Sarabande Books

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.

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical."

"Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems-at first-are about sexual passion. . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice."—from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky

Marketing Plans o Author tour in Ohio, Kentucky, and NYC
o Brochure and postcard mailings
o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines

Book tour dates including:
o Cincinnati
o Louisville
o New York City

Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction. She has been awarded scholarships to attend both Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as New England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the university there.

"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.

“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.

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate

"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

“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.

Whether hailing from Costa Rica or Newport Beach, New Jersey beaches or the shores of Belize, these stories, essays, and poems explore the endless variations of life at the beach. The pleasure of personal discovery that compels the writers in this volume is one readers will relish and share-as guilt-free beach reading or as an armchair vacation.

Here in abundant variety are the unique characters of coastal life-diamondback terrapins, ospreys, moray eels, and rockfish, as well as crabbers, fishermen, and "summer people"-all forms of life are described by diction that is deliciously specific, informed by both experience and passion.

This is an anthology of deep feeling for the relationships among humans as well as our relationship to nature. In "Off Season," by Sallie Bingham, a young mistress plays hostess in Key West to her new lover's wife, visiting from Chicago. In Peter Cameron's story, "Nuptials & Heathens," New Yorkers weekend on the coast of Maine.

Poems by Gray Jacobik, Chase Twitchell, Kathleen Halme, and others are lyrical surrenders to the shore's seductive allure. Peter Matthiessen recounts his experiences as captain of the Merlin, a charter fishing boat, off Montauk, Long Island.

And though there's a lot to celebrate in these pages, the conscience has not taken a vacation. Yusef Komunyakaa's poems dramatize racism at Newport Beach and depict the perspective of Thai fishermen limited by class circumstances. Literary essays by Jennifer Ackerman and Tom Horton are impassioned testaments to the need for ecological awareness.

If ever there were SOS messages in bottles, sent adrift with the desperate prayer that they would reach someone, somewhere-messages on which lives depend-here they are: uncorked.

Contributors:
Jennifer Ackerman
Ralph Angel
Emma Aprile
Sallie Bingham
Peter Cameron
Lucille Clifton
Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.
Maria Flook
Terri Ford
Debora Greger
Kathleen Halme
James Harms

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.

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox

“Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter

Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist.

Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope.

Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University; she is also the creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters.

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

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.

"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.

“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

“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.

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.

Jan Carew combines Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and literature of European exile to create a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights; he’s comfortable confronting anything, racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the natural world or city slum.

“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.

“[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.

“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.

Winner of the 2000 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Welcome to the strange, wonderful world of Brock Clarke. Here you will meet florists, dental hygienists, high school teachers, and peddlers of porno novelty items, all trying to be normal, good people and failing miserably. Reaffirming that "life, at its core, is embarrassing," What We Won't Do is a collection of tales about the miseries of the average, blue-collar worker who is anything but average. Here is a portrait of the Homer Simpsons and Archie Bunkers of the world, Knut Hamson style. These stories are more than insightful; they're downright funny.

"The honesty herein is not the sugarcoated sort, it's the sort that exacts revenge by goading others into doing what we can't or won't do ourselves. . . . You haven't read these stories before, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay them. That and the fact that they made me laugh, out loud, and frightened me a little, and still do."—from the Foreword by Mark Richard

Marketing plans for What We Won't Do:
• Author tour in South Carolina (Clemson, Greenville), and upstate New York (Syracuse, Rochester).
• Will coordinate additional tour with Harcourt upon release of his novel, The Ordinary White Boy, in September 2001.
• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Brock Clarke is from upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester, and is currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Clemson University. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. He lives with his wife, Lane, and their son Quinn in Clemson, South Carolina.

“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.

"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.

“When Susan Richards writes about horses and the interactions of the people involved with them, she brilliantly captures the characters, equine and human.”—Maxine Kumin

Strong, startling, funny—these stories are rich in their feeling for the human, natural, and sometimes supernatural world of Kentucky.

Susan Starr Richards has spent most of her life raising racehorses in central Kentucky, and writing. She has been a NEA Fellow in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and in Thoroughbred Times, as winner of their first National Fiction Prize.

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.

