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"As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'" - D. A. Powell"Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark. . . ." -Ada Limón"It's Smith's dynamically precise and vivid images, and her uncanny ability to find just the right word or action to crack open our known experience, that make Good Bones an extraordinary book. (She) demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible." -Erin Belieu

In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Doré Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he's anyone's father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist's finesse and a poet's details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency. In Dogged Hearts Ellen Doré Watson demonstrates a capacious talent for invention and empathy and, with her incomparable linguistic brio, gives us an unforgettable look at how loss and disconnection can usher in chance-to-change reverie and unexpected veerings towards life.

Ashore sees mystery and spirituality in common nature, in the last of winter leaves and the green mountains that are covered by traffic. It sees violence, also, which everyone shares in a floating island of plastic or an albatross' exploded stomach. In these poems, Nakashani is humble, responsible, and caring about the places she inhabits. Her poems ask us to care for what is small and specific in our own places, and they restore a kind of faith in these. To Nakashani, "it is enough, this tiny orbit, the spider's quivering step."

A powerful sequel to The Us, which ended with the son Ay wounded, rendered silent and immobile by a head injury. In Ay, the boy is propped up and worshiped, as others project a kind of divinity onto his stillness. While Ay recovers, in a series of lyrical monologues he discovers an individual self-awareness, separate from family and tribe. "Musically rugged, riddled with insight, resonant, gripping, and chock-full of moments that startle with their vividness ('What eats grass slow and bent- / necked, eyed from the side, is deer') Ay deploys its fertile idiom not only for the pleasure of it, which is immeasurable, but as a medium through which to investigate the mechanics of subjectivity, grief, empathy, and forgiveness. The result is one of the most radically inventive and invigorating books of poetry I've read in years" - Timothy Donnelly

Atlas Hour is a collection of poem-maps whose cosmology embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis' Terezin transit camp and the poet's own children. Sifting and selecting moments in history and in the annals of art, these poems bring the stuff of everyday into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed.

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

A meditation on the centrality of predation to the Western lyric tradition.  In dialogue with Wittgenstein's "On Certainty," Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt," among other works, Kristen Case's poems and lyric essays unearth the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing-or approximating knowledge of-one another.

Poems exploring the relationship between joy and elegy. In Perishable, Stelios Mormoris asks incisive questions about the nature of human connection: Where does memory live-in the body, in the mind, or elsewhere? What happens when the objects that surround us-a wedding ring, an empty purse, a harp-reveal necessary truths about ourselves and those we love? As the book unfolds, lush sensory details and unmatched lyricism are brought to bear on these lingering concerns in a style as neoclassical as it is contemporary. In poems that radiate with intelligence, Mormoris combines understated elegance with finely tuned music and evocative imagery.

Formally daring poems that ask a compelling question: if fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving? The realm that belongs to Nebulous Vertigo is both visceral and vibrant, and it is mysteriously familiar. If you come close to it, you will hear how rains eat, how a silken tofu revolts, how the Chinese word for "beans" turns into a speaking persona, and how a telephone bridges the surviving and the afterlife. In Nebulous Vertigo, everyday life is inevitably lost to the inevitable fate. And yet, with unexpected quivers, our fate and life keep surprising us.  Traveling through the cha chann teng in Hong Kong, you can hear how Mrs. Suen, Mr. Yuen, and Waiter Kuen carry out intriguing conversations; astounded by the night sky in Paris, you will see how constellations narrate the lovers' quirky destiny; and all the way through the Sayama Hills in Tokorozawa, you will be surprised by the turnings and upturnings of the myths told by a Japanese Uncle. Nebulous Vertigo, as its title beckons, "sighs an unreal cloud / for the fated sun to rise." If fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving? Every attempt, as the poems suggest, can be calmingly adventurous, unobvious yet magnanimous.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven incantations-prayers, hexes, and charms-all of which call for a transformation of language, grief, and the self. "Good things come to you through fire," a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew. Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems-prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations-that call for transformation. A parent's death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms-including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle-empowers these shifts. Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, "Underpoem [Fire Fungus]," sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, "Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency." Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.

