| Sun within a Sun | Claire Chi-ah Lyu | A sustained reflection on the enterprise of poetry, on what poetry is and might be, that sees poetry as way of life at it most genuine. |
| 90 Miles | Virgil Suárez | In creating this collection Suárez creatively combines poems from six previous collections with unpublished ones to give compelling expression of what it means to live in exile. |
| After the Fall | Edward Field | After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.
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| All-American Girl | Robin Becker | Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry. |
| All-Night Lingo Tango | Barbara Hamby | This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.
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| American Poetry Now | Ed Ochester | American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suárez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. |
| Angel, Interrupted | Reginald Shepherd | Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective. |
| Applause | Carol Muske | Applause is a collection of poems about joy and dread -- mirroring the extremes of the contemporary American experience. |
| Art of Drowning | Billy Collins | To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s. |
| Astoria | Malena Mörling | A book of poetry about the transitory physical world of the body, trains, and highways that reflects on the seamless quality of the present moment.
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| Asylum | Quan Barry | Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a stunning debut collection revealing a mature complexity of craft and an original sophisticated vision |
| Axion Esti | Odysseus Elytis | The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The "autobiographical" elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience. |
| Babel | Barbara Hamby | Winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
Barbara Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers.
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| Black Swan | Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon | A powerful new voice on the poetry scene, Van Clief-Stefanon writes of pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation. |
| Blessing the House | Jim Daniels | Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion. |
| Blue Like the Heavens | Gary Gildner | “Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book. |
| Blue on Blue Ground | Aaron Smith | Winner of 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
These artful, yet accessible poems are concerned with the body, desire, anxiety, and obsession—how what we want redeems and isolates us. They urge complete exploration of one’s physical and mental selves as a means to remain alive in the material world.
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| Boneshaker | Jan Beatty | Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos. |
| Book of Seventy | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | Poems that explore the territory of advancing age—its tragicomedies, its passions, its engagement with the world. |
| Brave Disguises | Gray Jacobik | Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mature, elegant, and crackling with energy, this volume won the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry. |
| Brother Salvage | Rick Hilles | Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.
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| Burn and Dodge | Sharon Dolin | Burn and Dodge is a collection of poems that “burns” with contemporary vices such as: Guilt, Envy, Regret, and Indecision while also “dodging” such concerns with formal playfulness.
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| Captivity | Toi Derricotte | What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God. |
| Cathedral of the North | Connie Voisine | Winner of the 1999 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry.
Set against a fantastic backdrop of religious imagery, myth and dreams, science fiction, and the stark realities of a northern factory town, Voisine's poems carefully detail the life of a common hero and his family. |
| Cave | C. G. Hanzlicek | This collection spans twenty-five years in the career of this highly regarded poet. It features poems from the books Stars, Calling the Dead, When There Are No Secrets, and Against Dreaming, along with seventeen new poems. |
| Ceremonies of Longing | Sandra Kohler | Whether cataloging her flower garden or worrying about her son, admiring a trio of aged aunts or recovering from an argument with her husband, the narrator in these beautifully lyric poems deftly explores imagination, relationships, and the unlived possibilities in our own lives. Like the currents of time that pull us inexorably into the future, Sandra Kohler leads us through The Ceremonies of Longing, illuminating the magic that inhabits daily life and ordinary dreams. |
| Children of Paradise | Liz Rosenberg | A book of poems about “children” in the widest sense--from children of the Nazi-torn Warsaw ghettos to the American poor, as well as poems of domesticity, love and daily life. |
| City of a Hundred Fires | Richard Blanco | City of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American. |
| City of Salt | Gregory Orr | City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination. |
| Cloud Moving Hands | Cathy Song | These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss—the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time—and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy. |
| Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser | Janet Kaufman | Muriel Rukeyser earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism.
In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser's translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz's work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem ‘Wake Island.’ |
| Contracted World | Peter Meinke | Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.
