70 Poems
Paul Celan

Translated by Michael Hamburger

This is a portable selection of some of this great writer's most essential work, translated by Michael Hamburger, who for more than forty years has provided the English-speaking world with the truest access to Celan. Arranged in order of the poems' original publication, this volume is an essential distillation of Celan's œuvre, both for those who already cherish his writing and those seeking to discover it for the first time. 

“Even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of [Celan’s] invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric. Michael Hamburger has earned our gratitude...”
—Robert Pinsky, The New Republic

“[Celan’s] poems help guide us... in both poetry and life... [W]hat a fine job Michael Hamburger has done.”
—Peter Filkins, Partisan Review

Paul Celan is the preeminent poet of the Holocaust. His chilling verse, evocative yet spare, is among the essential writing of his era and our own. Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Romania in 1920. His parents were killed in a Nazi labor camp in 1942, and Celan was himself imprisoned that same year. He escaped after eighteen months, eventually settling in Paris, where he lived—writing his acclaimed poetry and translating the word of Rimbaud, Blok, Dickinson, Mandelstam, and others—until his death by suicide in 1970. With Rilke and Hölderlin, he is generally regarded as the greatest German-language poet of the twentieth century.

Paperback / $12.00 (Can $12.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-424-9 / 85 pages / Poetry

/blak/ /al-fə bet/
Mitchell L. H. Douglas

Winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award

The musical, muscular poems in this touching second collection depict the lives of a southern black family after the death of its matriarch. Mitchell L. H. Douglas gives voice to the spirit and ghosts of one community’s America with a mix of fierce conscience and deep tenderness. /blak/ /al-fə bet/ is a volume of unforgettable melody, integrity, and warmth.

“Mitchell Douglas navigates sacred and secular avenues, the age-old aches and new age joys, the uptown and downhome worlds of his people. Like its author, /blak/ /al-fə bet/  is a force of scrutinizing intellect, imagination and soul.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead

“This book reaches back to a recent past that now seems far away, as if the speed of the present is causing that past to shrink and dim. Many of the poems capture a world just before it changed, before it became less centered, less vital. And that makes this a book of profound grief—grief for what we miss, and a further grief for what is missing now.”
—Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man

“Every line is threaded with funk and ferocity, conjuring a world that is as relentless and essential as the alphabet."
—Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem. He is also a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem fellow, and the poetry editor for PLUCK!: A Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he resides in Indianapolis, where is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-089255-421-8 / 80 pages / Poetry

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The Animal Too Big To Kill
Shane McCrae

Winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award

With his unmistakable cadences, McCrae probes insistently yet big-heartedly into some paradoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of his upbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists. 

“McCrae has established himself as one of our most necessary poets, personalizing the imperative discussion around race, and contemplating how that discussion is rooted in American language.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher, Bookforum

“McCrae’s fourth collection is as disarmingly original as his first three—and just as unlike them as they were unlike one another.”
—Stephen Burt, American Poet

“This book is personal. . .universal and especially timely.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)

Shane McCrae is the author of four poetry collections. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-464-5 / 80 pages / Poetry
 

Apocalyptic Swing
Gabrielle Calvocoressi

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America―its lore, disappointments, and promise.

“Calvocoressi is a daring act as a poet/athlete. . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post

“Muscular and musical, this second collection from Calvocoressi combines boxing, Elvis, church burnings, sex and horses to produce a book that is pure Americana. . . . This is a compelling sophomore effort from a very promising poet.”
—Publishers Weekly

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Rocket Fantastic and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is Editor at Large for Los Angeles Review of Books and Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 / 96 pages / Poetry

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Approaching Ice
Elizabeth Bradfield

Finalist for the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets

This collection portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures — Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.

“In her vivid, unsentimental poetry, Bradfield is both chronicler and active lover, braiding across the pages the gloss-ice strands of history, landscape and personal longing.”
—Linda Bierds

“Approaching Ice chilled me and warmed me. It got me up walking around and thinking a million things, and threw me back down to read more. It’s a high latitude book, a storm, a soundless daybreak at the end of the world, an exquisite investigation into why we explore. I loved it.”
—Kim Heacox, author of Shackleton: The Antarctic Challenge

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Interpretive Work, winner of the Audre Lorde Prize and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and many other publications. As a naturalist, she has worked in Alaska, the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and elsewhere. She lives on Cape Cod.

Paperback / $16.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-355-6 / 112 pages / Poetry

Arrhythmia
Emily Van Kley

Written in the years following the sudden death of a cherished friend, Arrhythmia traces the shock doctrine of grief as it electrifies the lives of those left behind. Alliances shift. Loss multiplies. Poems call out from the body, wrestling the twin impossibilites of memory and meaning in language that is by turns starkly simple and twistingly inventive. A tribute to queer friendship, these poems weave chronic grief with the stab of a loved one’s sudden absence—of what happens to the vibrant particulars of a life when it ends.

“Emily Van Kley stunningly entangles elegy with ode, reminding us we stand apart from nothing—not our beloved dead, nor the passionate and natural processes of life.”
—Alexandra Teague

“These poems are shimmering and musical and gorgeous on the page, where they maneuver like a woman suspended in silk, or made of it.”
—Maya Jewell Zeller

Emily Van Kley was raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula but now lives with her partner in Olympia, Washington, where she writes, and teaches and performs aerial acrobatics. She is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Cold and the Rust.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-539-0 / 80 pages / Poetry
 

A Better Life
Randall Mann

Randall Mann has long been admired for merging raw subject matter with formal ease in poems “at once boisterous and lubed, anxious and ambivalent” (Kenyon Review). In A Better Life, a gay, multiracial speaker toggles between the “florescent rot” of childhood and the “action; / transaction” of a sex-app midlife.

“Mann chronicles and contributes to a queer history that continues to be all too easily forgotten.”
—Chen Chen

“A Better Life is a beautiful book of history taken down to the scale of one.”
—Jericho Brown

Randall Mann is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Proprietary, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Northern California Book Award, and a book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-531-4 / 104 pages / Poetry
 

Blue Venus
Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar explores the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred. Her nocturnal poems weave themselves into the very fabric of private fervor—lyric, sexual, spiritual—beginning with “Dusk” and continuing on until “Dawn.” Fierce and giving, Spaar's exquisite verse isolates essential moments of vulnerability and wonder. A series on insomnia—in the voices of some notable insomniacs—is among the most moving extended sequences in recent memory. Elsewhere, she traces poetry back to its primordial roots—prayer, lullaby, mourning, exaltation, propelled throughout by a resolute belief in the relationship between the human and the cosmic.

“A virtuoso book, ambitiously beautiful.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[Her poems] are the perfect marriage of the realism of William Carlos Williams . . . and the sleepless heaven-seeking of such cloistered ecstatics as Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manly Hopkins.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review

“Spaar is ringleader of a stunning lexicon.”
—Christopher Matthews, Shenandoah

Lisa Russ Spaar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Satin Cash, Orexia, and Vanitas, Rough. She lives in Charlottesville.

Paperback / $14.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-306-8 / 80 pages / Poetry

The Bluestone Walk
Ed Nobles

A second book by “one of the most exciting and accomplished poets of his generation” (Richard Burgin, Boulevard), named one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century” by Library Journal. Edward Nobles’ significant new book, distinguished by its passionate individuality and vision, takes the reader on a harrowing journey along the troubled but enlightening walkways of the self and soul. Whether traveling through the interior opulence of “Twelve Magazines” or the anguished childhood darkness of “A Small Cluster of Stars,” poem after poem is suffused with longing, courage, unsettling wit, and transformative power. The Bluestone Walk both confirms and extends Noble's growing reputation as “a scrutinizer of the soul's troubles...a daring and accomplished truth-teller” (Rachel Hadas, The Kenyon Review).

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $19.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-247-4 / 86 pages / Poetry

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Boneshepherds
Patrick Rosal

In Boneshepherds, Patrick Rosal continues his confident dance through a world in which violence and beauty entwine—in which the music of Chopin gives way to a knifing, and the funk of decay and amorality cannot stifle the urge for human connection. As ever, Rosal's “sexy work finds the present haunted by the recent past, the personal [by] the political” (Publisher's Weekly). Boneshepherds shows him at his very best: vibrant, generous, and brave. 

“[In Boneshepherds,] Rosal has infused his poetry with the joy of language.”
—Bracha Goykadosh, Booklist

“Every heartbreak, grief, and outrage is laced with a hopefulness born not just of Patrick Rosal's tremendous gifts as a poet, but of his humanity.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead, winner of the National Book Award

“Patrick Rosal is quickly writing himself into the prominent role of young statesman in contemporary poetics. Unabashedly, he is influenced by hip hop, blue collar issues, and poetry alike: The result is stunning.”
—Mark Eleveld, Chicago Sun-Times

“Rosal is a second-generation Filipino whose heritage is a rich part of his work, but he is also an all-American urban kid...[with] the boastful beat of hip-hop...playing in the back of his head...In Rosal's world, beauty and pleasure are contagious. So is the charm of his poetry.”
—Time Out New York

Patrick Rosal is the author of the collections Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, My American Kundiman, and Brooklyn Antediluvian. He teaches in the creative writing program at Rutgers–Camden and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $15.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-386-0 / 88 pages / Poetry

Brooklyn Antediluvian
Patrick Rosal

Winner of the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Whether in New York City or his ancestral home of the Philippines, Patrick Rosal finds trouble he isn't asking for in these unforgettable poems, but he responds in kind, pulling no punches in his most visceral work to date. Brooklyn Antediluvian is full of lessons, hard-earned, from a poet who repeatedly discovers beauty where we least expect it. 

