The Charlotte & William Bloomberg Medford Public Library
December, 22 2024 02:04:08
From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
By Perez, Craig Santos
Experimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam) , and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo'åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
Omnidawn
|
9781632431189
|
Paperback
Punks
By Keene, John
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, PUNKS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, PUNKS weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poets friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, PUNKS reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry."John Keenes PUNKS is utterly brilliant. The range, vision, depth and humanity he brings to the page are as galactic as Bannekers astral wanderings, as crisp as the chordal cutting of a searching horn, as courageous and small as a nose wide open. Keenes masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. Amen to this exploration!"--Tyehimba JessPoetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies.
Publisher: n/a
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9781737277521
|
Paperback
Floaters
By Espada, Martín
From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.Martn Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of scar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Ro Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780393541038
|
Hardcover
DMZ Colony
By Choi, Don Mee
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
Publisher: n/a
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9781940696959
|
Paperback
Sight Lines
By Sze, Arthur
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award "The sight lines in Szes 10th collection are just that -- imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity." -- The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices -- from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent -- and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. "These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests." -- Lit Hub "The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines." -- Library Journal
Copper Canyon Press
|
9781556595592
|
Paperback
Indecency
By Reed, Justin Phillip
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in PoetryIndecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful -- the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
Coffee House Press
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9781566895149
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Paperback
Half-light
By Bidart, Frank
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry's most original voicesGathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it's that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet's own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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9780374125950
|
Hardcover
The Performance of Becoming Human
By Borzutzky, Daniel
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Following in the path of his acclaimed collections THE BOOK OF INTERFERING BODIES (Nightboat, 2011) and IN THE MURMURS OF THE ROTTEN CARCASS ECONOMY (Nightboat, 2015) , Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In THE PERFORMANCE OF BECOMING HUMAN, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts.
Brooklyn Arts Press
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9781936767465
|
Print book
Voyage of the Sable Venus
By Lewis, Robin Coste
A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present - titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know.
Knopf Publishing Group
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9781101875438
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Hardcover
Faithful and Virtuous Night
By Glück, Louise
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poetLouise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1St Edition edition
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9780374152017
|
Hardcover
Incarnadine
By Szybist, Mary
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Amazons Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment.
Graywolf Press; First Edition edition
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9781555976354
|
Paperback
Bewilderment
By Ferry, David
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry s "Bewilderment" is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against and with his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From "Bewilderment" OctoberThe day was hot, and entirely breathless, soThe remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fallSeemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was likeThe ticking sound of gentle rainfall asThey gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touchedOne or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar. "
University Of Chicago Press; First Edition edition
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9780226244884
|
Paperback
Head Off & Split
By Finney, Nikky
. Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry Winner, 2012 GCLS Award for Poetry Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. The poems in Nikky Finneys breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finneys poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mothers wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American presidents final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finneys poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime..
Triquarterly
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9780810152168
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Paperback
Lighthead
By Hayes, Terrance
Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for PoetryIn his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
Penguin Books
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9780143116967
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Paperback
Transcendental Studies
By Waldrop, Keith
This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.
University of California Press
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9780520258785
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Paperback
Fire to Fire
By Doty, Mark
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects - our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives - echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
Harper
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9780060752477
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Print book
Time and Materials
By Hass, Robert
The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time. The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius.
Ecco
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9780061349607
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Print book
Splay Anthem
By Mackey, Nathaniel Ernest
In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories - from America to Andaluca, from Ethiopia to Vienna - in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections - "Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub") - Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu" (though "mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou") .
New directions
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9780811216524
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Print book
Migration
By Merwin, W.s.
The definitive volume from “one of America’s greatest living poets.”—The Washington Post Book WorldA powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century. Migration: New & Selected Poems is that case.As an undergraduate at Princeton, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day.” Over the last 50 years, Merwin’s muse led him beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin’s work, “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.
Copper Canyon Press; 1st edition
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9781556592188
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Hardcover
Door in the Mountain
By Valentine, Jean
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects--love, and death, and the soul. Her images--strange, canny visions of the unknown self--clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.
Wesleyan
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9780819567123
|
Hardcover
The Singing
By Williams, Charles Kenneth
New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair. . . Reality has put itself so solidly before methere's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the worldto us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.--from "The World"In his first volume since Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity--the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events--with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, an in so doing "dissects" our common humanity.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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9780374292867
|
Hardcover
In the Next Galaxy
By Stone, Ruth
Ruth Stone has rightly been called America's Akhmatova, and she is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. In this, her eighth volume, she writes with crackling intelligence, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems.ShapesIn the longer view it doesn't matter. However, it's that having lived, it matters. So that every death breaks you apart. You find yourself weeping at the door of your own kitchen, overwhelmed by loss. And you find yourself weeping as you pass the homeless person head in hands resigned on a cement step, the wire basket on wheels right there. Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo, or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing by Leonardo.