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| Controvertibles | Quan Barry | Second book by an acclaimed young poet. This volume features more of Barry’s refined brilliance and delicate lyricism, cast in a more meditative mode.
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| Crack in Everything | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing. |
| Defense of Poetry | Gabriel Gudding | Dangerous, edgy, and dark, Gudding offers a defense not only against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. |
| Dirt She Ate | Minnie Bruce Pratt | A powerful collection that doesn’t shirk from showing pain that includes thirteen new poems along with selections from her four previous volumes of poetry.
Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry |
| Dismantling the Hills | Michael McGriff | WINNER OF THE 2007 AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE
A book of poems that explore working-class, rural American life, in all its complication and contradiction.
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| Dog Angel | Jesse Kercheval | Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these poems trace the timelines of Kercheval’s life forward and backward, offering a moving examination of the connections that bind us together into families and communities. |
| Domain of Perfect Affection | Robin Becker | Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.
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| Domestic Interior | Stephanie Brown | These poems describe the private and sometimes secret spaces of marriage, parenthood, and knowledge.
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Watch Stephanie Brown read at Poetry LA |
| Elegy | Larry Levis | A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. After Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. |
| Elegy on Toy Piano | Dean Young | In this book Young presents poems of varying tones and styles, emphasizing the nature of simultaneity and the power of wordplay. |
| Emplumada | Lorna Dee Cervantes | Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience. |
| Endarkenment | Jeffrey McDaniel | The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque ‘academicisms,’ McDaniel is an intro to a new world.
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| Essential Etheridge Knight | Etheridge Knight | The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems. |
| Eve’s Striptease | Julia Kasdorf | Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, Eve’s Striptease suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Julia Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them. |
| Eye of Water | Amber Flora Thomas | Winner of 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Drawing her inspiration from she calls her “waking”, Amber Flora Thomas presents poems that depict humanity’s struggle to overcome its own flaws.
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| Falling Hour | David Wojahn | The fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn. The Falling Hour is a book in which the workings of personal history collide with the forces of public history, examining loss and cultural legacies. Marks a significant advance from Wojahn’s previous works, as he employs both strict forms and free verse. |
| Fata Morgana | Reginald Shepherd | Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence. |
| First Course in Turbulence | Dean Young | With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book. |
| Floating Bridge | David Shumate | The Floating Bridge, David Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, transports its readers over the chasm between the mundane and the enchanted. We traverse one bridge and find ourselves eavesdropping on Gertrude Stein and her gardener. We take the night bus to Gomorrah to have a look around. Halfway across, each bridge vanishes beneath our feet. Our world shifts. The commonplace begins to glow. We turn the page. Another bridge awaits.
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| Flying at Night | Ted Kooser | In this work the 2004-2005 U.S. Poet Laureate has selected poems from Sure Signs, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Prize, and the acclaimed One World at a Time.
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| For a Limited Time Only | Ronald Wallace | For a Limited Time Only explores issues of aging, illness, and mortality, and the philosophical and theological speculations that arise from personal tragedy, and invokes humor, hope, and consolation in the face of death and loss.
Winner of the 2008 Posner Book-Length Poetry Award.
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| From the Meadow | Peter Everwine | Peter Everwine has been a dominant force in American poetry for more than five decades. This volume features a group of new works, as well as selections from four previous collections, which capture the quiet intensity of his calmly dazzling work. |
| Giacometti’s Dog | Robin Becker | Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author’s “two-headed journey” to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world. Becker’s poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a Giacometti sculpture. From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain. |
| Grace | John Hodgen | Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.
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| Green Age | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s writing: from the opening poem, “Fifty,” funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive “Meditation in Seven Days,” whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism. |
| High Water Mark | David Shumate | Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
These fresh and unpredictable prose poems annouce the arrival of an exciting new voice. Every page is filled with unexpected delights.