“Rosal’s lines bob and weave with an effortless unpredictability. . .show[ing] off his extraordinary ear for poetry’s sonic qualities, in particular rhythm and consonance. . . .The title poem [is] title poem an earth-shattering performance; Rosal seamlessly stitches together history, mythology, etymology, and autobiography.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Brooklyn Antediluvian is a tour-de-force love song to New York City's most boisterous borough. These poems, restless and unnerving, do difficult, necessary work.”
—Patricia Smith

Patrick Rosal is the author of the three previous collections Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, My American Kundiman, and Boneshepherds. He teaches in the creative writing program at Rutgers–Camden and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-474-4 / 70 pages / Poetry

Read a great interview with Cynthia Marie Hoffman in Foreword and a terrific review.

Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones
Cynthia Marie Hoffman

In this book-length poetry sequence, a mother inherits a leather box that was her grandmother’s. Her daughter joins her on a reconstruction of family history. Together they traipse through graveyards and sift through endless photos and clippings, piecing together what used to be in order to understand who they are.

“Hoffman builds a fascinating collage of family stories, photographs, letters, and poetry. . . . Intricate and intelligent, these poems reveal the heart of the genealogical craze—to face mortality, and find a way to remember and be remembered.”
—Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews

“Cynthia Marie Hoffman obsessively and nimbly combs, witnessing histories both harrowing and common, and it is her practice of hand and mind that moves us, as readers, to view each living dace before us as subject to the one last face: death—and us, in turn, as future mourners. This virtuosic, lyrical meditation can therefore orient us ethically, deeply, and beautifully to each other and to our mortal selves.”
—Katie Ford

“Call Me When You Want To Talk About the Tombstones is a haunting, thrilling experience. Each line of Hoffman's tactile, incandescent poetry recovers, for a moment, the irrecoverable past with stunning”
—Nick Lantz

Cynthia Marie Hoffman received her BA and MFA from George Mason University. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of Paper Doll Fetus and Sightseer, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-489-8 / 118 pages / Poetry

Clean
Kate Northrop

Kate Northrop’s new poems capture the ephemeral thresholds between natural and supernatural worlds. Through the mist and snowfall of the American Landscape, topographical and psychic, they momentarily illuminate figures at once familiar and strange: stray dogs, wayward people, and “fields rising. . . like a shroud / or a female voice.”

“Northrop's poems recall early photographs where the shutter was left open until the scene had burned itself into the paper. Her images acquire definition word by carefully weighed word.”
—Eric McHenry, The New York Times Book Review

“No vexed or fictive entity is beyond Northrop’s unique, reconstructive, lyrical intelligence.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, Virginia Quarterly Review

Kate Northrop is the author of Back Through Interruption and Things Are Disappearing Here, a New York Times Book Review “Editor's Choice” and finalist for the James Laughlin Award. She teaches at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie. 

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-367-9/ 80 pages / Poetry

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The Cold and the Rust
Emily Van Kley

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

A tender portrait of a queer girlhood on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this lyrical and unflinching debut, a landscape of staggering beauty abuts industrial towns in the throes of economic decay. Emily Van Kley explores notions of home, estrangement, isolation, and longing against a backdrop of crystalline winters, Lake Superior’s mythic tempers, and forests as vast as they are close.

“Van Kley imbues her sharp debut collection with the complex, wistful nostalgia an outsider feels for her hometown. She alternates moments of humor with instances of darkness and melancholy, writing of deer hunts, menstrual cramps, and even an aquarium of fish left to freeze in a home without heat. Van Kley precisely captures the deathly pall of a Midwestern winter in this remarkably vivid exploration of how it feels to leave home and then return.”
—Publishers Weekly

Emily Van Kley was raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula but now lives with her partner in Olympia, Washington, where she writes, works at a cooperative grocery, and teaches and perform aerial acrobatics. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Mississippi Review, Best New Poets 2013, and Best American Poetry 2017.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can. $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-488-1 / 78 pages / Poetry

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Dear Editor
Amy Newman

Winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award; A Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection

Each prose poem in this extraordinary volume is an impassioned letter to a nameless editor from a poet seeking publication for her poems about chess, sainthood, and the poet’s lonely childhood. Taken individually, the poems display a dazzling originality; together, they form an exquisite exploration of memory and longing.

“For all its conceptual cleverness, [Dear Editor] succeeds in exploring the limitations of language, as well as themes of martyrdom, innocence and faith.”
—Angela Sundstrom, Time Out New York

“[Dear Editor] is a complex, nuanced, and stimulating work.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A poet who has attained true mastery in her ability to play with language.”
—Image

Amy Newman has published four poetry collections, mostly recently On This Day in Poetry History. She is editor of Ancora Imparo: A Journal of Arts, Process, and Remnant, and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-387-7 / 88 pages / Poetry

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Delivered
Sarah Gambito

Winner of the 2005 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry.

Both surrealistic and urgently on-point, these boisterous poems comprise an identity crisis in the age of New Media. Sarah Gambito writes with verve on the complicated collision of ethnicity, sex, immigration, and nationality, her playfulness and pop-culture savvy offering cover for her surprise attacks of direct, even confrontational engagement.

“Gambito evokes a carnival of multiethnic references, intuitive leaps and fiery existential queries. . .”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The poems in this second collection are as much about language as they are about Gambito’s Filipina heritage. . . They are surrealistic, fierce, and playful.”
—Library Journal

Sarah Gambito is the author of a previous collection, Matadora. She is founder and director of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization devoted to the promotion of Asian American poetry, for which she was recently awarded a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers award. Assistant Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University, Gambito lives in New York City. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-346-4 / 64 pages / Poetry

Dido in Winter
Anne Shaw

Driven by a resolute sense of exploration, the exquisite poems in Anne Shaw’s new collection excavate both physical and emotional landscapes, together constituting a mapping of the senses in which rapture and disillusionment shadow each other. This book searches for truth beyond beauty by a poet who shines increasingly bright.

“Anne Shaw writes as if there is no decorum to language at all; her poems will leave you feeling worried and wild, lucidly drunk, gussied up and patted down. This book is a deliriously confusing part of town where you don’t know the bus routes and there are no cabs to be had. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
—Kazim Ali

“In Dido in Winter, Shaw finds a taut, hard joy in her engagements with language. Her poems embody despair and defiance in equal measure.”
—Andrew Joron

Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals such as Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner. Recipient of an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-429-4 / 84 pages / Poetry

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Listen to Cameron Awkward-Rich read four poems from Dispatch here.

Dispatch
Cameron Awkward-Rich

2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award Winner

In his second collection, Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today an in its past. 

“The poems in Awkward-Rich’s second collection speak with a poised urgency out of profound, enduring fear imposed by impossibly huge forces… and steady themselves, when steadiness seems possible, on the fact of an undiminishable self beyond language”
—American Poets

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, an he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-503-1 / 88 pages / Poetry
 

dying in the scarecrow’s arms
Mitchell L.H. Douglas

In urgent new poems, Mitchell L. H. Douglas depicts the assault on people of color in America’s increasingly divided Heartland. A devotee of American popular culture, from rock ’n’ roll to Star Wars to Marvel comic books, Douglas now wonders whether we will withstand its most odious, self-destructive elements in this searing collection.

“In his third book Mitchell L. H. Douglas delivers a lyric bildungsroman, a hymnal of manhood, eerily guided from page one by Etheridge Knight, who, like Douglas, lived a full life at the cursed cross of Kentucky or Indiana, enslavement or liberation, incarceration or career. What does it mean to make love, grocery shop, make it home, each night, safe? dying in the scarecrow’s arms is our needed testament of black life mattering, of a man owning his own, because, by God, he can.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory

“Douglas sing[s] of America in all its vice and virtue.” —Publishers Weekly

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of three poetry collections including /blak/ /al-fə bet/. A native of Louisville, he lives in Indianapolis. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-089255-487-4 / 82 pages / Poetry

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An Ecology of Elsewhere
Sandra Meek

Recipient of the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America

In these gorgeous new poems, Sandra Meek guides us through exquisitely rendered landscapes both terrestrial and emotional, from the deserts and deltas of Sub-Saharan Africa to the bruised terrain of the fragile human heart. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past (personal and terrestrial) with an uncertain future.    

“What’s remarkable is that Meek does not stoop to the journey-as-healing narrative one might expect. Instead, she puts us in panoramic settings that in their bristly, sun-seared particulars represent her brittle emotions.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)

“These lush and sensory poems take the reader many places, both exterior and interior, from the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and across savannahs of linguistic imagination. This is a deeply textured, brilliant book.”
—Thomas Lux

Sandra Meek is the author of four books of poems, including Road Scatter, and the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, as well as cofounder of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia.

Paperback / $16.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-473-7 / 104 pages / Poetry

Ghost Hour
Laura Cronk

Sometimes compact, sometimes expansive, the poems in Ghost Hour emanate from adolescence and other liminal spaces, considering girlhood and contemporary womanhood—the ways both are fraught with the pleasures and limits of embodiment
Laura Cronk writes personally, intimately, yet never without profound consideration of contemporary violence, which we must love in spite of and rage against.

“This is a collection of poems for grown-ups, a fierce coming of age, a coming into—with heart, humor, and humility—one’s own.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher

“Ghost Hour is brilliant.”
—Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

Laura Cronk is the author of a previous book of poetry, Having Been An Accomplice, winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She is Chair of Undergraduate Creative Writing at The New School in New York City.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-519-2 / 104 pages / Poetry 

Glitter Bomb
Aaron Belz
 

New poems by the author of Lovely, Raspberry alternate between deadpan and slapstick in their madcap depictions of human foibles.