“From the world that could not be saved, the storyteller salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness.”—from the introduction by Carole Maso

Southern California: land of dislocation and assimilation, a place Diane Lefer knows well. In California Transit, she uses conversational prose and macabre wit to zero-in on a Mexican woman detained indefinitely by immigration officials, isolating her from her American family; a zoo employee considering what to do with a euthanized antelope’s head; and, in the title novella, a lonely woman, riding buses all day, who cannot avert the violence building within her. This collection explores the difference between justice and law through a lens unfiltered by moralistic or didactic intention. Like a surveillance camera meant to record crime, not stop it, Lefer presents a world gone wrong, not because of people’s hatred for one another but because of their impossible, unfulfilled yearning to connect.

Diane Lefer is the author of two previous collections, The Circles I Move In and Very Much Like Desire, and the novel Radiant Hunger. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an artistic associate of Playwrights’ Arena, volunteers with the Program for Torture Victims, and serves on the animal behavior observation team of the research department at the Los Angeles Zoo. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College of the Union Institute & University.

“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.

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.

“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.

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

“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.

“Keep watching for Yolanda Barnes and her work. Her voice is her own and will be heard.”—George Garrett

Inspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vision of inner-city life. This stunning re-rendering of Eden takes place on imaginary Piedmont Street—an avenue of vital contradictions, with a pawnshop and cemetery, prostitutes and preachers, a street with no money in its pockets. Here we meet a variety of women embattled at society’s fringe—Cecile, once a schoolgirl at her history lessons of Pompeii, now a piano teacher down on her luck; Bernadette, seamstress and subject of rumor; an anonymous gardener planting dill as a curative against witchcraft and an amateur botanist studying the bird of paradise, which is both flame and woman’s hat.

Throughout this beautifully made montage, recurring images flash into focus and then recede—fire, dusk, the fearsome temper and pleasures of red (lipstick, fig and burning sun). And among them all appears the reluctant street preacher Daniel, a troubling messianic figure bothering Piedmont with warnings of hellfire.

As striking as Jean Toomer’s Cane, When It Burned to the Ground is a stark, bold lyric of place and time, an ambitious and innovative fiction. Its stories, sketches and fragments culminate into a haunting book of novelistic breadth and depth, creating a dreamlike and surreal reflection of our own strange world. It is an extraordinary and unique accomplishment.

Yolanda Barnes lives in Los Angeles, where she was born of Creole/black Southern heritage. She graduated from the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism, and received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections.

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.

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

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.

"The tone may vary from one essay to another, but more than anything else, these are love stories, not rose-colored romances, but love that includes doubt, violence, wrestling with angels, and devils."—From the Introduction

CONTRIBUTORS:
Eavan Boland
Madeline DeFrees
Stephen Dunn
Reginald Gibbons
Edward Hirsch
Maxine Kumin
J.D. McClatchy
Carl Phillips
Stanley Plumly
Mary Ruefle
Adam Zagajewski
and many others!

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 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

"This novel’s poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in—at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony."—From the Foreword by Rosellen Brown

In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of 12, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book’s narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past.

In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach.

Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow.

"Drawing from her work as a neonatal nurse and from some more common experiences (e.g. nervous breakdowns, incest and poverty), Waring exhibits the street-smart ear and unflinching eye that made her first collection, Refuge, one of PW's Best Books of 1990. The images and headlong rhythms of these new poems exert a wide-ranging, often irresistible pull."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Waring creates a voice that we feel we can trust to lead us to the center of an experience, maybe because her language never feels artificial but seems to grow naturally out of the situation it presents. The remarkable range of subjects and characters in Waring's poems leads to an equally remarkable variety of tones and vocabularies."-Word House, Baltimore's Literary Calendar

"When Belle Waring reads her poetry, the jazz-inflected words escape her mouth like a Lester Young solo: quietly, melodically, forcefully. . . . she provides weight to each short line, drawing out her words like sensuous kisses. Her work is also punctuated with politics and humor."-D.C. City Paper

"Poetry, Robert Frost once said, is a way of taking life by the throat. It is in this tradition that poet and nurse Belle Waring approaches her craft-seizing difficult subjects and holding them in time. . . . "-Salon

Waring has written a collection that doesn't renege on us the promise of her first book and indeed has honed her craft to include a wider range of tonal shifts and allow for a finer lyricism while not losing the syncopated snap and humor of her earlier voice."-Indiana Review

"[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.

