Bøger udgivet af National Poetry Review Press

"'I can't believe I live anywhere, ' the poet says in this remarkably dark, quirky, sad and surprising collection of poems. But he does-in Expatriatetown and Elegytown, in Endtown and Doubttown, on and on in his solitary travels. Bryan Penberthy's brilliant guiding metaphor goes past conceit to the multiple worlds within us, going past homage and question and complaint, back to a source radiant and genuine. A toast to this fine first book!" -Marianne Boruch "If there were one American poet that the work of Bryan Penberthy most esembles, it might be the late Richard Hugo; but Penberthy is a far better poet than Dick was, with a wild sense of humor and none of the oppressive self-involvement that all too often freighted Hugo's poetry. The mind behind these poems is obviously brilliant, and the personality engaging. Friends, meet Bryan Penberthy." -Jonathan Holden "These poems are a work of multiple, ongoing scenarios, which beguile the reader each time one starts up again: 'This could be the best place you've known.' These approaches to viewing the world-Quiettown, Pooltown, Sleeptown, and so on-seem actually human rather than simply mechanically humanistic-that is, we live through them, and that sometimes is all we can do. Possibility exists, but truth follows a pattern just beyond one's control. Free will exists, not that it ends up doing us all that much good. So we tell our stories, these stories, and get on with it: 'We're only as real/as the landscape that shifts around us.'" -Alberto Ríos, 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize judge "Bryan Penberthy's Lucktown is smart in its unflinching: 'the dead / can't be accurately counted, their ends are miserable and useless, ' and smart too in its hope for art. . . . And smart yet again in its hopeless hope for love triumphing over the persistent failure of love. . . . Lucktown believes in luck simply because sometimes your number has to come up on the roule e wheel or people would stop gambling. Lucktown itself, though, is a winner." -Andrew Hudgins "Reading Bryan Penberthy's Lucktown is like looking through the facets of a well-cut prism to see a sometimes blurred, but rainbow-edged world come into sharp focus. He inhabits the endless towns of his imagination, which become surreal topoi for different psychic states. The poems' titles are themselves a prose poem: lucktown, tigertown, pooltown, expatriatetown, oceantown, sleeptown, quiettown, doubttown, crazytown, smoketown, goodbyetown. The mood is indigo. All the world's randomness, melancholias, self-delusions, hopes, yearnings, woundings, desires are given voice through a book of great formal rigor and variety. Yes, Penberthy is mining Richard Hugo's boom-and-bust silver towns, but his small towns have the inconsolable dolor of his own Midwest. As Penberthy says, 'there's been some minor / talk of sending out a party // to find out what makes the world burn. / There's been this kind of talk before.' Yes, but this talk, though minor-keyed, is not minor. These poems do tell us what makes the world burn." -Donald Platt

Mame, Sol, and Dog Bark follows the unfolding lives of a 21st century couple shadowed by their faithful pooch. Also shadows, the city and bay are backdrops as the poems explore tensions created by the new century's prosperity, and its pervasive anxieties. Mame asks: Could the sea with its kind of seasoning be an answer? For what question? One labored day gives way to another. Finger the string hanging in the balloon tree and choose the same route; as always it leads round and round, one breath and then another of questionable texture, the sequence like string tree-tied to a postponed present.

A Lesson in Smallness is an invitation that builds--word by shiveringly, perfectly placed word, cadence by subtle, breath-catching cadence-into shifting vignettes, vistas, vision. There's nothing small at all here, it turns out. Vastly imponderable, and also close, and cherished: nature and human nature and the nature of art, all at once in these moving poems. A book to read and read again. - Robin Behn Early in her new poetry collection, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter speaks of "the necessary oomph." Which is also an excellent way of describing the pizazz of this wonderful book. Though titled A Lesson in Smallness, Slaughter's language is large, attentive, loving, and dynamic, even while acknowledging that our connections to others-in this case, as wife, mother, daughter-sometimes require a steep mortgage on a woman's most intimate and individual desires. I love this book's truthfulness and clarity of vision, and I'm betting you will, too. - Erin Belieu A Lesson in Smallness is a book seized by hunger and the umbilical. It is at once a travelogue, a junk drawer, a menu, a romance, an anti-romance, a cultural inquiry, and a mystery, which is to say it is fascinating and not at all aimless but deft, meticulous, and at the same time lavish. It proceeds by pleasurable and painful tension and release to a Rilkean abundance. The sensational third section of the book is an eruption into Slaughter's full powers of language in the service of transport. The "smallness" is a modest way to say her acts of attention expand our sense of what is possible. It's a beautiful [and dangerous] debut. - Bruce Smith Lauren Goodwin Slaughter a lesson in smallness The National Poetry Review Press Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her poetry has appeared in venues such as Blackbird, Blue Mesa Review, Hayden's Ferry, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review Online, and Verse Daily, among others. She is co-fiction editor at DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Originally from Philadelphia, she now lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband and two young children.