“The poems in Glitter Bomb pull no punches: irreverent, devastating, even nasty at times, they capture the present moment in all its absurdity and hyper-reality. ‘Lampwise by altarlight’ (pace Dylan Thomas), Aaron Belz keep his eye on the object: often hilarious, he is also wise.”
—Marjorie Perloff

“[Belz’s] approach resembles the New York School’s lighter side, where Ashbery’s use of Popeye in a poem evokes pop art and O’hara’s conversational tone disarms the reader to open him up for heavier material that follows.”
—Jason Labbe, Boston Review


Aaron Belz is also the author of The Bird Hoverer and Lovely, Raspberry.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-431-7 / 78 pages / Poetry

The Good Thief
Marie Howe

The heralded debut collection of poems by the author of What the Living Do (Norton, 1997). Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.

“Marie Howe’s poetry doesn't fool around...[The poems] transcend their own dark roots.”
—Margaret Atwood

“Howe’s haunting lyricism lifts the back shades on the familial and the mythic in poems that bespeak a hard-earned compassion amid the world's chaffing.”
—The Boston Phoenix

Marie Howe is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Magdalene. She also edited, with Michael Klein, the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Howe is the recipient of Peter Lavan Younger Poet Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Mary Ingram Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe College, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.
 
Paperback / $14.95 / 978-089255-127-9 / 54 pages / Poetry

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Having Been An Accomplice
Laura Cronk

Winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

In this arresting debut, love poems and interior monologues are reinvented in a time of war. Within them, Laura Cronk writes, “I want to blow up the Law with Language, having run my tongue around my mouth ten thousand times. Instead of not speaking, I want to speak.”

“Laura Cronk explores the vicissitudes and pleasures of the relational and often domestic beloved and then proceeds to invent a fascinating persona in the figure of the child-like Citizen Queen, a disarmed goddess sitting in her apartment, questioning her power and efficacy.”
—Anne Waldman

“Dreamy yet certain, lovelorn and love-buoyed, the sadness in the poems has joy-rounded edges, the delight scooped out of melancholy and offered, shining.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy

Laura Cronk has curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar in the East Village for many years. She is Associate Director of the Writing Program at The New School where she coordinates the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. Originally from New Castle, Indiana, she lives with her family in Jersey City.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can. $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-413-3 / 68 pages / Poetry

Heaven Beneath
Anne Marie Macari

Walking through the landscape of loss, the poems of Heaven Beneath explore the parallel ongoing degradation and destruction of the planet and its creatures. Beneath “paved-over space,” in the deep currents of a river, or the shadows of great trees, there’s another world, there’s a heaven—unknowable, in the muck, yet alive and with us.  

“This is a book of witness and gathering. A book of mourning and wonder. A book that has its hands reaching out to you, and its soul reaching into the earth.”
—Ross Gay

“Rare in contemporary poetry, the lyric of supplication encounters acute location and mesmerizing eroticism…”
—Judith Vollmer

Anne Marie Macari is the author of five books of poems, including Red Deer, She Heads Into the Wilderness, and Ivory Castle, which won the APR/Honickman first book prize, chosen by Robert Creeley. Her poems and essays have been widely published in magazines. She lives in New York City. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-512-3 / 88 pages / Poetry 

In the Field Between Us
Molly McCully Brown + Susannah Nevison

Written in collaboration, these epistle poems written back and forth between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us considers disability and the possibility of belonging in the aftermath of lifelong medical intervention.
In the beginning, the poem-letters express, in gorgeous harmony, the psychic and physiological complexities of surviving remedy. As the book unfolds, the writers encounter a natural world which increasingly seems to mirror the traumas they have endured. Out of their tracing of innumerable scars, these poems emit a perseverance, a spirit of communion, and a hopeful resolve that rise out of the poets’ profound connection to one another.

“This is a beautiful, urgent book.”
—Ilya Kaminsky

“Brown and Nevison have composed a remarkable, mortal duet, an exchange of poems so attuned to each other, the voices blend.”
—Rosanna Warren

Molly McCully Brown is the author of Places I’ve Taken My Body and The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. She teaches at Kenyon College.
Susannah Nevison is the author of Lethal Theater and Teratology. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.
 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-514-7 / 80 pages / Poetry
 

Insecurity System
Sara Wainscott

Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize

Sappho meets Springsteen in Insecurity System, a wry exploration of memory, motherhood, interdimensional time–travel, and the precarious future. Propelled by existential longing, these poems cycle between tenderness and rage, desire and despair, tracking the intertwined anxieties of making a living and making a life.

“…the sonnet is made new—revitalized by the restless brilliance of Wainscott’s mind and music.”
—Shane McCrae

“This work is a masterclass, not only in poem-craft, but in all kinds of ecstatic creation.”
—Kiki Petrosino

Sara Wainscott received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She is the author of a chapbook, Queen of the Moon. She lives outside of Chicago.

Trade Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-504-8 / 88 pages / Poetry
 

Inside Spiders
Leslie Shinn

Winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

These gemlike poems, deceptively complex, are revelations of the domestic and natural worlds. Reminiscent of the writing of Robert Creely, Shinn’s debut conveys a life condensed—deeply felt and keenly observed.

“The angles may be acute, the details partial, miniature, yet Inside Spiders becomes a richly capacious portraiture, illuminating the actual yet at times transforming what it finds with further, haunted evocation. Shinn documents the domestic in its troubles, its loves, and its daily regard, lighting ‘the heart’s dark lantern.’”
—David Baker

“In Leslie Shinn’s gorgeous debut collection, what is outside of habit or home is turned brilliantly on, whether in waking to the ‘flash of a pane, dark and clean’ or encountering the ‘small, peculiar weights’ of a neighborhood grief. These poems are cut and precise and frightening.”
—Kate Northrop

Leslie Shinn received her MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-439-3 / 55 pages

Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler
Thylias Moss

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

In a cascade of language—ordinary speech, preaching, song, banter, erudition—all that is good spirals into regions of horror and grotesque inconsistency, with consequences as contemporary as headlines and as eternal as myth. Intense and brilliantly sustained, these poems limn the humane being tested, the plunge into strangeness, and finally recovery, the salvaging of wonder after all. A Village Voice Favorite Book of 1998, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is a volume of urgent poetry in which words, images, ideas, music and feelings are pushed to their ultimate capacity. 

“Thylias Moss already is a permanent American poet, canonical in the old, authentic sense. Her Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is a profound and disturbing volume. Its difficulties are necessary and rewarding, and enrich me.”
—Harold Bloom

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her books of poetry include Tokyo Butter, Slave Moth, named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by Black Issues Book Review, and Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code. Moss is a recipient of the fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, among other honors. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Cloth / $24.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-229-0 / 118 pages / Poetry

The Last Thing
New & Selected Poems
Patrick Rosal

For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants, he has made a life of bridging worlds—literary, ethnic, national, spiritual—through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers. The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, gives us a substantial playlist of new work—hard-hitting and big-hearted—along with ample selections from his first four books. Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.

“I read these poems aloud to change the air in my room, to alter my mood.  What a gift to be reminded of the capacity for song in every breath”
—Jamila Woods

Patrick Rosal is the author of four previous books of poetry, including Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Bonesheperds, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive.

Hardcover / $26.95 (Can $35.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-532-1 / 224 pages / Poetry

Paperback/ $18.95 (Can $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-568-0 / 224 pages / Poetry
 

The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart
Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Winner of the 2006 Connecticut Book Award

Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populace.

“Calvocoressi brings keen and sympathetic attention to the local disasters the larger world has often overlooked.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review

“An excoriation of present-day America by a new and lethal commentator.”
—Times Literary Supplment

“Remarkable . . . teas[es] meaning out of a past. . .that still dogs us.”
—Sarah Goodyear, Time Out New York

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two other collections of poetry, Rocket Fantastic and Apocalyptic Swing. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, and The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.
She is Editor at Large for Los Angeles Review of Books and Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paperback / $15.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-315-0 / 68 pages / Poetry

Leviathan with a Hook
Kimberly Johnson

Kimberly Johnson's dazzling first collection is rooted in the land and language she inherits, then claims for her own. Informed throughout by Milton's Paradise Lost, Johnson's poems burst with the flora and fauna of a magnificently imagined landscape, and gain their power from the incomparable language she uses to describe it. Her voice is wholly new and unique; Leviathan with a Hook heralds the arrival of one of the new standard-bearers of American verse.

“[Johnson’s] classical sensibilities—attuned not just to the classics themselves but to their resonances in English literature—help to account for verses whose tensile energies and fierce intellectual passion are stronger than in any young American poet I know.”
—John Talbott, Yale Review

“Kimberly Johnson rises in a few lines from weevils to threshing the stars. These poems fear neither glory nor ruin.”
—Rosanna Warren

Kimberly Johnson is a translator, Renaissance scholar, and the author of three books of poems, including A Metaphorical God and Uncommon Prayer. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Hardcover / $23.00 (Can. $34.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-282-5 / 70 pages / Poetry

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The Logan Topographies
Alena Hairston

Winner of the 2006 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize

This extraordinary debut is an inhabiting of the town of Logan, West Virginia. In four gorgeous sequences, Alena Hairston conducts the voices of this population of miners and their kin, poingantly rendering their destitution, their heartbreak, and their incongruous strength and spirit.