Like a seam of coal, that mineral she knows so well, Kiki DeLancey is a valuable find, and a rare one as well: the self-taught writer who seems to have sprung fully formed out of nowhere. In the pages of Coal Miner’s Holiday (mining jargon for a forced layoff), DeLancey introduces us to the culture and characters of coal-mining towns bordering the Ohio River. Though she has a B.A. in political science and English, DeLancey never took a writing course, never had a writing mentor. She learned to write by reading such masters as William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, then writing, and rewriting her own stories. And DeLancey is, first and foremost, a storyteller. She tells the stories of unseen American immigrants–Polish, Greek, Irish, and others–who worked under the earth, in the dark and dangerous heart of the heart of the country. The result is a revelatory new voice in American fiction.

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Born Kiki Nicolozakes, Kiki DeLancey was brought up with close ties to the Greek community, with four grandparents from the island of Crete. DeLancey spent fifteen years in the coal industry, beginning as a permit clerk and finally, as Executive V.P. of Marietta Coal Company. Her stories have been published in literary magazines since 1987. She still lives where she was born and raised, in Cambridge, Ohio, now with her husband and children, where she works part-time as an investment manager, and is at work on a new collection of stories and a novel.

"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.

"Perhaps what's so refreshing about Taking Eden is that it fits into no neat category. There's a sensitivity in it to the natural world, but the phrase 'nature poetry' certainly doesn't apply; many of the poems use a narrative structure, yet 'narrative poetry,' too, seems inaccurate. The surreal leaves its tracks throughout the book, but they are as delicate as the traces left by subatomic particles in a Wilson's cloud chamber,
dispersing as soon as they are seen, reabsorbed into the other events of these poems. Clinton's imagination is multidimensional, and the pleasures of Taking Eden are accordingly complex. While the poems here share some qualities-an alertness couched in simple diction, often-they do not predict one another. This is especially admirable in a first book. . . . Robert Clinton is a poet with a unique outlook. . . . Taking Eden has a maturity that bodes well for Clinton's future work: these poems grow more like oak than ailanthus; they are dense and strong."-The Boston Book Review

"Many of the thirty-nine poems in Robert Clinton's first book of poetry, Taking Eden, seem at once autobiographical and universally appealing."-Independent Publisher

"'Some days are holidays of silence,' Clinton writes in 'My Father;' his most introspective and lonely short work owes much to the early Mark Strand. His more narrative poems relate visionary, solitary encounters with bearers of wisdom, frequently father-substitutes but sometimes the speaker's own father, who form an understated lineage: 'The men I know / born in labor all of them // go along the rock / the way I go without / much hesitation.' In 'Treetops,' a 'son who will remain unborn' finds the poet 'in the shade of the house collecting stones,' 'he stands up, / pushing the house into the

"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.

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

"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.

"Frost, a jazz drummer and English professor, sets his first collection in 20 years in the world of visceral experience rather than abstract matter. . . . Frost's strengths lie in the hinges of his poems where the reader can feel the deep connections that motivate his work. . . . Frost's pithy, epigrammatic style finds strength in silences as well as words."-Publishers Weekly

"In Richard Frost's long awaited third book, he recreates a world as if revived from memory . . . where humor and violence intersect in the daily intimacies of living, sometimes leading to the horrific, often leading to the miraculous."-Salt Hill Journal

"I am very fond of Mr. Frost's poems," writes Donald Justice of [Frost's] latest collection, "and especially of those that have a story to tell, which they manage to do with enviable clarity and a total lack of pretension. They can be poignant and scary; also funny. They are certainly very human. Nor should it be held against them-unusual though the case may be-that these are poems one can actually enjoy.'"-American Poet

"For those who still believe that poetry can discover truth and illuminate experience, Neighbor Blood will come as a rare comfort and pleasure."-The Marlboro Review

"These are poems that can help us to understand our human lives. . . . Frost is a remarkable poet, a storyteller of colloquial surety who greets the reader with respect and intimacy. . . ."-Controlled Burn

"Frost loves language, delighting in every twist it affords. You can see it in these poems, in the music and rhythm of their lines, and even in their subject matter. . . . Frost is a working jazz drummer, and he writes about it, and about a few

"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

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.

Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, "If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father-then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?"

Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, and Carolina Quarterly. One of her stories was included in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

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.

But McQuade refuses to stay within the lines that describe poetry per se. Her thoughts on the genre are also enriched by discussions of distinctly nonverbal poetic expression in painting and film, theater and dance. McQuade invigorates prosody's perennial questions-form and function, fashion and faction-and addresses the importance of humor as an elixir for thinking. She dares to define the subject of poetry itself as pleasure. "Poetry," she ventures, "doesn't need to be literary."

