ACM and is an assistant professor at Lewis University, as well as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.