Hinge is a book fixated on contingency and what it might mean to live in it. These meditative lyrics are radically, at times painfully aware that anything could happen .... This awareness walks hand in hand with Wolahan's almost preternatural sensitivity to cause and effect, the syntax of the physical and the interplay of the parts that make up any given whole. More than any younger poet I can think of, Wolahan is attuned to the engineering of the world she walks through as well as to the musical possibilities it suggests ....Hinge is a startlingly mature, refined debut. - Timothy Donnelly Presiding over Hinge is a fierce and forwandering intelligence, one that preserves the traces of its coming to consciousness of all that surrounds it and that it surrounds. These poems know that something is exchanged for apprehension, the way a wave removes part of what it reveals of the beach that understands it.... - Jane Gregory Emily Wolahan accounts for the delicate hinges between pronouns, and through this poet's attentive gaze, we see the seams between the known and unknown, the there, not yet there .... By simultaneously seeing and asking what is seen, Wolahan performs the stakes in the hinges .... - Michelle Taransky Emily Wolahan has lived in Britain, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, and America. She received an MA in Literature from University of Houston and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Omniverse, DIAGRAM, and Drunken Boat. She is also co-founder and co-editor of JERRY Magazine. She now lives with her husband and two children in San Francisco, where she teaches writing.

Dispersed among some ten poems celebrating the nubiferous paintings of Arthur Dove (1880-1946)) are another forty (also nubiferous) poems by Lynne Potts. I believe this transcendent duplicity requires some prompting about Dove's pictures which are among the earliest abstract works painted in this country. Dove and his second wife Helen Torr lived on a river boat in eastern NY, where their aim was to discover the exact color and form or motif to represent the essence of the object painted. Hence Helen's countless questions ("How does one capture the soma of the sea? / Watch until transparency turns liquid topaz." And again: "Outside the boat window / the storm had cleared; he painted it pale yellow, / a serrated knife for lightning. She put it in his / accumulating pile, not far from her few." The immense satisfaction of Porthole View is the impossibility of uncoupling the licentious recreation of Dove & Torr from the learned originality of Lynne Potts. -Richard Howard With a luminous clarity Lynne Potts peers into the world of artist couple Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. Find in these beguiling poems an urgency and buoyancy about what presses upon the artistic spirit and process, and upon the fragile fabric of a relationship. -Nance Van Winckel

Meg Johnson's collection, Inappropriate Sleepover, had me at page one. Her quirky and darkly humorous poems are as refreshing as they are clever, as disarmingly entertaining as they are provocative. Meg Johnson is a stunning addition to the American poetry scene. -Nin Andrews Half siren song, half battle cry, Meg Johnson's Inappropriate Sleepover is a debut collection that coaxes us out of our tightlyzipped sleeping bags and keeps us up until dawn with poems that resonate, beguile, and delight. Equally whimsical and poignant, Johnson's voice introduces us to a new sort of poetry heroine: one who is undaunted by external forces that oppose her, and driven to excavate the most subtle nuances of human connection. These are poems to keep for yourself, and to share with your very best friends. -Mary Biddinger In these poems, Meg Johnson dances on the narrow boundary dividing self-confidence from self-delusion. Always unsettled, her restlessness born from her awareness that the self is too big to fit, even when broken into parts, into the many and ever-proliferating boxes in which a self is expected to find its many homes, her speakers both celebrate and lament the quotidian by which they are enraptured: "If I was a tree I'd / want to be a pine because of the needles. People / would always be finding a piece of me." And the celebrating, and the lamenting, are themselves both enrapturing. -Shane McCrae Meg Johnson was born and raised in Ames, Iowa, and has since lived and worked in various cities. Her poems have appeared in Hobart, The Puritan, San Pedro River Review, Sugar House Review, Wicked Alice, and others. Meg started dancing at a young age and worked professionally in the performing arts for many years. She is currently the editor of Dressing Room Poetry Journal and an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing. Visit her at www.megjohnson.org.