Cyborg Fever addresses timely questions about AI, technology, and their role in shaping relationships. In Cyborg Fever, acclaimed writer Laurie Sheck brings us a probing and lyrical philosophical fiction in the spirit of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing transhumanism. Throughout Cyborg Fever, many strange, surprising facts appear: an artist clones a flower from his DNA and the DNA of a petunia, an astronaut plays golf on the moon, a mathematician on a rest cure rethinks the life of Shakespeare, and particles and antiparticles collide at lightning speed beneath the green hills of Switzerland and France. Threaded throughout, one question lingers: in this age of AI and genetic engineering, how can we come to know more fully what it means to love and be human among the wonders and destructions we have wrought on Earth? At the center of the book is the narrator, Erwin, left as an hours-old infant on the steps of an orphanage where he is named after the renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger (of the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment). After a traumatic fall into a year-long fever dream, he experiences many visions that take him into many areas of inquiry including the nature of the universe, bioengineering, medical experimentation, cyborgs, AI, and space and time, and ultimately teaches him the nature of love. Along the way, he develops a friendship with a gentle cyborg who has escaped from a Lab involved in covert medical intervention. Guided by the cyborg and a vision of Funes (of Borges's iconic story "Funes the Memorious"), Erwin experiences the Information Age and the promises of AI in all its beauty and, ultimately, its terror, as he watches the cyborg he has come to love devolve into an unfeeling information machine. Throughout, issues of personhood, human attachment, and the dignity of all living beings pervade Erwin's thinking and leave him with a larger understanding and appreciation of what it means to love.

This collection bears witness to ecstasy and grief through persona. By inhabiting the voices of Adam and Eve, Abelard and Heloise, etc., DiNiord reveals the enduring alterity contained within the self. Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. DiNiord divines "the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same." From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as "Skywriting Over The Rockies," "With A Bone In My Heart," and "I Call Out To You," this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called "each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay" and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls "dust in love." Ambitious and masterful, DiNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to "the other," whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a "negative capability" that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it. Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to "the harsh advice of loss" to the memory of a young couple's transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry's irony and blessing.

Winner of the 2023 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, Jalousie works toward a poetics of analysis. The "I-centered," first person, yet experimental poems in Jalousie explore the ways in which expression of the deeply personal experience is both dictated to and altered by rigid societal expectations. The speaker of these highly personal poems can't help but view language as a historical artifact, the DNA of past worlds, as these poems delve into the complexities of sorting out one's individual identity amid broader cultural contexts. Paty's poems attempt to connect the personal, private, intimate persona with elements that are always external-external not only to this poet but to every person. These poems seek to capture fleeting moments of personal connection despite the impossibility of language, the societal dictates of gender roles, the pressures of making a living, the inexorable march of time, and the bewildering strangeness of architectural spaces. At the heart of this collection is "Premise," an extensive poem that weaves in detours through the history of New York City, themes of discard, references to Bruegel's "Wedding Dance," and discussions on representation and memory. The book also contains three full-color illustrations which augment the poet's themes and concerns.

Poems that ask an urgent question:  how might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death without becoming complicit in the commodification of Black trauma? Phantom Number listens for an absent voice. To survive and answer to her best friend and fellow poet April Freely's death, Spring Ulmer rips meaning apart in her poems, then repairs it, only to rip it up again. Words bend, meaning shifts-abstraction a tool Ulmer wields to better get at the question at the heart of Phantom Number: How might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death at a time when the push is to write Black joy as antidote to the commodification of Black trauma? Ulmer understands her position is suspect yet cannot shirk her love or rage. Ulmer asks the reader to do the work or else. Her abstracted poems vibrate, emotion emerging from a poem made rag. Ulmer's abecedarium long form holds these fragments, inviting lines into an order of alliteration and words into an otherwise coherence, a belonging that has nothing to do with their origin. Phantom Number finds in abstraction a radical wail.

Autumn is the inspiration behind this anthology, but not necessarily the destination. The destination is the discovery of the human condition, the discovery of the ways in which we respond to the natural world. In this extraordinary anthology, forty-seven contemporary poets and one photographer respond to the myriad ways in which what we think and feel about the "autumnal" resonates through our lives and senses: spiritually, physically, and philosophically. Contributing poets were asked "to let their language rub up against any part or parts of the autumnal world that calls to them, whether from the outside in or the inside out." In other words, these autumn poems and photographs need not so much as mention fallen leaves, milkweed, or even "autumn." Autumn is the inspiration, but not necessarily the destination. The destination is as ever, the discovery of the human condition, the discovery of the ways in which we respond to the natural world. The poems included in this anthology have all been written fresh in response to the autumnal prompt, with new work from luminaries such as Elise Paschen, Martha Ronk, G.C. Waldrep, Michael Chitwood, Gillian Cummings, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Rick Hilles, Eva Hooker, Luisa A. Igloria, and William Orem. The photographs are by Jeffrey Levine, who, in addition to being executive director of Tupelo Press, is widely recognized for his work behind the camera. These images boast exceptional composition and color, but beyond technique, each photo offers up a penetrating resonance on the theme of autumn and the autumnal.

