Lyrical and highly charged, these poems examine the strengths and frailties of the human psyche as it functions under the stress of loss, disappointment and mortality. As the poet struggles with reali
Peter Sacks draws upon his life as an expatriate as well as upon his early years in South Africa, including his time spent in the military, to create a remarkably powerful book of poetry. At turns med
Set in a castle and on its grounds in Brittany, The Little Field of Self is one long poem comprised of individual poems that articulate the essence of devotion and the conflict within the devoted. Wit
Jennifer Clarvoe’s second book, Counter-Amores, wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid’s Amores, and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take reve
Reel to Reel, Alan Shapiro’s twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the n
A meditation on the nature of betrayal, the constraints of identity, and the power of narrative, the lyric monologues in Troy, Unincorporated offer a retelling, or refraction, of Chaucer’s tragedy Tro
Milton’s GodWhere I-95 meets The Pike,a ponderous thunderhead floweredstewed a minute, then flippedlike a flash card, tatterededges crinkling in, linings so darkwith excessive brightthat, standing, wa
In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump
Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud is the latest offering from enigmatic prose-poet Killarney Clary. Like her earlier book, Potential Stranger, this is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems
From Let Me Hear You Outside is inside now.The pyramid whose pointwe are is weightlessand invisibleand has become itself the nightin which alonetogetheron a high plateauwe go on shoutingout whate
A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur’s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be
We are all losing all the time. Four titanic forces—time, mortality, forgetting, and confusion—win victories over us each day. We all “know” this yet we keep dreaming of beauti
“There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense while the world dries and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, and boil .
To Forget Venice is the improbable challenge and the title of Peg Boyers’s newest collection of poems. The site of several unforgettable years of her adolescence, the place she has returned to more fr
This unusually well-conceived manuscript evolved over the course of several years when Benjamin Landry was an administrator in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Each day on the
from Enormously Sad. . . Sad, so sad-compared to what?To your earlier more oblivious state?It never was oblivious enough-always those presentiments of sadnessprickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Ge
In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life’s emotional mysteries—both dire and hilariou
From Ways of Goingfor SteveWill it be like paragliding—gossamer takeoff, seedlike drifting downinto a sunlit, unexpected grove?Or ski-jumping—headlong soaring,ski-tips piercing clouds,crystal revelati
Winner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the City—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986—Anne Winters'sThe Displaced of Capital e
Eleanor Wilner's poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the