Caroline Manring's Manual for Extinction is guided by a sensual mind, one that is sharply aware of mortal outcomes, and a deep sense of the comedy in any of the intellect's know-how attempts. This is rambunctious work, frisky with mordant play and verbal swing; rarely does such vibrant formal innovation couple with a keening grittiness. -Dean Young Operating instructions for a disintegrating world and a field-guide to the vanishing, this startling first book tracks an ecopoetics of systems that persist despite it all. And though Manring fills her pages with the fragility of the animals at our mercy, counting humans among them, she does so with a wry eye and a surprising amount of bounce and zip. Sharp linguistic twists and shifts echo that fragility, and yet, taken as a whole, it's a work that suggests that much might, against all odds, survive. -Cole Swensen Manring's Manual is not a prescription but a generous invitation; it finds its hard lessons in both the absences and singularities of the American landscape. "We must make endings meet/ This is a place called Earth," she writes, and it's true: The only way to fully occupy a home is first to leave it, and the only way to begin life afresh is to trace the route from old roads to new and name each junction with exactness. Manring's gorgeously complex lyric poems offer us a lush and ambitious tour of the human spirit, one whose means of navigation is inimitable and profound and therefore not to be missed. -Seth Abramson Caroline Manring's poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Conduit, H_NGM_N, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently teaches creative writing and environmental literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

If you have luckily found yourself with this book in your hands, don't relinquish it until you have read every word (twice) and put it safely in bag to take with you always. These poems do this: they make you want them. As Hughey tells us, "Quivering/ can be much better than flowering." But these poems do both: quiver and flower. Part ancient lullaby and dream, these poems echo Dara Wier, Gertrude Stein, and Frank O'Hara to move into their own space of grand beauty. A space where "Soap bubbles, the ornaments/ of a morning, float in the wait," where you can "Hear the drone of electric razors and feel the explosive thunder from the neighboring screen," where "a sun could have already/ faded." These poems say to you, "Dear travelers with your coins digested by the whirring, /punch the number for what you need. You may get an extra/ if you are open to revelations wrapped in cellophane." Be open to the revelations of Guest Host. They will lead you on your path very well. - Dorothea Lasky The frippery and bricolage of polite culture during war. The obsession with being "seen," as though our lack of privacy had not stripped anything conceivably hidden irrevocably away. Her idea of "entering a new unimportance." Her "Silversmiths, please wake up again and polish us a new anthem." The supple, sharp portraits of women shapeshifting as if still trapped under bell jars. Elizabeth Hughey's Guest Host is a book of our time, and it is frightening and brave. - Gillian Conoley Elizabeth Hughey's Guest Host considers Emily Post on the acid trip of the year 2012, sitting in front of the television or flipping through old photos, and probably reading Leibniz's Monadology. These poems straddle extreme metamorphosis and the nowarchaic certainty about "manners." In other words, Hughey asks (from the middle of the explosion): How are we supposed to be behaving? How is one thing related to another? Her answer, terrifying and utterly believable, is something like: "The way one door sometimes/ opens all of them, we become the same." - Sarah Vap Elizabeth Hughey is the author of Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press) as well as Guest Host, and an NEA recipient. She is a contributing editor at Bateau Press and a founder of the Desert Island Supply Co., a free creative writing center for kids in the Birmingham area. New poems can be found in American Poetry Review, 27 rue de fleures and the White Whale Review. Elizabeth lives with her husband and two sons in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches creative writing and yoga.