Winner, 2004 Best Books of Indiana (poetry category) |
| Hill Daughter | Louise McNeill | Musically complex and intellectually sophisticated, Louise McNeill’s imagery and rhythms have their deepest sources in the West Virginia mountains where she was born in 1911 on a farm that has been in her family for nine generations. These are rooted poems, passionately concerned with stewardship of the land and with the various destructions of land and people that often come masked as “progress.” |
| Horse Fair | Robin Becker | Becker investigates how marginalized individuals negotiate public and private spheres, while inventing sustainable communities. She also explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and painter Rosa Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. |
| Imaginary Lover | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review, aptly describes this book: “intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.” To read her poems is to “discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human.” |
| Improbable Swervings of Atoms | Christopher Bursk | This collection follows the physical and emotional struggles of a young boy growing up in 1950s America as he attempts to understand himself and the world around him.
Winner of 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and the 2006 Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award.
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| In Every Seam | Allison Joseph | The third poetry collection from Allison Joseph. In Every Seam documents the passage from girlhood to womanhood in an urban environment fraught with brutality, yet seething with energy and vitality. |
| In Praise of Falling | Cheryl Dumesnil | Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Enacting the Zen proverb “fall down seven times, get up eight,” this collection explores the ways we fall—through disillusionment, disappointment, and plain, old-fashioned mistakes, and the ways we rise up—out of personal debacles, unfortunate circumstances, family legacies, and collective struggles. |
| Insomnia Diary | Bob Hicok | Bob Hicok’s fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill these pages. His fourth book, Insomnia Diary is filled with Hicok’s characteristic edgy, brazen, provocative, and meditative poems. |
| Interrogation Palace | David Wojahn | A career-spanning selection of work by a widely respected American poet, including a generous gathering of new poems.
David Wojahn was awarded the 2007 O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize for this collection >> Read the press release |
| Invention of the Kaleidoscope | Paisley Rekdal | The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation. |
| Journey | Kathleen Norris | Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life. |
| Ka-Ching! | Denise Duhamel | Ka-Ching! is a book of poems that explores America’s obsession with money. It also includes a crown of sonnets about e-bay, sestinas on the subjects of Sean Penn and the main characters of fairytales, a pantoum that riffs on a childhood riddle, and a villanelle inspired by bathroom grafitti.
Read a press release about this book
Watch Denise Duhamel read at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. |
| Land of Bliss | Cathy Song | The fourth collection from an award-winning poet that examines our ability to create our own misery and our own happiness. |
| Last Person to Hear Your Voice | Richard Shelton | While Richard Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with soocial issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother. |
| Late Empire | David Wojahn | Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation. In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac. Centered around tow masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry. |
| Leaping Poetry | Robert Bly | Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art. Part anthology and part commentary, Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of “leaping” as found in the works of poets from around the world, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. |
| Liquid Paper | Peter Meinke | Peter Meinke was a master of traditional poetic forms long before the current interest in “the new formalism.” His work is, in turn, witty, comic, sane, deeply moving, and always readable. Liquid Paper collects the best of his previously published poems from the late 1960s on with a generous selection of new work. |
| Little Girls in Church | Kathleen Norris | Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects. |
| Little Space | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Alicia Suskin Ostriker struggles with the meaning of family, politics, and faith. |
| Long for This World | Ronald Wallace | Long for This World includes twenty-six new poems from this master of the sonnet and other traditional forms, along with selections from his six previous collections. This book exemplifies the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become Ronald Wallace’s hallmarks. |
| Love and Strange Horses | Nathalie Handal | “Sometimes we have questions that seem to defy answers or even suppositions but then we find Love and Strange Horses to help us map out a course to continue loving life. A really wonderful, thoughtful read by an intriguing new voice.”
—Nikki Giovanni |
| Love on the Streets | Sharon Doubiago | Love on the Streets is a selection of poems from four of Doubiago’s books of poetry, two of which are book-length poems, plus new poetry. It is the culmination of thirty years of writing “on the road.”