“Alena Hairston crystallizes the fecund interconnections of history, genealogy, geography, subsistence, and worldview that define the community of Logan, West Virginia. These interconnections outstrip any one community and move across several generations, making Logan, in this work, a refreshingly full version of the American working-class town.”
—The Believer

“The Logan Topographies is an evocative glimpse into dedicated lives and the cultural fabric of hardworking people.”
—Midwest Book Review

Alena Hairston, also known as elen gebreab, grew up in Logan County, West Virginia. A writer, artist, teacher, and performer, she lives in Oakland, California.

Paperback / $13.95 ($17.50 Can.) / ISBN 978-0-89255-329-7 / 80 pages / Poetry

Lovely, Raspberry
Aaron Belz

Aaron Belz is the funniest poet in America. Or he’s not funny at all. He might be deadly serious. But whether he’s sincerely humorous or humorously sincere, his poems strike a chord that nobody else’s do. Regardless of whether they tickle funny bones or bang them into cabinet doors, the courtly poems in Lovely, Raspberry leave readers in stitches (or in need of them). They are disconcerting treats from one of the unique brains of American verse. 

“Aaron Belz’s poetry reminds us that poetry should be bright, friendly, surprising, and totally committed to everything but itself.”
—John Ashbery

“Reading Belz is like watching an intimate comic performance; it's stand-up poetry meant for you alone.”
—Chris Martin

Aaron Belz is also the author of The Bird Hoverer and Glitter Bomb.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can. $16.50) / 978-0-89255-359-4 / 96 pages / Poetry

⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

Listen to Sarah Gambito’s conversation with Rachel Zucker on the Commonplace podcast.

Loves You
Poems
Sarah Gambito

In Loves You, Sarah Gambito explores the recipe as poetic form and a mode of resistance. Through the inclusion of real recipes that she and her family cook from, she brings readers to the table, not only to enjoy the bounty of her poems but, slyly, to consider the ways in which Filipino Americans, and people of color in general, are assailed and fetishized. In addition, the book explores the manifold ways that poetry can nourish and provide for us. Gambito’s poems have always been full zest and bite. Now she literally invites us to dig in with this long-awaited new book: Kain Na Tayo! (Let’s eat!).

“There’s a jittery, wisecracking wisdom to these meditations on the immigrant’s haunted inheritance, powered by equal parts shame, nostalgia, and a barely-camouflaged anger. These are poems that seduce and throw punches, sometimes both at once.”
—Ligaya Mishan, “Hungry City” columnist for The New York Times

“This hugely anticipated collection is simply Gambito’s finest work yet―a remarkable folksong and jubilee of the heart―and stomach. The connections of food, love, and landscape bubble and froth together here in a stunning and dazzlingly original compilation. I’m mesmerized and made hungry by the sheer romp-racket ?of these provocative pages dotted with delicious recipe-poems that will certainly convince you to ask for seconds or even thirds.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Matadora and Delivered. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Field, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Quarterly West, and other journals. She is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian American poetry, and is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Fordham University. She lives in New York City.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-495-9 / 96 pages / Poetry

Madrigalia
Lisa Russ Spaar

This career-spanning volume portrays in stunning fashion Lisa Russ Spaar’s exquisite obsessions: spiritual hunger, lingual pleasures, bodily decay. The “ringleader of a stunning lexicon” (Shenandoah), Spaar’s poems are both colloquial and sumptuous, hyper-attuned to contemporary idiom while rooted in language’s primordial, earthy roots. Whether writing of the erotic or the divine, of anorexia or insomnia, of fairy tale or literary history, Spaar’s writing is unmistakably her own, a trove of music and magic like nothing else in contemporary poetry. In Madrigalia, her oeuvre is on full display; it is a showcase of her indispensable poetic gifts, a tribute to a writer both ascetic and ecstatic.

“Lisa Russ Spaar sounds like no other poet writing today.”
—Jennifer Chang, The Believer

“Madrigalia features a riveting suite of new poems that need to be read aloud and savored to fully experience the unexpected twists, virtuoso lexicon, and erotic charge.”
—Arthur Sze

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Orexia, Blue Venus, Satin Cash, and Vanitus, Rough. She is the editor of More Truly and More Strange, among other anthologies. She is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where for man years she directed the MFA program in creative writing.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $25.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-536-9 / 168 pages / Poetry
 

The Man Grave
Christopher Salerno

Winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitski Editor’s Choice Award

The Man Grave portrays the corrosiveness, violence, and loneliness of all-too-familiar strains of American masculinity. In perceptive and moving poems, Christopher Salerno explores patriarchy, boyhood, lust, misogyny and homophobia, infertility, and family in an effort to diagnose—and remedy—inherited patterns of manliness. “Have I / made it any further than my father / in his laughter, before his slaughter?” Salerno writes. His new collection is a moving and generous answer.

“Without false heroics or glibness, Christopher Salerno pins back the flaps of masculinity, its privilege and its vulnerability, its lewdness and its fear.”
—Diane Seuss

“Read this book to think deeply about what it means to be a man in 21st-century America.”
—Patrick Phillips

Christopher Salerno is a poet, the editor of Saturnalia Books, and Professor of Creative Writing at William Paterson University. He is the author of five poetry collections, and four chapbooks of poems. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-573.6 / 76 pages / Poetry
 

A Metaphorical God
Kimberly Johnson

No poet writing today confronts the perplexities of the divine with more pizzazz than Kimberly Johnson. In A Metaphorical God, Johnson showcases her gifts for mining language for its hidden gems and its gospel (“my tongue is a fovent choir, / a cloven fire”), using what she unearths to delve deep into mysteries both epistemological and holy.

“Kimberly Johnson is a polyphonic prestidigitator, a virtuoso of the vibrant heart, and —stunning in our fallen world—a genuine metaphysician, with all the healing aptitude the word implies.”
—Linda Gregerson

Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and Renaissance scholar. She is the author of  Leviathan with a Hook, Uncommon Prayer, and a translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. Johnson has received prizes from the Merton Foundation and the Utah Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can. $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-342-6 / 70 pages / Poetry

⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

The Milk of Inquiry
Wayne Koestenbaum

More meditative, more provocative than his previous, much-praised work, The Milk of Inquiry is Koestenbaum’s strongest collection to date. Short lyrics that show this opulent writer at his most austere and a long autobiographical poem round out the collection. 

“Koestenbaum puts wordplay at the service of autobiography, and autobiography at the service of a ceaseless inquiry into the origins of woe, the mysteries of sex, and the dialectic of the brain and crotch. This is the top of the milk of that inquiry—la crème de la crème.”
—David Lehman

“Slack, odd and ravishing, Koestenbaum’s poems take spectacular risks... A constantly self-lacerating, curtly erotic and courting of cliche.”
—Pubilsher’s Weekly

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of two previous books of poetry, Ode to Anna Moffo and the Other Poems and Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender. His works of cultural criticism include The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award) and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. Winner of a Whiting Writer's Award, he is a professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate School. 

Paperback / $16.50 (Can $22.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-239-9 / 134 pages / Poetry

⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

Mistaken For Song
Tara Bray

Winner of 2008 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize

Even amidst a constant ache, the poems in Mistaken for Song do not refuse solace. Instead, they find consolation, communion, and even joy in the untamed natural world, rendered at every turn by Tara Bray’s pitch-perfect ear for heartbreaking music.

“I’m astonished, and thrilled, by the ferocity of Tara Bray’s poems, their untamed wants and hungers. Again and again in this ravishing first book, the poet longs for connection with the world, particularly the natural world.”
—Davis McCombs

“...a book deeply grounded in both our human and nonhuman stories. Although there is grief at the core of many of these poems, their emotional accuracy, contemplative wisdom, and powers of observation offer a hard-won solace, and they take us on a journey so rich and necessary we experience a kind of joy.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly

Tara Bray has published poems in Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a State of Nevada Individual Artist Fellowship and a Sierra Arts Foundation Literary Artist Grant. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-347-1 / 70 pages / Poetry

View the table of contents here.

Contributors include: John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Ted Berrigan, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Stephanie Burt, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chen Chen, Robert Creeley, Natalie Díaz, Rita Dove, Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, Alice Fulton, Jorie Graham, Jennifer Grotz, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson, Saeed Jones, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Donika Kelly, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Meghan O’Rourke, Gregory Orr, Gregory Pardlo, Carl Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Seido Ray Ronci, Patrick Rosal, Hayden Saunier, sam sax, Brenda Shaughnessy, Reginald Shepherd, Richard Siken, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, James Tate, Natasha Trethewey, Jean Valentine, David Wojahn, Charles Wright, and many more.

More Truly and More Strange
100 Contemporary Self-Portrait Poems
Lisa Russ Spaar (Editor and Introduction)

We live in the age of the selfie, or rampant self-portraiture. Social media now offer anyone with a smart phone endless chance to create and display self-portraits. But American poets have been portraying themselves for centuries: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” Walt Whitman proclaimed. “I, too, sing America,” Langston Hughes retorted. “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson provokes. Such assertions of selfhood, while intimate and individual, have helped us ponder who we are as people and a populace.

More Truly and More Strange collects astonishing self-portrait poems from the mid-twentieth century onward. The poems are as varied as they are memorable. Some are surprising catalogues of the poet’s physical form while others minimize the body in favor of other facets of the self, psychological or spiritual. Reflections, visual and existential, are everywhere.

In encountering the ways that our greatest poets have, often disarmingly, perceive themselves, we experience an ever-evolving gallery of American identity.


