And So, the third collection by Joel Brouwer frames and zooms close-up on lovers and strangers as they couple and recoil. Cynical yet energetic, And So is a considered study of the ways we tell the li
In The Cure, Sarah Gorham's mature, eager, intelligent poetic voice explores family--and marriage; and self--as forms in which we move, escaping and demanding restraint, seeking and fearing contact wi
Rift, the third collection from poet and psychologist Forrest Hamer, engages hauntingly with separations and reconciliations that are both personal and socio-historical. Hamer draws on his American e
The suburban world of After Dayton is radioactive, diseased and energetic in equal measure. It pulses and strobes with the exothermic reactions of modern science and the familiar everyday colliding: "
Drawing on traditional forms including the villanelle and pantoum, and writing with an ear for a beautiful, resounding rhythm, C. Dale Young investigates the lessons of the trainee doctor and document
Tina Chang's poems address the problems of family and heritage, initially inhabiting formally patterned stanzas that mimic the boundaries and bonds that are her subject, and then opening into free(-e
Violent Blues is a blues-harp album of words, a soundtrack of self-violence and loss, introspection and renewal—one man’s search for intimacy and enduring music. Its poems are rooted in the natural wo
Round Lake begins with an awakening in solitude. It moves through a search for romantic love, and attempts to create a sense of home and family through art and travel. There are elegies: surviving a s
The lush, lexically gorgeous and emotionally complex poems of Little- Known Operas guide us through the terrain of love, sex, same-sex marriage, illness, death, and art.
Distinctive in their lyric beauty, imaginative daring, distilled emotion, and ceaseless questioning, Bond's poems explore the mysteries of the flesh in terms both surreal and philosophical, scientific
These poems consider the history of the Americas and their uncertain future, particularly regarding the danger of climate change, and suggest a line from colonialism toward a shattering “Apocalipsixtl
Dear All, is a book of moral urgency that eradicates the differences between private and public lives as it uncovers memory’s distortions and inaccuracies. Maggie Anderson negotiates the perceptions
Brutal and tender, Adamshick’s spare poems recount a son’s unsentimental and powerful love for his mother, while contemplating, in the wake of her death, what it is to be truly alive.
In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman writes an American anthem for the 21st century, a full-throated lyric composed of pain, faith, lust and vulnerability. Coleman’s poems comment on and interrogate
The characters of Meg Kearney's gritty second poetry collection travel the shadows and edges of modern life. Searching for home and knowing that, once found, home might dissolve without warning, Kear
In her debut book of poems, knit together with personal essays, Mehta explores her own cultural history— Indian Jainism and American Judaism—as well as her ideas about faith, feminism, and family.
Populated with ghosts from the past and contemporary victims of cruelty, these poems focus on the stories of a woman diagnosed with cancer during a divorce and a mother struggling with her daughter’s
In Sandy Tseng's first collection, leaving is both what remains and the act of going to another place, a different lifestyle, an unknown afterlife. This book recounts the pleasures and terrors of tra
Of Pimone Triplett's The Price of Light, David St. John, judge for the Levis Poetry Prize, writes "[this is] a collection of astonishing scope and power. Her poems are linguistically electric and eac
Poet and translator Daniel Simko emigrated with his parents to the U.S.A. and lived here until his death, aged 45, in 2004. Steeped in the traditions of European art, Simko remained reticent about pu
Shadow-feast is a chronicle of dying—the awareness, denial, pain, and hope surrounding incurable illness, as well as the aftermath of grief as told from three points of view: Hers, His, and Theirs (th
In Cynthia Huntington's The Radiant, what is most tragic can, and often does, become beautiful. "What/ is memory? Who stays to mourn?/ It seems we feel so much/ and then we die. The marsh hawk/ vee
The speaker in Please Bury Me in This grieves the death of her father and the loss of several women to suicide while contemplating her own death and the nature of language as a means of human connecti
Event Boundaries considers ways our relationships and growth as individuals are interdependent, whether it’s possible to consider any relationship (including with ourselves) independent of the culture
Pelletiere’s poems convey a visceral sense of the poet’s harrowing recovery from brain injury after a car – truck accident that altered her experience of both body and language.
Scale is about a relationship between a father and a son. These poems consider the importance of acknowledging the past as well as the dangers in doing so.
Kevin Prufer’s How He Loved Them sets love in a fraught, paradoxical world where bombs explode, fields burn, and armies advance. With clear, compassionate eyes, Prufer finds powerful intimacy between
Late in the Empire of Men, Kempf’s powerful debut collection, reads the author’s coming-of-age in Ohio and California against the westward trajectory of American history, a trajectory he simultaneousl
Andrea Cohen’s poems search the shadow regions of yearning and loss, but they take surprising, sometimes meteoric leaps, landing in a place where brightness reigns. The voice in Unfathoming strives t
In fiber-optic-fast meditations on everything from Marxism to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without bei
We are making our lives up “here on this bridge / between starshine and clay” (Lucille Clifton). Addressing tough circumstances tenderly, this book is about life—what we inherit, what we create, what
What rises--and to what end? Farrah Field's award-winning debut collection, Rising, offers a new Southern poetry in which Field lets loose a Calamity Jane-like voice loaded with screwball humor.