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| M-80 | Jim Daniels | In M-80, his third book of poems, Jim Daniels explores the sharp edges of urban life. His characters struggle for survival in the face of rising urban violence, racial tension, and a crumbling economy. The collection is named for one of the most dangerous fireworks found on city streets - an apt metaphor for an urban world where the fuse is always lit. |
| Mad River | Jan Beatty | Winner of the 1994 Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. |
| Mother/Child Papers | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | In 1970, as the war in Vietnam was heating up, Ostriker was awaiting the birth of her son. On April 30, President Nixon announced the bombing of Cambodia. On May 14, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The poems in this collection confront Ostriker’s personal tumult as she considered the world she had brought her son into. |
| My Brother is Getting Arrested Again | Daisy Fried | A new more mature Daisy Fried, writing about grown-up problems with the same insouciance and even more range and skill.
Read a press release about this book |
| Mystery Train | David Wojahn | David Wojahn deftly mixes personal history and recollections with a wide range of character studies and monologues, but the center of this book is a sequence of thirty-five poems, mainly sonnets, in which rock and roll music is a strange, kaleidoscopic mirror of recent American history. Combining rhapsodic homage, grim humor, human folly, and tragedy, these poems are like nothing else in contemporary poetry. |
| Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man | Ronaldo Wilson | Prose poems that profile the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking deeply into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity.
Read a press release about this book |
| Natural Causes | Mark Cox | In Natural Causes, a collection haunted by death, compassion, and love, the penchants for metaphor and resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever. |
| New World | Suzanne Gardinier | Winner of the 1992 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry |
| Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds | Angela Ball | Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
Angela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.
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| Night Mowing | Chard deNiord | Influenced by the natural, the classical, and the biblical, these poems wrestle with the universal and the sacred, revealing an urge to move toward purity and deep feeling even in dark times.
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| Night Watch on the Chesapeake | Peter Meinke | Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself. |
| Niobe Poems | Kate Daniels | Now back in print, this heralded second collection by the award-winning poet centers around the Greek myth of Niobe and the theme of endurance. |
| No Heaven | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | A commentary on America, this book delves into major aspects of contemporary society and expounds upon the country’s qualities, both positive and negative.
Read a press release about this book |
| Noose and Hook | Lynn Emanuel | “I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America. Her aesthetic and artistic choices consistently invoke a complex hybrid poetics that radically reimagines the shape of our poetic discourse. The brilliant, shattering, and disturbing poems of Noose and Hook are not only wry critiques of recent poetic and cultural activity in this country but also compelling signposts to what yet might be possible in our future. This is Lynn Emanuel's most exquisite and powerful book yet.”
—David St. John |
| Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo | Rick Noguchi | For the young Kenji Takezo, the innocent surfer who inhabits this collection of poems, balance becomes more than just trying to stand on a wave. It is a way of surviving in a world as precarious as the ocean, a world constantly turning on itself. |
| Open Interval | Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon | Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in ]Open Interval[ locate the self in the interval between body and name. |
| Ostinato Vamps | Wanda Coleman | Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas. |
| Otherhood | Reginald Shepherd | The fourth collection from this much-praised poet combines lyricism with experimentation, creating a unique synthesis of passion and linguistic exploration. |
| Picnic, Lightning | Billy Collins | To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s. |
| Plum Flower Dance | Afaa Michael Weaver | The Plum Flower Dance includes new poems and poems from Weaver’s earlier works My Fathers Geography, and Timber and Prayer, among others.
Read a press release about this book |
| Poems of the River Spirit | Maurice Kilwein Guevara | The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets. |
| Post-Rapture Diner | Dorothy Barresi | Winner of the 1997 American Book Award for Poetry and Nominated for the 1997 Poet’s Prize, The Post-Rapture Dinner is about finding hope, about confronting and overcoming cynicism by discovering a spiritually grounded in the things of this world. |
| Primitive Mentor | Dean Young | The ninth collection for this Pulitzer Prize finalist, who remains as entertaining, imaginative and inventive as ever.