Lisa Russ Spaar is the editor of three previous poetry anthologies as well as seven books of poetry including Orexia, Vanitas, Rough, and Satin Cash. She is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Paperback / $20.00 (Can $27.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-506-2 / 216 pages / Poetry Anthology
 

Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague

Winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

Winner of the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards

Alexandra Teague explores how language alternately empowers and fails us in this smart, searching and accessible debut. Drawing on sources as varied as ESL classroom discussions, a colonial travelogue, and the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, the poems in this collection magically reveal the landscape of our emotional geography, unfolding like roadmaps of the human experience. Mortal Geography is both playful and poignant; it marks the emergence of a confident new voice.

“While Mortal Geography does function as a kind of traveler's notebook, it is more importantly an exploration of syntax in all its forms—the assumptions of English grammar, the intervals of time, the sequence of the human genome, latitudes and longitudes, and, of course, forms of verse.”
—The Rumpus

Alexandra Teague is the author of many books of poetry, including The Wise and Foolish Builders. She has published poems in many periodicals, among them the Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Paris Review, and Slate, as well as Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2008 and the Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.  

Paperback / $15.00 (Can. $16.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-358-7 / 88 Pages / Poetry

My American Kundiman
Patrick Rosal

This pulsating collection picks up the beat and imagery of Patrick Rosal's thrilling debut, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. Here, though, the poet’s electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritages. 

“A stunning collection of poems.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“Rosal’s vividly syncretic, even sexy works find the present haunted by the recent past, the personal within the political.”
—Publishers Weekly

Patrick Rosal is the author of the collections Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, Boneshepherds, and Brooklyn Antediluvian. He teaches in the creative writing program at Rutgers–Camden and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-330-3 / 68 pages / Poetry

On This Day in Poetry History
Amy Newman

A 2016 Library Journal Top Poetry Pick

In her newest feat of poetic innovation, Amy Newman wanders the lives of mid-century poetry immortals—including John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Anne Sexton—peeking in from the periphery on personal moments both sensational and mundane, imagining their consequences for the poets, their readers, and their shared American century. Affecting and refreshing, a perfect mix of literariness and pulp, On this Day in Poetry History is the latest accomplishment from a poet of incomparable wit and imagination.

“A dazzling new collection. . .that looks to the past [and] to the future as well.”
—David Kirby, New York Times Book Review

“Newman has a wicked and wide-ranging imagination.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Amy Newman has published four previous collections, mostly recently Dear Editor. She is editor of Ancora Imparo, the journal of arts, process, and remnant, and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-470-6 / 76 pages / Poetry

⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

Once Removed
Elizabeth Bradfield

Once Removed continues poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s exploration of how we navigate (and sometimes contaminate) our ecological and emotional environments. Set on the waters and shores of Cape Cod, with sojourns to Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere, Bradfield’s unflinching poems delve into our complex impulse to connect to nature and the ways in which the landscapes we inhabit stay with us long after we leave them. Once Removed is a moving chronicle of natural encounters, a masterful confluence of art and life.

“A deft naturalist, with a keen eye for details. . .of nature, human and non-human.”
—Jon Christensen, San Francisco Chronicle

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Interpretive Work, winner of the Audre Lorde Award, and Approaching Ice, finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Field, Orion, and elsewhere. She lives on Cape Cod.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-463-8 / 82 pages / Poetry

The Opposite of Light
Kimberly Grey

Winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

Can the notion of Romantic love withstand our endless postmodern moment? In these extraordinary poems, Kimberly Grey explores our abiding need for neatness, order, and symmetry in matrimony, considering our ideals for love and language in this digital age―its weightless, distracting, and inescapable pressures. She portrays the ways in which love reflects us back to ourselves: familiar but strange, predetermined but new.

“In this dazzling book, Grey does something brave. She investigates contemporary marriage without sounding ironic, treacly, or angry.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“[These poems] chime and resonate like deftly struck, fine crystal.”
—Janet St. John, ALA Booklist

Kimberly Grey, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow, is Marsh McCall Lecturer in Continuing Studies at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Paperback / $15.96 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-471-3 / 54 pages / Poetry

Or What We’ll Call Desire
Alexandra Teague

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors’ model Audrey Munson—calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form. 

“This is an urgent and exacting book about the grace, and the cost, of survival.”
—Molly McCully Brown

“A book of wonders and a book of wondering, this is Alexandra Teague’s most ambitious, accomplished, and intimate book yet.”
—Mary Szybist

Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry—Mortal Geography, winner of the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders—and a novel, The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. She is a professor at the University of Idaho. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-499-7 / 66 pages / Poetry
 

Orexia
Lisa Russ Spaar

Thrumming with the triune hungers of mind, body, and spirit, Lisa Russ Spaar’s fifth collection plumbs the conditions of late-middle age, weaving together the sacred and the erogenous, the ethereal and the earthy, the mortal and the fertile. As ever, Spaar’s poetry is both transcript and epicenter of longing. Seductive and symphonic, Orexia is the latest glory by a poet of exquisite powers.

“Spaar layers tight, gorgeous, concrete language creates urgency while proposing a bright love of this world.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review)

“Spaar arranges them so that they possess surprising echoes, shimmer with texture, and exude intriguing subtexts. . . . Spaar searches for that which eats at us and makes us yearn.”
—Publishers Weekly

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, including Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Vanitas, Rough and the editor of three poetry anthologies. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-490-4 / 88 pages / Poetry

Also available as a hardcover

Paper Doll Fetus
Cynthia Marie Hoffman

A Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection

These visceral, mystical poems give voice to a surprising population from the world of obstetrics. While some of their speakers are conventional (mothers, doctors, midwives), many are embryonic (a phantom child speaks from a nun’s womb; the titular paper doll fetus, flattened in utero, addresses its robust twin) and others aren’t human or even biological (a strap on a gurney depicts the woman it restrained; an embryonic sketch describes its incomplete rendering). Part spell-book, part anatomical primer, Paper Doll Fetus surveys the womb and its environs, and offers us a haunting chorus of its denizens.

“This book fascinates, surprises, engages, and enlightens on well-trodden subject matter; it is an achievement among contemporary project books.”
—Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews

“In Paper Doll Fetus, Cynthia Marie Hoffman creates one beautiful inhabitation after another, each a feat of dizzying perspective and musical dexterity. I have not encountered such a moving and terrifying collection of poems in years.”
—Kevin Prufer

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones and the chapbook Her Human Costume. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-448-5/ 58 pages / Poetry

The Poems of Laura Riding
Laura (Riding) Jackson

Always ahead of her time, no other major poet of the last century enters the twenty-first so fresh, so essentially unexplored as does Laura Riding. Her formidable credentials as a modernist need no longer distract attention from the class-of-her-own this writer occupies. Beginning in spiritual respect for Shelley, Whitman, and Francis Thompson, Riding’s resolve to work toward nothing less than “the essence of the good in language” carries her across an entire poetic world within this volume—as it afterwards carried her out of poetry altogether. This centennial volume presents the entire content of the 1980 edition, together with the author’s retrospective Introduction and Appendices, corrected and reset. The poem-text reproduces, with the few errata corrected, the typography and design of the celebrated first edition of 1938, as supervised by the author herself.

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $28.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-258-0 / 498 pages / Poetry

Poems of Paul Celan
Translated by Michael Hamburger
 

The essential poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan was one of the greatest poets to ever write in German and among the indispensable writers of the twentieth century in any language. His poems “embody a conviction that the truth of what has been broken and torn must be told with a jagged grace.” (Robert Pinsky, The New Republic).

For more than thirty years, the peerless translations of Michael Hamburger have been English speakers' truest access to Celan.  Poems of Paul Celan concludes with the compelling essay, “On Translating Celan”, in which Hamburger details his relationship with Celan’s work and with Celan himself. Through the essay, and of course through the poems, this book offers readers an immersion into the troubled genius of this crucial poet. 

“[Poems of Paul Celan] is a memorable volume and will influence our moral outlook and the practice of poetry for a long time to come.”
—J.M Cameron, New York Review of Books

A Romanian Jew, Paul Celan (1920-1970) survived the death of both of his parents at the hands of the Nazis and eighteen months in a labor camp before escaping to Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. Celan was never able to overcome his sense of loss and alienation following the Second World War, and he died, a suicide, in 1970.

For his Celan translations, Michael Hamburger (1924-2007) was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and the prestigious Goethe medal.

Paperback / $21.95 (Can $27.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-276-4 / 366 pages / Poetry

Also available as a hardcover

Poems of Nazim Hikmet
Nazim Hikmet

Translated from the Turkish By Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, Foreword by Carolyn Forché

This second edition of Poems of Nazim Hikmet, revised and expanded on the occasion of the poet’s centennial, features his one hundred best poems, chosen from the length of his forty-year career and presented in the widely acclaimed English versions that have made him such an influential presence in contemporary poetry for the past quarter-century. 

“These aremany of the most overwhelming peoms in English.”
—Stephen Berg

“Brilliantly conceived and executed, witty and passionate, and inspiring in a sense not found in most modern poems."
—Booklist

Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) is the first and foremost modern Turkish poet. He served a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner and his native Turkey and spent his last years in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages, and he is recognized around the world as one of the essential twentieth century poets.

Randy Blasing is the author of seven books of poetry. Mutlu Konuk is Professor of English at Brown University.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $25.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-274-0 / 274 pages / Poetry

Poetry in Medicine
An Anthology of Poems about Doctors, Patients, Illness, and Healing
Michael Salcman (Editor)

Foreword by Michael Collier

For millennia poets have described the ailments of the body and those who treat them. Infused with hope, heartbreak, and unexpected humor, this book gathers diverse poems about our medical experiences—poems about doctors and patients, remedies and procedures, illnesses and convalescence—each one prescribing a unique perspective and new revelations. A literary elixir, Poetry in Medicine showcases not only the breadth of poetry’s relationship to medicine, but also the genre’s unparalleled capacity to heal us.