A collection of poems concerned with how the living and the dead coexist, how to survive trauma, and the power of persistence. The Haunting is a book of feminist-horror visitations, incantations, and possessions embodied in unruly forms that subvert genre and generic definitions of poetry and prose. This is a collection that is concerned with how the living and the dead coexist, how to survive trauma, and the power of persistence. Drawing from a variety of texts including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, twentieth-century horror films, the Velvet Underground, and Ovid, The Haunting explores the anxieties of ancestral and artistic inheritance, rage, transformation, motherhood, maternal ambivalence, and the drive to create.

A lyric essay about young love and loss and the aftermath of a former lover's suicide. Landsickness explores the inelegant progress of grief and pursues a relentless search for evidence of the beloved's presence through the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, and the science of depression. While full of tenderness, the poems employ humor and honesty to observe the ugliness of grief and the failure of elegy to restore the dead. From the funeral to the office of her dead-end job to navigating the streets of New York, the speaker experiences a series of blunders and false starts as she learns to cope with her new life. Still, there is a real sense of progression in the collection's end, even as the speaker continues to ask herself: "Why am I obsessed with the physics of his fall?"

Poems that enlarge our sense of what beauty and awe can be. While operating with startling self-awareness, Green Island does not simply offer poems that interrogate the circumstances of their own making. The work found in this slim volume questions the poetic tropes of beauty and romantic love and their relationships to the lyric. Ultimately working within the confines of a received tradition to expand what is possible within it, Liz Countryman shows us moments of quiet revelation in the quotidian, the comic, and the vestiges of popular culture.

A collection of poems that blesses the reader with a spirit of hope, solace, and inspiration in their own seasons of adversity. The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity--an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade's worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word "anthropause" floated indelibly into the world's vocabulary.

A book that bends time and fragments narrative. On the surface, Small Altars appears to narrate the story of two brothers, offering a singular portrayal of grief, loss, and the quiet violence inherent in adolescence. Gardiner considers the powerlessness of his narrator as he comes of age against a backdrop of comic books, piano lessons, and family secrets. At the same time, Small Altars explores--through form, style, and technique--precisely how memory works. By eschewing the impulse to rely strictly on chronology as a structural device, Gardiner instead creates a provocative fragmentation of time, meaning, and narrative. He interrogates our use of story to lend unity and cohesion to what are essentially discontinuous experiences, to find meaning in loss, grief, and their indelible aftermath.

An examination of obsession, gender, love, and loss in contemporary rural America. Country Songs for Alice is a story of queer love and heartbreak, infused with the imagery and aesthetics of country music. In this collection, a non-binary, queer narrator passes through the crucible of love, romance, and heartbreak against the backdrop of rural AmericaCountry Songs for Alice not only tells the story of a relationship and its dissolution but reclaims country western imagery and aesthetics for a queer audience.

"In her third collection, Amy Beeder offers worlds past and contemporary in diction nearly Elizabethan, in poems as witty and sly as any from that virtuosic literary era" - Dana Levin

Continuing the work begun in 2014's Poverty Creek Journal, the lyric essays in Thomas Gardner's Sundays focus on moments in our ordinary lives when something within us breaks and we are cast out to wander and sing, "feeling [our] way toward something [in the invisible] that will press back."

Pablo Neruda's epic poem Canto General is a prodigious work that scrolls out like the chronicle of a journey through the Americas, as the poet strives to provide a unifying vision of reality. Neruda's most audacious and ambitious achievement, Canto General locates and reveals communal sources of strength in the place of our origin, land of our ancestors. The poet depicts history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Constructed in fifteen parts, and made up of more than fifteen thousand lines, Canto General unfolds in successive epochs, celebrating the flora and fauna and geology of Neruda's homeland and recounting episodes in the lives of explorers and conquistadors, emperors and dictators, revolutionaries and everyday laborers.--

Broadening the scope of his award-winning debut to consider the wider Indo-Caribbean community in migration across the Americas and Europe, Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir’s inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet-narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.Praise for Rajiv Mohabir’s previous book: “In his excellent debut, Mohabir exposes desire and inner turmoil through the measured incantations of a queer, Indian-American voice that refuses the burdens of a homophobic and racist world. He eloquently describes how the brown body survives, clinging vigilantly to longing, lust, and love: ‘I mean to say / I am still — this trembling breath of a comma, this coincidental object of your want.’ . . . Mohabir illuminates his own wounds, and as the reader watches him dresses and stitches those wounds, ‘A queer flutter knocks about your ribs.’” — Publishers Weekly

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America's leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.