The Wanted, Michael Tyrell's sharp-eyed, intellectually inventive, playful, and darkly humorous first book, is filled with so many wonderful and surprising ways of looking at familiar things that it answers Stevens' dilemma about which to prefer-"The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes"-by preferring them both. Tyrell expresses this preference by way of a patient and scrupulous self-scrutiny, the kind he observes in Egon Schiele's representation of trees in which the painter "looked at himself, tore out the human, cleaved/ it into branches." So, too, Tyrell looks at himself and cleaves the essential human matter of his perceptions onto the provocative and often sinuous lines of his verse. -Michael Collier Like the haunted, disconnected heads on a wanted poster, Michael Tyrell's daring and fiercely intelligent poems signify nothing less than the mystery of existence, the relationship between how one is perceived to what one really is, if such a thing were possible to express. To read these remarkable poems is to enter the shadow world of the wanted, where every surface is vulnerable to a violence, real or implied, that will crack it open to reveal a secret code. A book of masks where the disguised often forgets it wears the mask and the mask forgets it is not the face, The Wanted invites us to "enter the wet bladed edges/ which break us again into separate beings, / pour salt into wherever we bleed." Enter with caution and be prepared to lose yourself. -Henry Israeli In Michael Tyrell's The Wanted, the images, techniques, and preoccupations of film noir permeate many of the poems. There are references to crime scenes, acts of real and imagined violence, missing children, lie detectors, forgeries, guns, exit wounds, and much more. In "The Supporting Character," the poet writes, "The narration's unreliable./...I'm a subplot about to unfold." All of this for good reason since Tyrell's subject is essentially the unfathomability of identity and selfhood-a mystery to be slowly puzzled at, unraveled, exposed. Ultimately, the poet's evasions are the evasions and uncertainties we experience in our everyday lives, both with ourselves and with other people. The Wanted is a strange, disquieting book that serious readers will keep returning to as they plumb the many levels of these resonant, mysterious poems. -Elizabeth Spires Michael Tyrell resides in Brooklyn, where he was born. His writing has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and many other magazines. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). He teaches at New York University.

Eros and wit make for an irresistible pair, true enough. Invest their coupling with a cast of classical figures, a compelling lyric music, and a lush sense of the laden line, and, well, you have a party worth attending. What is most alluring here remains the book's complex of delicious tensions-sensuality paired with spiritual longing, a keen, critical eye attended by deep compassion, and a very much spoken delivery attaining sculptural precision. - Scott Cairns If The Kissing Party could carry its own flag, it would read, "that obscenity the heart," the perfect tagline for Sarah Barber's smart and sexy collection. This book is classical and crude, calculated and crafty, thoroughly seductive and not a little naughty. But most memorable for me are the lyrically transcendent moments in poems such as "Late Birds" and in lines such as "I who make longing a professional career." Barber's career looks to be a promising one indeed.- Kathy Fagan Fiercely intelligent and sexy, The Kissing Party reads like a fabular closet drama, whose flood subjects - desire and the soul's sojourn - are played out by dramatis personae ranging widely and provocatively from Apollo and other classical figures from myth and art, Rothko, various holy men and women, porn stars, Lord Byron, and anonymous protagonists from an erotic novel of the Abruzzi, to the daring, insomniacal guises of the narrator herself. The poems cavort boldly with patent rhetorical and romantic moves - the male gaze, traditional poetic form, the pathetic fallacy, the onus of the human heart, vanitas, and de Man's notion of autobiography as defacement. Like Dickinson, Barber wields her words like blades; hers is an original sensibility, "untidily / golden and dangerously sharp." - Lisa Russ Spaar

John Mann is an archivist of the human heart and an accountant both of the natural world and popular culture. His precisely observed juxtapositioning of these in Able, Baker, Charlie never fails to surprise, never fails to move us. As Rilke advised readers to change our lives, so does Mann often build toward the insistent, as in "Hand over your dearest songs"-advice which the poet himself has surely heeded in this marvelous collection. -David Stevenson John Mann's poems approach you not like the lantern that you plod towards through darkness, but like fireflies appearing at different points within the range of your vision that engage your every sense, enough for you to make sense of the journey you take through his unsettling, elliptical world. They seem to be written in outlying areas where the usual compasses and watches will not serve, but they will so thoroughly claim you that you may find that you have suspended your breathing. George Ellenbogen We have fooled ourselves into thinking that pain is simple-it is emptiness, a chasm. But John Mann's poetry shows loss with all of its lurid filigree, its barbed-wire curlicues. Mann probes this "atmosphere of void covered with frost" throughout Able, Baker, Charlie, and he manages to capture how we leave this void changed. There is no mitigating agent. Even love is defined as "the heart outside the body." Beauty is something that leaks from the eyes, and the sky "vomits its stars." Able, Baker, Charlie is a beautiful, painful read-more acute because of its dead-eye accuracy. -Karen Craigo, Mid-American Review John Mann is the author of Wyoming, a chapbook of poems (Finishing Line Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, Conduit, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Vallum, Crazyhorse, and The Gettysburg Review. He won a Poetry Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and a resident fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He taught creative writing at Western Illinois University and edited The Mississippi Valley Review.