Read a press release about this book |
| Pulling a Dragon’s Teeth | Shao Wei | The debut collection of Agnes Lynch Starrett winner Shao Wei, a Chinese-American poet, blends fairy tales, New York images, family stories, and the universal rites of passage associated with growing up to paint a vibrant canvas of passion and imagination. She captures the struggle of many immigrants as she describes her efforts to balance the influences of her childhood along the Yangtze river and her adulthood in New York City. |
| Queen for a Day | Denise Duhamel | There’s no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you’ve never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. This book showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.
Watch Denise Duhamel read at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. |
| Questions About Angels | Billy Collins | To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s. |
| Red Line | Betsy Sholl | Winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry |
| Red Sugar | Jan Beatty | In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the “romantic” “and the “brutal” and how they exist within us and between us.
Read a press release about this book |
| Red Under the Skin | Natasha Sajé | Winner of the 1995 Towson State University Prize for Literature and the 1993 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. |
| Refuge | Belle Waring | Winner of the 1989 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry |
| Rouge Pulp | Dorothy Barresi | Barresi’s poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair. |
| Satan Says | Sharon Olds | First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds’ Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as “a daring and elegant first book. This is a poetry which affirms and redeems the art.” |
| Scars | Peter Meinke | Peter Meinke is one of the most readable poets. The surface clarity of his lines and his aptness for metaphor make these poems accessible and mysterious. They have real subjects - Dessert Storm and acorns, coffee and Tolstoy - but at the same time give entry to that interior world where all feelings and moralities grow. |
| School Figures | Cathy Song | In this, Song’s third book, the poems are like the school figures an ice skater etches onto the ice - the pen moving silently and deliberately across a white expanse of paper and experience, bringing maximum pressure to bear upon the blade of language to unlock “the invisible fire beneath the ice.”
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| See Jack | Russell Edson | Edson began publishing poetry in the 1960s. He has been called “the godfather of prose poems in America” by Booklist’s Ray Olson.
Edson has been quoted as saying “Prose comes so naturally that one doesn’t really have to choose it, it’s already in one’s mouth”.
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| Selected Levis | Larry Levis | The revised collection of Larry Levis poems selected by David St. John. Each of Levis’s books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books. |
| Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth | Susan Wolfson | This anthology brings together three powerfully original figures who vividly capture the spirit and anxieties of nineteenth century England––Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The editors’ introductions to each poet are lively and accessible to the non-specialist, while their editorial work, both in establishing the texts and in their annotation and apparatus, makes this an ideal text for specialist study as well. |
| Shadow Ball | Charles Harper Webb | Shadow Ball gathers together in one collection the best of Charles Harper Webb’s prize-winning books, as well as a selection of his newest poems. |
| She Didn’t Mean to Do It | Daisy Fried | Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection presents 33 narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems on love, sex, relationships, work, and news of twenty-somethings in the 21st century. |
| Sin puertas visibles | Jen Hofer | A fully bilingual anthology featuring the work of eleven women poets not yet fully established—by choice or because of youth—within Mexican literary hierarchies.
Awarded the 2004 Eugene M. Kayden National Translation Award from the University of Colorado, Boulder. |
| Skid | Dean Young | In Dean Young’s fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. |
| Sleeping Preacher | Julia Kasdorf | Sleeping Preacher was chosen from more than 900 first-book manuscripts as the winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, which consists of a cash award of $2,000 and publication in the Pitt Poetry Series. The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City. |
| Some Are Drowning | Reginald Shepherd | This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed. The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning. |
| Song of Thieves | Shara McCallum | Shara McCallum is on of the most compelling voices in American poetry. In her second collection Song of Thieves she artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune. |
| South America Mi Hija | Sharon Doubiago | Set amidst the mysteries and tragedies of South American culture, this book-length narrative poem is both an account of their journey and a feminist exploration of the struggle between the sexes. |
| Spirit Cabinet | David Wojahn | Spirit Cabinet is an ambitious work, seamlessly mixing autobiography with subjects ranging from pop music to ancient Egypt, from Stalin’s reading habits to Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. Formally inventive, elegiac and redemptive, aesthetically and emotionally risky, this is Wojahn’s most ingenious and compelling collection. |
| Starry Messenger | George Keithley | A unique sequence of narrative poems focusing on Galileo’s life, relationships, and work. George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. |
| Sure Signs | Ted Kooser | The publication of Ted Kooser’s Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accesible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry. |
| Temper | Beth Bachmann | Winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
Selected by Lynn Emanuel
The elegies in Temper interrogate the way grief leaves us confrontational, in a state of fracture.