In every instance, these essays feature a fine mind's play on the page as well as McQuade's characteristic expertise: an awareness that is at once historically informed and hip. If metaphor itself expands the mind's capacity for contrary ideas, then McQuade is a metaphor made manifest. Among writers on writing, here is a writer who is utterly and remarkably unlike any other.

Molly McQuade's essays and criticism have appeared in The Village Voice, Hungry Mind Review, New England Review, Boston Review, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She has served as editor of the monthly Poetry Calendar magazine and previously founded and edited the poetry review column of Publishers Weekly. Her writing has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Illinois Arts Council. Her first book, An Unsentimental Education, a collection of biographical portraits of writers, was published in 1995 by the University of Chicago Press. Her poetry, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, ha

[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.

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration of Jacob’s Ladder (with its questions of identity and shifting realities) with the microscopic compulsiveness of Einstein’s Dreams. The book’s sense of hypnotic premeditation brings Donnie Darko to mind as well, as poem after poem scatters the breadcrumbs of a murder mystery leading us further away from the present self and deeper into the past. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is an astounding debut collection that will crawl under your skin and stay there.

"I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a remarkable book. It is innovative, original, unprecedented, and, at the same time, its originality and innovation are predicated on a passionate, even obsessive relationship with the past."—Lynn Emanuel

"Paul Griner's Hurry Please I Want to Know takes the reader on a sweeping tour of America—from Iraqi soldiers to prison telemarketers, from famous cartoonists to bone procurers, from missing persons to the resurrected dead—the real, the surreal, and everything in-between. Griner seems to know everybody's secrets, and this astonishing collection sets out to reveal them."—Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake

"Paul Griner finds surprising and inventive ways to write about a wide range of sometimes uncomfortable—but always interesting—situations. The writing is careful, precise, shocking—stylistically brilliant. The stories are sometimes surreal, but convincing all the same. They take your breath away!"—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of The Girl in the Blue Beret and In Country

A stylized and otherworldly short story collection filled with sidelined characters placed at center stage. A low-ranking soldier is forced to milk a cow within enemy range. A cartoonist's daughter waits each morning to see how her father's mood dictates how he will draw her face. Grieving siblings wait to inherit one of their father's physical features after his death.

Paul Griner's first book, the story collection Follow Me, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. His next two books, the novels Collectors and The German Woman, have been published in half a dozen languages. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Playboy, One Story, Tin House, Narrative, and Zoetrope, among others. He teaches at the University of Louisville.

"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.

Men carry a mattress retrieved
from a dumpster past the flooded
foundations of an unfinished
high-rise, an old woman catches
a pigeon in the folds of her dress
the dead smile and rise from swimming
pools or stand at attention
on stamps. The landscape can't believe
it's real—there is no ground
beneath it, like what mirrors do.

Adam Day is the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Society of America and Kentucky Arts Council, and a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in Boston Review, the Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, AGNI, the Iowa Review, and others.

“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.

"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.

"Smote is a book of the dark reality of our daily existence; it is a book of abiding grace."—Robert Olen Butler

I release you like the crank-addled truck driver
releases his cargo at the midnight dock
until the warehouse is one in a trail
of crumbs, little light left on behind him.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and My Psychic, and the co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He been the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Whiting Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Morton Prize.

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

From Farinelli, the eighteenth century castrato who brought down opera houses with his high C, to the recording of "Johnny B. Goode" affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, Let Me Clear My Throat dissects the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There are murders of punk rock crows, impressionists, and rebel yells; Howard Dean's "BYAH!" and Marlon Brando's "Stella!" and a stock film yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought's incarnating instrument and Elena Passarello's essays are a riotous deconstruction of the ways the sounds we make both express and shape who we are—the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves.

Elena Passarello is an actor and writer originally from Charleston, South Carolina. She studied nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa, and her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Slate, Iowa Review, The Normal School, Literary Bird Journal, Ninth Letter, and in the music writing anthology Pop Till the World Falls Apart. She has performed in several regional theaters in the East and Midwest, originating roles in the premieres of Christopher Durang's Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel's Wild Signs and Holler. In 2011 she became the first woman winner of the annual Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans.

“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.

Karyna MyGlynn takes readers on tour through the half-haunted house of the contemporary American psyche with wit, whimsy, and candid confession. Disappointing lovers surface in the bedroom; in the bathroom, "the drained tub ticks with mollusks & lobsters;" revenge fantasies and death lurk in the basement where they rightly belong. With lush imagery and au courant asides, Hothouse surprises and delights.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl and three chapbooks. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at Oberlin College.

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.