Among the poets included are W.H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, John Berryman, William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, Rafael Campo, C.P. Cavafy,  Geoffrey Chaucer, Amy Clampitt, Lucille Clifton, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, Edward Hirsch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ted Kooser, Philip Larkin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, A.A. Milne, John Milton, Ogden Nash, Ovid, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Ranier Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare, Vijay Seshardi, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Wislawa Szymborska, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, and many more.

“Who better to write about the mysteries of the body and the mind under stress than ever-vigilant, temperature-taking, empathic poets?”
—Booklist

Michael Salcman is a poet, neurosurgeon, and art historian, formerly chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is author of six medical textbooks and six collections of verse,. He lectures widely on art and the brain.

Paperback / $28.00 (Can $27.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-449-2 / 372 pages / Poetry / Medicine

Poets For Life
Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS
Michael Klein (editor)

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry

Seventy-six of our best poets—gay and straight. male and female, black and white—respond to AIDS in all its manifestations, with anger, grief, and transcendence.
Poets included are David Craig Austin, Robin Behn, Philip Booth, Olga Broumas, Henri Cole, Robert Creeley, Mark Doty, Eve Ensler, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Edward Hirsch, June Jordan, X.J. Kennedy, Wayne Koestenbaum, J.D. McClatchy, James Merrill, Honor Moore, Eileen Myles, Molly Peacock, James Purdy, Adrienne Rich, and many more.

“Poets for Life possesses a documentary force that transcends aesthetics.”
—The Nation

“Poets for Life is simply stunning. These urgent and intimate acts of witnessing make this powerful collection the most compelling anthology of recent memory. These powerful poems are essential reading for us all.”
—David St.John

Michael Klein is a widely published writer and poet. He is the co-editor of Things Shaped in Passing and In the Company of my Solitude.  

Paperback / $12.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-170-5 / 244 pages / Poetry
 

Proprietary
Randall Mann

Through his poems, Randall Mann has always insisted on authenticity when encountering shallowness and euphemism. Now, he eyes and slyly rebukes the American corporate culture and materialism that has metastasized since the 1980s and sanitized his formerly lurid stomping grounds of northern Florida and San Francisco, as well as the country at large. Delightfully barbed and decidedly timely, Proprietary is an important new book by “a writer of breathtaking honesty” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). 

“The poems in this collection... straddle the distance between a San Francisco of hedonistic pleasures and a San Francisco of corporate doublespeak.... [I]n threading these poems about lust, longing and alienation through a brave new world of org charts and web portals, Mann imagines anew what it means to connect or to feel at a loss in the age of the Internet.”
—Tess Taylor, NPR’s All Things Considered

“Mann thrives on the demands of constraint, the challenge of needing to go deep into a subject to find the rhyme, to maintain the integrity of the line, to render an experience with clarity, control, and concision. His work demonstrates a formal rigour not often seen in contemporary poetry, even in his free verse which, as Mann reminds us, is a formal choice.”
—London Magazine

“Mann’s work should be admired for its ferocity, its craft, and its unabashedly gay point of view.”
—Lambda Literary

Randall Mann is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Straight Razor, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, and Complaint in the Garden. He lives in San Francisco. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) /  ISBN 978-0-89255-481-2 / 78 pages / Poetry

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Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky
Thylias Moss

A 1991 National Poetry Series selection

“One of the year's most powerful books of any genre...A joyful discovery, [it] contains poems that present the black American experience with heightened intensity...[with] language at once immediate and transcendent...”
—Grace Shulman, The Nation

“This is a book of astonishing originality and intensity. Moss is a visionary storyteller, a political and religious poet.”
—Charles Simic

“Thylias Moss names the black truths behind white lies. These poems are angry, defiant, yet informed with a sense of the sacred in their images, in their language, in their mimesis of transcendent ritual in every day life.”
—Marilyn Hacker

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Slave Moth, named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by Black Issues Book Review, Tokyo Butter, and Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code.


Paperback / $9.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-157-7 / 78 pages / Poetry

Red Deer
Anne Marie Macari

In Red Deer, Anne Marie Macari unearths a hidden prehistoric world of art and art-makers. Her poems delves deep within the earth, exploring the prehistoric caves of France and Spain, communing with the lives and art of those who once inhabited them. Writing from a variety of perspectives and in diverse voices, Macari connects us with a distant past, with “memory / stumbling into mineral stillness. . .a forgotten animal / across my shoulders.”

“Red Deer reminds us to return to the space, or state of mind, in which we are most aware of our connection to the physical world, while also honoring our link to all that is nonphysical and invisible.”
—Janet St. John, Booklist

Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry. Her poetry and prose has been widely published in magazines. In 2005 she was the recipient of the James Dickey Prize for poetry from 5 Points Magazine. She teaches in the Drew University MFA Program.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-456-0/ 80 pages / Poetry

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Ridiculous Light
Valencia Robin

2018 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize Winner

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award

In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin captures the everyday and the ecstatic in a voice all her own. Through poems that live at the intersection of history and experience, she captures the joys and tumult of being alive. She is a storyteller of the first order, a documenter not just of memories but of how we remember.

“In these memorable poems, Valencia Robin serves up a brash, blistering narrative that is impossible to turn away from. . . . Ridiculous Light illuminates in utterly lyrical and necessary ways.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

“In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin transforms memories of family, Milwaukee, and her post-divorce reckoning into poetry that underscores the lyric's distinctive power to illuminate the contours of a Black woman’s life.”
—John Keene, author of Counternarratives

Valencia Robin is a poet and visual artist. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Award and the Hocking Hills Power of Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Boston Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-496-6 / 56 pages / Poetry
 

Road Scatter
Sandra Meek

The fourth poetry collection by Sandra Meek is a kinetic exploration of breakage and survival. The poems are compelled by the decline and death of the poet’s mother and by other urgent encounters at home and abroad—in the American South, Latin American, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.

Forcibly sprayed, swirling like the gravel of the book's title, the lens of these poems fractures but never cracks, instead gaining new and unforeseen perspectives—even, in the end, an improbable wholeness, hard earned and exquisitely rendered.

“Sandra Meek’s poems are both deeply surprising and deeply felt. Precise and faceted, any line, it feels, conveys some new constellation of image, knowledge and feeling. Road Scatter is a book of mourning, but also a book of living: rising from grief, these are pages returning light in all directions.”
—Jane Hirshfield

“Dazzling, intricate poems about both the personal and the political.”
—Library Journal

Sandra Meek is the author of four books of poems, including An Ecology of Elsewhere, and the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, as well as cofounder of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-419-5 / 86 pages / Poetry
 

Rocket Fantastic
Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Winner of the 2018 Audre Lorde Award
for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle

Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic transfigures the landscape and language of gender and the body. Its poems are populated by figures both familial and fabular: a prodigal brother and a relentless father; the Hermit, Dowager, and Major General; and, perhaps most strikingly, the Bandleader, embodiment of sexual, capitalistic, and political dominance. Mythic and musical, erogenous yet wide-eyed, this is a dazzling book by a space-age troubadour of American poetry.

“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronical

“I did not want this book to end. It is the most compelling thing I have read this year, without contest, and so very timely.”
—Sarah Warren, World Literature Today

“A vertiginous, wondering, painful, uncannily and deeply sexy book.”
—Maureen N. McLane

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of  The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is Editor at Large for Los Angeles Review of Books and Assistant Professor and Walker Percy Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-492-8 / 92 pages / Poetry

Sakura Park
Rachel Wetzsteon

With this third collection, Rachel Wetzsteon continues to imprint American verse with her particular brand of smart, tart poems. These new pieces employ her remarkable formal agility in order to showcase an assortment of quarreling themes: learning and loss, autonomy and loneliness, love and work. The result is the rare book that is equal parts sass and sorrow.

“Rachel Wetzsteon's inheritance from W. H. Auden... is nowhere more apparent than in her third collection.... Sakura Park is as much an ode to [New York City] as it is a documentation of love and loss...”
—Amy Newlove Schroeder, Boston Review

“For all of Wetzsteon's prosodic and emotional control, her poems never lack for red corpuscles. Far from damping emotion, her measured lines intensify it through the coiled anxiety and longing seamlessly controlled in them.”
—David Yezzi, Parnassus: Poetry in Review

Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of the poetry collections Silver Roses, The Other Stars, and Home and Away, and a book of criticism about W. H. Auden, Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources. 

Paperback / $16.50 (Can $22.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-324-2 / 116 pages / Poetry

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Satin Cash
Lisa Russ Spaar

In the wake of Blue Venus, called “a virtuoso book” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, comes this ravishing volume of bodily, even carnal prayers, that quiver with the ecstasy and anguish of longing. Lisa Russ Spaar has long produced poems that emit a palpable, devotional Eros, but Satin Cash is a raw, more elemental invocation of human yearning—a startling song of worship and fetish.

“Spaar has created an entrancing world of lush language and passionate imaginings, where a womb is a ‘chivalric piñata,/ quixotic hourglass,’ and a turtle appears ‘emerging from its stone/ velvet, vulnerable,’ poems as beautiful and fragile as the creatures and gardens they contain.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In Satin Cash, Lisa Russ Spaar shows herself to be what she has always been, a love poet, a poet of love.  These poems with their lush and layered music exfoliate like depth charges.  This is a book to read again and again.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Epistles

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, including Orexia, Blue Venus, and Vanitas, Rough and the editor of three poetry anthologies. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among others. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can. $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-343-3 / 72 pages / Poetry

Selected Poems
In Five Sets
Laura Riding

Selection and preface by Laura (Riding) Jackson

Laura (Riding) Jackson is recognized as one of America’s great modernist poets although she renounced the writing of poetry in 1941, viewing poetry as “blocking truth’s ultimate verbal harmonies.”
Selected Poems: In Five Sets includes sixty-one poems personally selected and arranged by the author in 1970. Drawn from her Collected Poems of 1938, this is a remarkable distillation of Laura Riding’s poetic achievement.
The extraordinary preface is perhaps Laura (Riding) Jackson’s most succinct explanation of her renunciation of the writing of poetry, and is a provocative commentary on the contemporary poetry scene.

“Laura Riding is the greatest lost poet in American literature.”
—Kenneth Rexroth

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $12.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-189-7 / 94 pages / Poetry

A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding
Laura Riding

Laura Riding is recognized as one of America’s great twentieth -century poets although she renounced the writing of poetry in 1941, viewing poetry as “blocking truth’s ultimate verbal harmonies.” Now the poet, critic, and novelist Robert Nye, long an advocate of her poems, makes this substantial new introductory selection. It is the only selection to draw from the full range of Riding’s poetic work, and includes eighteen poeme from the last-published volume First Awakenings.
In his introduction Nye writes: “When the true history of twentieth-century poetry in the English language comes to be written, I believe that the poems of Laura Riding—and the story that goes with them—will be seen to be as important as anything in it.”

“...[a] selection of the best of Riding's work, electrifying poems that combine the clean, bracing structure of traditional poetic forms with a startlingly modern sensibility..... Riding was a brilliant, passionate, and influential writer whose work deserves repeated resurrections.”
—Booklist

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $12.95 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-221-4 / 164 pages / Poetry

The Shallows
Stacey Lynn Brown

In The Shallows, Stacey Lynn Brown continues her potent exploration of the American South—its complex legacies of family and race. These harrowing yet ultimately hopeful new poems depict a daughter grappling with the aftermath of her father’s massive stroke and her own concurrent struggles with a debilitating and mysterious illness.

“The Shallows reads like a page-turner, each poem calling urgently, tenderly to the next. Stacey Lynn Brown’s poems are grounded in love, illuminated by loss, and inhabited by a remarkable intelligence that’s both generous and exacting. I was enlightened and moved by The Shallows. I’ll return to it again and again.”
—Cheryl Strayed

“Brown doesn't make hard facts look easy but, in her hands, poetry is a giving art.”
—Jenny Mueller, St. Louis-Post Dispatch

Stacey Lynn Brown is the author of Cradle Song: a Poem. She teaches creative writing at Indiana University.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-493-5 / 55 pages / Poetry

Shoreless
Enid Shomer

2019 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award Winner


In Shoreless Enid Shomer continues exploring her passionate relationship with the Florida landscape, the inextricable web of family, and the challenges of the body. While studded with the austere recognitions of growing older, these poems are punctuated by humor and play—formally elegent and inventive, beautifully textured and nuanced. Shomer employs the language of science and Eros to uncover exquisite truths of pain and pleasure.

“Enid Shomer’s heroic new collection is ringed by the vast, floating horizon of each moment—and, closer in, the depths: memory, love, loss, solitude. With formal grace and moral agility, these poems chart our transformations by art and heart.”
—Donald Morrill

“Everywhere in this gorgeous book, [Shomer’s] gargantuan talents are in play.”
—Michelle Boisseau

Enid Shomer is the author of five books of poetry, three of fiction, and the editor of an anthology. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry, Tikkun, and elsewhere. She lives in Tampa.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-521-5 / 96 pages / Poetry

Shuntarō Tanikawa: Selected Poems
Shuntarō Tanikawa

Translated by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura

Bringing together the Japanese tradition of poetic compactness, a fascination with America and the West, and a love of words that transcends specific culture and language altogether, Shntarō Tanikawa is an international treasure.
In Selected Poems choice work from his ongoing career is ripe with curiosity, candor, and play. Whether fixating on an object, an artist, or a geography, Tanikawa is insatiable in his imaginings of his subject's conditions, infinite in his compassion and willingness to consider the world close at hand, and far removed.

Shuntarō Tanikawa was born in 1931 in Tokyo. He is the author of some 60 books of poetry, as well as plays, and scripts for film, television, and radio. He is the Japanese translator of Charles Schultz's Peanuts and of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The winner of every major award and distinction in Japan for his poetry, Tanikawa has also won an American Book Award for Floating in the River Melancholy and is the recipient of a 2000 Mobil Children's Culture Award.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-259-7 / 128 pages / Poetry

                                                                       ⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

Sightseer
Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

The poems in this enchanting debut capture the dubious nature of even the most reverent tourism. From Provincetown to Prague, in cemeteries and abbeys, they address with tongue in cheek the artifacts and denizens of the sacrosanct places they visit, exploring what it means to appreciate the foreign and sacred.

“Sightseer is that rarity: a first book so mature, so intelligent, so wittily and deftly written that it seems not to be a first book at all, but the offering of a poet who has found her stride...”
—Carolyn Forché

“Hoffman is a seer whose words re-imagine the sights and sites on which she focuses this wondrous travelogue.” —Sandra M. Gilbert

“Sightseer is an unforgettable, revelatory experience.”
—Erika Meitner

“Sightseer is a powerful collection of poems that makes a subtle and profound argument about the nature of travel, dislocation, and belonging.”
—Ryan Teitman

Cynthia Marie Hoffman received her BA and MFA from George Mason University. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the author of Paper Doll Fetus and Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-368-6 / 72 pages / Poetry

Silver Roses
Rachel Wetzsteon

Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) was a poet of seemingly effortless formal grace, moving between high and popular culture with wit and heart.  This bittersweet posthumous collection is, in effect, a book of love poems, and seldom has writing on that subject been so infused with this same combination of delight, skepticism, and, in retrospect, omen.  Wetzsteon was that rare writer who could lampoon with compassion, and Silver Roses shows her at the height of her powers:  an American poet of endearing and lasting impact.

“The [title] poem’s placement at the end of the book, and thus of her life, makes it a painfully optimistic gesture. But it is an inspired gesture that ripples through time; it reaches back to Keats’s hand, ‘now warm and capable,’ and proffers the silver rose of love, of promise, the torch of art, to her true lover, the reader, and the readers yet to be born.”
—A.E. Stallings, Poetry

“Wetzsteon left a final collection that radiates searing pain and exceptional beauty. Her poems have a pulse, and they throb with lust, desire, and a need to be heard.... Weztsteon’s poems portray a soul laid bare.”
—Booklist

“[In] the poems of Rachel Wetzsteon all things matter because they have been given form, delivered to us by a sensibility that feels the weight and beauty of every moment as it passes.”
—James Longenbach

“Rachel Wetzsteon achieves maturity and mastery in this poignant collection.”
―Harold Bloom

Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009) is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Home & Away, The Other Stars, and Sakura Park, as well as a critical study of W. H. Auden. 

Paperback / $16.50 U.S. ($20.50 Can.) / ISBN 978-0-89255-364-8 / 90 pages / Poetry

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Slave Moth
Thylias Moss

Named by Black Issues as the best poetry book of 2004

This critically acclaimed verse-novel follows the unforgettable Varl, a slave on a plantation in Tennessee, on her path to freedom. Wise beyond her years and wildly creative, Varl must choose between the only life she's known and her growing need for self determination. Standing in her path, waiting to quash her spirit, is her master, the cunning Peter Perry, "a collector of rare things," who aims to add Varl herself to his perverse assortment of oddities.

With Slave Moth, Thylias Moss shows herself yet again to be "a visionary storyteller" (Charles Simic). Written in gorgeous verse, it is an explosion of life in the face of servitude. 

“Through the course of this emotionally arresting poetry sequence... it's that young woman's complexity and confusion that make Slave Moth one of the most profoundly startling and beautifully rendered of the neo-slave narratives.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“As complex emotions come to a boil in this piquantly beautiful, covertly witty, and suspenseful verse drama (a truly remarkable mesh of story and form), Moss brilliantly assesses the warped psychology and poisonous relationships engendered by slavery.”
—Booklist

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her other books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Tokyo Butter, Rainbow Remnants in the Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, and Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-318-1 / 152 pages / Poetry

                                                                       ⤖Read more about our poetry imprint. 

Soft Launch
Aaron Belz

With fluster, bluster, and, occasionally, mustard, Aaron Belz absurdly goes where many middle-aged white men have gone before, but few have described with such insight and pomp. In Soft Launch, he surveys the banal, the grinding quotidian, and asks not, “Is this all?” but rather “Isn’t this not all?” and then he bows his head either to pray or to nap.

“This book is a cup of tea that might scald you if drink it too fast. Take little sips. Don’t burn your lips. This poetry is hot, I’m warning you.”
—D.A. Powell

“…[Belz] acutely observes his fellow humans—especially millennials—and uses these observations to weave text-speak and startup jargon into rich moments that feel entirely human.”
—Publishers Weekly

Aaron Belz has been, recently, a literary critic, stand-up comic, poet-for-hire, UX writer for financial services, consumer-food-product namer, and bicycle-repair-shop owner. He is the author of three previous books including Glitter Bomb and Lovely, Raspberry. 

Trade Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-502-4 / 88 pages / Poetry
 

Still
Sandra Meek

Still re-imagines the Renaissance concept of the studiolo, a room displaying cabinets of wonder, each juxtaposing human-made art objects, such as miniature still-life paintings, with natural ones—harbingers of the coming wonders and catastrophes of travel brought back from distant lands Europeans claimed as “discoveries.”

