Ordinary Chaos looks at the real, almost-real, unreal, and once-real phenomena that hide behind the veneer of ordinariness. With Kimberly Kruge’s deep focus, daily life unfurls into strangeness&
Dark, enigmatic, and sometimes comic, the stories in Partners and Strangers unite intimate anxieties with public dangers. Its characters embody grief, deviance, and the repressed: In “Yoav Feins
For the most part plainly spoken, as if in effort to measure memory and answer loss, the poems in Rowing with Wings surround everyday silences with everyday songs, however carefully sung. But if hope
Jason Whitmarsh’s The Histories is an extravagantly funny and deeply affecting work of the imagination. With an obsessive precision, Whitmarsh catalogs our misunderstandings, our absurdities, our joys
Sarah Rosenblatt laments, celebrates and questions the meaning of the ongoing story of time. Seasons speak but don’t recognize us. Time creeps through the windows in the same way it did with our ances
These poems grapple with conflicts arising from a world in which the personal, political, cultural, and aesthetic are deeply entangled and often troubling. Charara does not shy away from the tensions,
In Rachel Richardson’s second collection of poems, she juxtaposes the grand quests of Ahab and Melville with the quotidian journeys of contemporary life. Hundred-Year Wave launches stories of marriage
These poems are freighted with longing and doubt but they are never naïve. Passionate, unflinching family stories and personal loss are here, and yet the will to love breaks all molds.
In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of cult
The poems in Civil Twilight animate the present with a resonant sense of the past as character and as compass. The poems in the collection reveal a fascination with the possibilities that exist at eve
Like Conrad's Marlow, Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down "the shield of irony" without ta
The Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros has reinvented the Orphic task of the poet in these short, surreal, incandescent lyrics that stick close to the natural world, that make a pact with stones and bird
This powerful sixth collection of poetry is like some kind of new world Genesis singing its stories with lyric, grace, comic intuition and tragic force. The poet leads us over the remains of drought,
Suddenly exiled from Paris by her father, fifteen-year-old Agnes finds herself living in the south of France with her sister Sophie, her ailing grandfather and two servants in the family’s long-neglec
Good Hope Road is one of those rare books of verse that combine lyricism with the momentum of narrative, a concern for dailiness with a willingness to embrace wildness. Like Joyce’s Dubliners, the twe
Pretenders interweaves narrative, lyric, and fable in poems that tell their magical stories with revelatory rhythms and precise diction. Surreal and darkly funny, these powerful poems create a dense w
In Alexandria, Jasmine V. Bailey has written a string of love poems, islands in an archipelago that emerges with each poem’s brief story. In a voice at times detached and wistful and sometimes ringing
Like Robert Frost's North of Boston, David Yezzi's Birds of the Air intersperses charged lyrics with longer dramatic narratives. His monologues explore the frenetic pressures of urban life, as a numbe
With its striking new sequences of charmed mathematics and magical equations with their surreal violences and tragicomedic human predicaments, Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems spans two deca
In this debut collection, Anne Marie Rooney subverts traditional forms into strange and sexy new shapes. With poems as scary as they are seductive, Rooney reveals the domestic to be a rich, dirty burl
From the poet wrestling the saleswoman behind the counter at the chocolate shop for a plate of free samples to Cain slaying Abel in Iraq to appease his savage God, from a dinner with friends spoiled b
A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offe
Freud said that everywhere he went, a poet had been there first. Pamela Painter, even with these crystal prose conundrums, is one of those poets. Her stories are charming and provocative, but be caref
In Nicky Beer's The Diminishing House, birds are disemboweled, a father is mourned, and a basement fills with snakes. This first book of resonant lyric poetry meditates on such subjects as animals, ar
In this sequence of fifty poems, Norman Dubie has conversations with the nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt. Marvin Bell says of this book: "It's not simply that a sizeable portion of
K. A. Hays’ debut collection opens with an invitation to the apocalypse, an act of American bravado that soon gives way to fear of disaster, dread of violence, and grief for the dead. As the book’s “l
Shinemaster is a book about discovering plenitude in apparent scarcity. It presents this human paradox in lively and often playful fashion, with poems about sweet potatoes, popular music, spitwads, se
How can a small university like Carnegie Mellon have such a big impact on the world? Ironically, being small is a key reason the university is so prolific. An intimate environment, coupled with an ext
“With language that’s as simple as it is musical, Di Piero sets dazzling moments amid plainsong.”—New York Times Book Review For more than three decades, W. S. Di Piero’s
Emily Pettit is not afraid to confront the greatest of our universal experiences. Her Blue Flame is about time, space, loss, love, memory, fear, and staying alive. In this exquisite collection, she ex
“You fetch / the daily things. You go on. There’s nothing else to do.” In Afterswarm, Margot Schilpp reveals and revels in the deep comfort we take in the common objects, people, and
If the dead are a sea and the living an island, these poems speak from the shore. Their steady company consoles and reminds us that the wages of mortal awareness and sorrow endured can be attention an
In Anne Marie Rooney's second full-length book, she queers form and narrative to explore girlhood at the corner of the twenty-first century. In poems that excavate and subvert ideas of female desire,
Written over the course of more than twenty years, The Great Czech Navy is a collection of stories that chronicles the relationship between Czech citizens and Americans who chose to live in their mids
“All hail the end of spectacle,” announces a speaker in Virginia Konchan’s anticipated debut collection of poems. Sharp, funny, serious, and elegant, the poems in The End of Spectacle have the intimac
In this stunning debut collection, Lauren Moseley’s poems move through real and imagined landscapes, navigating the borders between doubt, fear, wonder, and empowerment. Through the lens of the natura
Immortal Village is a poetry collection about wildness versus domesticity, about desire set against the civilizing structures of myth, marriage, school, and village.