Copper Canyon Press
|
9781556591785
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Print book
Poems Seven
By Dugan, Alan
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan's new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet's insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Seven Stories Press
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9781583222652
|
Book
Blessing the Boats
By Clifton, Lucille
This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes new poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting, The Book of Light and The Terrible Stories. Clifton employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality, spirituality and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper.
From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
By Perez, Craig Santos
Experimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam) , and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo'åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
Punks
By Keene, John
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, PUNKS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, PUNKS weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poets friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, PUNKS reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry."John Keenes PUNKS is utterly brilliant. The range, vision, depth and humanity he brings to the page are as galactic as Bannekers astral wanderings, as crisp as the chordal cutting of a searching horn, as courageous and small as a nose wide open. Keenes masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened, and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. Amen to this exploration!"--Tyehimba JessPoetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies.
Floaters
By Espada, Martín
From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love.Martn Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of scar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Ro Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry.
DMZ Colony
By Choi, Don Mee
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
Sight Lines
By Sze, Arthur
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award "The sight lines in Szes 10th collection are just that -- imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity." -- The New York Times From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices -- from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent -- and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry. "These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests." -- Lit Hub "The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines." -- Library Journal
Indecency
By Reed, Justin Phillip
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in PoetryIndecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful -- the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.
Half-light
By Bidart, Frank
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry's most original voicesGathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it's that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet's own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability.
The Performance of Becoming Human
By Borzutzky, Daniel
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Following in the path of his acclaimed collections THE BOOK OF INTERFERING BODIES (Nightboat, 2011) and IN THE MURMURS OF THE ROTTEN CARCASS ECONOMY (Nightboat, 2015) , Daniel Borzutzky returns to confront the various ways nation-states and their bureaucracies absorb and destroy communities and economies. In THE PERFORMANCE OF BECOMING HUMAN, the bay of Valparaiso merges into the western shore of Lake Michigan, where Borzutzky continues his poetic investigation into the political and economic violence shared by Chicago and Chile, two places integral to his personal formation. To become human is to navigate borders, including the fuzzy borders of institutions, the economies of privatization, overdevelopment, and underdevelopment, under which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses in cities, villages, deserts.
Voyage of the Sable Venus
By Lewis, Robin Coste
A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present - titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know.
Faithful and Virtuous Night
By Glück, Louise
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for PoetryA luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poetLouise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball.
Incarnadine
By Szybist, Mary
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Amazons Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment.
Bewilderment
By Ferry, David
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry s "Bewilderment" is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against and with his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From "Bewilderment" OctoberThe day was hot, and entirely breathless, soThe remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fallSeemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was likeThe ticking sound of gentle rainfall asThey gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touchedOne or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar. "
Head Off & Split
By Finney, Nikky
. Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry Winner, 2012 GCLS Award for Poetry Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. The poems in Nikky Finneys breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finneys poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mothers wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American presidents final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finneys poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime..
Lighthead
By Hayes, Terrance
Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for PoetryIn his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
Transcendental Studies
By Waldrop, Keith
This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.
Fire to Fire
By Doty, Mark
Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects - our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives - echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
Time and Materials
By Hass, Robert
The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time. The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius.
Splay Anthem
By Mackey, Nathaniel Ernest
In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories - from America to Andaluca, from Ethiopia to Vienna - in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections - "Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub") - Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu" (though "mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou") .
Migration
By Merwin, W.s.
The definitive volume from “one of America’s greatest living poets.”—The Washington Post Book WorldA powerful case can be made for declaring W.S. Merwin the most influential American poet of the last half-century. Migration: New & Selected Poems is that case.As an undergraduate at Princeton, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to “get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day.” Over the last 50 years, Merwin’s muse led him beyond the traditional verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engaged a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of W.S. Merwin’s work, “I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didn’t take so much from it into my own life.
Door in the Mountain
By Valentine, Jean
Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects--love, and death, and the soul. Her images--strange, canny visions of the unknown self--clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.
The Singing
By Williams, Charles Kenneth
New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Repair. . . Reality has put itself so solidly before methere's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the worldto us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.--from "The World"In his first volume since Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity--the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events--with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, an in so doing "dissects" our common humanity.
In the Next Galaxy
By Stone, Ruth
Ruth Stone has rightly been called America's Akhmatova, and she is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. In this, her eighth volume, she writes with crackling intelligence, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems.ShapesIn the longer view it doesn't matter. However, it's that having lived, it matters. So that every death breaks you apart. You find yourself weeping at the door of your own kitchen, overwhelmed by loss. And you find yourself weeping as you pass the homeless person head in hands resigned on a cement step, the wire basket on wheels right there. Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo, or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing by Leonardo.
Poems Seven
By Dugan, Alan
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan's new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet's insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Blessing the Boats
By Clifton, Lucille
This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes new poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting, The Book of Light and The Terrible Stories. Clifton employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality, spirituality and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper.