Bøger i Penguin Poets serien

"A stunning, multimorphic work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity"--

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night.". . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. --from "Reign of Snakes"

In 1973, at the age of twenty-three, Jim Carroll burst upon the poetry scene with his first collection, Living at the Movies, a book of vivid and inventive verse that won him comparisons to everyone from Arthur Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara. Carroll's first new book of poetry in more than a decade, Void of Course presents work composed over the last two years. His major themes--love, friendship, desire, time and memory, and, above all, the ever-present city--emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. These seventy-seven poems range from graphic, sensuous shorter pieces to edgy stream-of-consciousness prose poems to longer, more contemplative works such as "While She's Gone," an eerie tour de force of longing over a departed lover. Void of Course establishes that Carroll's power and purity of vision are stronger than ever.

"Kill Or Cure,” a bold prescriptive for these apocalyptic days, brings together substantial new work as well as the best of Anne Waldman's previously uncollected poetry. It includes credos, manifestos, dreams, homages to literary predecessors, "Shaman Hisses You Slide Back Into The Night” (the journal poem written during Bob Dylan's historic Rolling Thunder Revue), witty political diatribes, travel vignettes, incantations, and a new section of the ongoing epic poem "Iovis,” a powerful meditation on male energy.

"Your thoughts become fluid, volatile; their aroma fills the room. This is a nerve storm." In her first collection since Bitter Angel, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, Amy Gerstler explores themes of suffering and redemption through a heady blend of folklore, popular culture, and the natural world in Nerve Storm. The poet Eileen Myles has said that "the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply [Gerstler's] materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art." A crackling wit and whimsical instinct guide this collection as Gerstler traipses through humanity's triumphs and blunders, effortlessly revealing the surreal and surprising possibilities inherent in everyday life.

Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America's greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement … Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in "Red Trousseau," "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal," to the sun in "Unsent letter." in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins" In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red-the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros it self, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft."With Red Trousseau, Carol Muske achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation with its humanity: terror, sometimes courage, excessive need, and the stubborn twin habits of hope and representation. This is urgent and beautifully confident work.'-Jorie Graham

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe late John Ashbery was a poet whose "teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature." (The New York Times) This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery's major long poems, including "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.

One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature PoetryA new collection by an award-winning poet who “presents her apprehensions of the natural world with striking accuracy and emotional impact” (Orion Magazine)Denise Levertov has called Pattiann Rogers a “visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed.” Quickening Fields gathers fifty-three poems that focus on the wide variety of life forms present on earth and their unceasing zeal to exist, their constant “push against the beyond” and the human experience among these lives. Whether a glassy filament of flying insect, a spiny spider crab, a swath of switch grass, barking short-eared owls, screeching coyotes, or racing rat-tailed sperm, all are testifying to their complete devotion to being. Many of the poems also address celestial phenomena, the vision of the earth immersed in a dynamic cosmic milieu and the effects of this vision on the human spirit. While primarily lyrical and celebratory in tone, these poems acknowledge, as well, the terror, suffering, and unpredictability of the human condition.

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman - an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activismMythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.

A resonant new collection of poetry from Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Map to the Stars, the fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape-whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.

Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this collection, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich supplements an incomplete draft of a haiku manuscript found in Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of Kerouac's other haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. With more than 500 poems, this is a must-have volume for Kerouac enthusiasts everywhere.