Visit Beth Bachmann’s web page
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| Tender | Toi Derricotte | Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable. |
| Then, Suddenly— | Lynn Emanuel | A portrayal in verse of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body, between the identity and persona of both the author and the reader. |
| Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone | Mark Cox | Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems proble the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape - the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straighforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessability. |
| This Clumsy Living | Bob Hicok | “Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok's poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our 'clumsy living' with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which 'the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”
--Beckian Fritz Goldberg |
| Time’s Fancy | Ronald Wallace | Winner of the 1995 Banta Book Prize for a Wisconsin Author
Ronald Wallace is best known for his wit and good humor, his synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, his sensory immediacy, his accessibility, and charm. Now in Time's Fancy, his fifth collection, Wallace explores the tragic aspects of life more fully, fashioning a declarative poetry that is darker and deeper, more meditative and complex. |
| Tormented Mirror | Russell Edson | This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems. |
| Two and Two | Denise Duhamel | Ranging in subject matter from traditional literary matter to Hong Kong action films, the poems in this collection provide unusual perspectives on American society.
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Watch Denise Duhamel read at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida. |
| Uses of Adversity | Ronald Wallace | In this collection of one hundred sonnets, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Ronald Wallace once again proves himself to be one of our most versatile and affirmative poets. |
| Velocity | Nancy Krygowski | Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Krygowski's poems--often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous--are lovingly grounded in the ordinary. They are thinking poems--tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it.
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| View from a Temporary Window | Joanie Mackowski | “Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”
—John L. Koethe |
| volcano sequence | Alicia Suskin Ostriker | Bold, erotic, spiritual collection of poetry from a well-respected poet and critic, whose previous two books were both National Book Award finalists. |
| Walking Back Up Depot Street | Minnie Bruce Pratt | In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street , we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. |
| Water Between Us | Shara McCallum | In the winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Shara McCallum presents a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the struggle of those in exile to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. |
| Weather Central | Ted Kooser | Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm. |
| Widening Spell of the Leaves | Larry Levis | The result is a book of discursive meditations that will amply reward the reader. Part travelogue, part pilgrimage in which the shrines remain hidden until they are recognized later, Larry Levis’s startling and complex fifth book of poems is about the enslavement to desire for personal freedom, and the awareness of its price. |
| Windfall | Maggie Anderson | A selection of poems from three previous books as well as new work, Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a wry, self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity. |
| Winter Stars | Larry Levis | Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a “representative life” of our time. |
| Woman of the River | Claribel Alegría | One of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. The poems are richly human documents rooted in Alegria’s knowledge of and love for her subjects. |
| Words for Empty and Words for Full | Bob Hicok | “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.”
—Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living |
| Wrong | Reginald Shepherd | The poems of Shepherd’s third book seek to redefine the meaning of mythology, from the ruined representatives of Greek divinity to the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. |
| Wyndmere | Carol Muske | Wyndmere is a town in North Dakota where Carol Muske’s mother was born, and where she visited as a child. Muske’s grandparents are buried there, and it is where her mother met and married her father. Now almost a ghost town, Wyndmere is the source of imagery in many of these poems, as well as the idea of Wynd-mere, wind-mother, both inspiration and principle of separation. |
| Zinc Fingers | Peter Meinke | In Peter Meinke’s eleventh collection, he writes poems of humor and sadness. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well. |
| Zoo | Joanie Mackowski | Selected by Li-Young Lee as the Winner of the 2000 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry, this debut collection of poems illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange.
Winner of the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. |