These poems shimmer with the wonders of the natural and aesthetic worlds—and in doing so, reckon with environmental, colonial, and sexual violence, with the oppression of silencing as well as the reclamation of voice. In confronting violations of body, family, culture, and nature, Still gives voice and image not only to what is still, what has been stilled, and what is in danger of being forever stilled, but also to the marvel of survival.

“These gorgeous and very smart poems ‘measure the heart by obsession,’ measure our days by music, measure understanding by mysteries”
—Ilya Kaminsky

“Sandra Meek is a poet whose work becomes more and more insightful and… more and more necessary.”
—Jericho Brown

Sandra Meek is the author of five previous books of poetry, most recently An Ecology of Elsewhere. Meek is Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at Berry College, and lives in Rome, Georgia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-505-5 / 88 pages / Poetry
 

Straight Razor
Randall Mann

Randall Mann’s third collection showcases the debaucheries and traumas of growing up amid San Francisco’s gay scene. These self-possessed new poems combine the regal and raw, with Mann’s renowned ear for poetic form matched by his unflinching eye for longing, alienation, and vice.

“Randall Mann is a writer of breathtaking honesty. At the center of [Straight Razor] is the question of desire and what we do with it, how we move through it and how we are moved. And yet, Mann knows, desire can also be a weapon in the hands of the world.”
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“[R]eaders would do well to recognize Mann’s place alongside poets like D. A. Powell, Marilyn Hacker, and Anne Sexton.”
—Booklist

“[T]he sex is explicit, the meters traditional and taut, the poems compact, witty, yet ready for serious points.... [A] combination of astringency and fire.” —Publishers Weekly

Randall Mann is the author of the poetry collections Proprietary, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, and Complaint in the Garden. He lives in San Francisco. 

Paperback /  $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-430-0 / 68 pages / Poetry

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Straits & Narrows
Sidney Wade

Sidney Wade continues to showcase her talents as a poet of potent play in this buoyant sixth collection. Oftentimes reminiscent of the work of Marianne Moore, these striking new poems—rustic, reflective, and typically set lakeside—are limber and unbelievably lean, quick as bubbling brooks, and packed with whimsy and wisdom in equal measure. 

“Sidney Wade’s imagination is as powerful as any American poet's since Wallace Stevens.”
—Jordan Davis, Slate

“Wade who takes a reflection on nature and applies it to the entire world . . . with insight and wisdom. . . . a choice pick for poetry enthusiasts, very much recommended.”
—The Midwest Book review

Sidney Wade is the author of seven books, including Stroke. Her poems  and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at the University of Florida, and lives in Gainesville.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-425-6 / 80 pages / Poetry

Stroke
Sidney Wade

Political outrage rustles the high grasses of these ingenious, boisterous poems, alternately set in the lush ecologies of the Florida panhandle and the Aegean coast.
Throughout Stroke, Wade displays a fascination for language as a living and growing thing with an unprecedented capacity for mischief and coercion. This collection represents an increasingly rare accomplishment: a poetry that is at once high-spirited and deadly serious.

“Sidney Wade's imagination is as powerful as any American poet's since Wallace Stevens.”
—Jordan Davis, Slate

“[In] this luminous little book. . .Wade offers elegant, backlit poems that float like bubbles but are more substantial.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Sidney Wade is the author of seven books, including Straits & Narrows. Her poems  and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English at the University of Florida, and lives in Gainesville.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-337-2 / 74 pages / Poetry

The Survival Expo
Caki Wilkinson

In her third collection, Caki Wilkinson steers us into flyover country—from its gun shows and high school gyms to the gates of Graceland—as she explores the relationship between fear and self-protection, both the ways we weather the past and how we carry it with us. Through an array of voices and forms, The Survival Expo finds music in the mundane—and hope, too, in the worlds we make to survive the world that made us.

“If Gwendolyn Brooks and Wallace Stevens had a great-granddaughter who lived in the contemporary South, she might be Caki Wilkinson.”
—Terrance Hayes

“I am altogether grateful for this book, this poet.”
—Marcus Wicker

Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections Circles Where the Head Should Be and The Wynona Stone Poems. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, and is an Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-533-8 / 72 pages / Poetry
 

Sweet Crude
Randy Blasing

This is the eighth collection from a poet of formal grace an open heart. Blasing's poems of love, the passing of time, and the kinds of desires that transcribe a life are timeless and full of warmth.

“Sweet Crude is both celebratory and wistful, playing out passages of memory and desire that inscribe a life.... luminous in their jeweled aspects and crafted to be enduring.”
—David St. John

Randy Blasing is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including Choice Words: Poems 1970-2005. He is also co-translator from the Turkish of nine books of poetry by Nazim Hikmet. He lives outside Providence, where he edits Copper Beech Press.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-422-5 / 86 pages / Poetry

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Systems for the Future of Feeling
Kimberly Grey

In moving paradox, Kimberly Grey’s ingenious poems look to language to explore language’s inadequacies, grappling, as they do so, with disintegrating love and surging terror in a hyper contemporary world. Urgently, Grey explores the need for empathy and consolation—our desire, our responsibility, to express the inexpressible, comprehend the incomprehensible, bear the unbearable.
Systems for the Future of Feeling is both innovative and primordial, a reckoning with our complex and confounding moment.

“Kimberly Grey constructs grammatical worlds as a form of time travel.”
—Alyse Bensel, Colorado review

“Humorous, inventive, playful…”
—William Doreski, The Harvard Review

Kimberly Grey is the author of The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner at Stanford University, she is currently complete a doctoral degree in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-520-8 / 88 pages / Poetry

Teratology
Susannah Nevison

Winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize

This rich debut collection explores the psychic states compelled by physical imperfection or abnormality. Set in vivid yet unsure spaces, like those between consciousness and anesthesia or dream, Susannah Nevison’s poems name and reclaim the body, making and unmaking it, portraying the “marvelous monsters” that we all are—whether outside or in. Unflinching and brave, Teratology marks the emergence of a highly imaginative and compassionate poetic voice.

“Teratology is a dynamic and beautifully hewn collection of poems.... Redolent images create a past and a present that must cope with an underlying uncertainty about what experiences of and within the body make one less than human, make one superhuman.”
—Foreword Reviews

“In this gorgeous collection, the body is subject to constant revision and transformation—sometimes into a toy, shaped and manipulated; at other times into birds, into water, into fire that cleanses and destroys, into ‘whole orchards bloom[ing] from ash.’ Though these poems begin in anguish and trauma, their movement and gesture is always and ever toward song, through which it is possible for a damaged body to find freedom, even rapture.”—Katharine Coles

Susannah Nevison received the American Literary Review poetry prize and an Academy of American Poets/Larry Levis prize for her work. Her poems and criticism have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, diode, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she also teaches.

Paperback/ $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-458-4 / 54 pages / Poetry

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That’s What I Thought
Gary Young

Winner of the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award

Gary Young builds on his remarkable oeuvre with this heartening volume, his seventh. His new poems, full of the pleasures and concerns of everyday life, brim with subtle wit and wisdom. Set implicitly along the coastal landscape of northern California, Young’s longtime home, they are latest achievements of a poet renown for “the capturing of small, daily miracles” (Dorianne Laux) in his masterful prose poems.

“...a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life’s difficulty and openness toits beauty.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review for Even So

“The warmth and honesty of Young’s poems are as durable as their precision and insight.”
—Mark Jarman

Gary Young is a poet, artist, and translator. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-494-2 / 80 pages / Poetry

Things Are Disappearing Here
Kate Northrop

Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets

Absence and trespass permeate these poems, in which what has just occurred—or what is about to—is as palpable and ominous as it is unrevealed. In Kate Northrop’s finely-wrought verse, children have gone astray, sealed-off passages are discovered, and missing dogs emerge like visions before bounding off again.
Northrop has a sixth sense for where the mundane and the uncanny pass too close for comfort. Things Are Disappearing Here is an imaginative tour-de-force.

“In this second book, Northrop pares her lines back to the bone, conjuring a dark lyricism that’s both unsettling and seductive.”
—ForeWord

“Things Are Disappearing Here unfolds like a dream of possibly insidious intent, the poems moving back and forth across the border between what can be clearly stated and what must be surmised. It is stirring, this sense throughout of the beautiful, true word right at the point of being uttered.”
—Sven Birkerts

Kate Northrop is the author of Back Through Interruption and Clean. She teaches at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-334-1 / 62 pages / Poetry

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Things Shaped in Passing
More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic
Micheal Klein & Richard McCann (editors)

This important and passionate collection presents the work of forty-two American poets whose vision and language bear the impress of the AIDS pandemic.
It complements Poets for Life, the classic anthology of poetry on AIDS, and is also an update, presenting a poetry different from what has gone before, in which the elegist leaves the bedside to look at the whole fractured world, the world as it is, with AIDS in it.

Includes contributions from Kim Addonizio, Rafael Campo, Michelle Cliff, Melvin Dixon, Mark Doty, Denise Duhamel, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Howard, Marie Howe, Timothy Liu, James Merrill, Paul Monette, Boyer Rickel, Maggie Valentine, and many more.

“This new anthology suggests that some of America’s best poets... have mastered the devastating subject by writing highly formal verse, in strict mete and rhyme, that disciplines grief.”
—Time Out New York

“Even those who profess a dislike for poetry may be converted by [this] beautiful and moving collection..”
—Boston Phoenix

Michael Klein is a much-awarded poet and writer. He edited Poets for Life and is the co-editor of In the Company of My Solitude. Richard McCann  is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems. 

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-217-7 / 212 pages / Poetry
 

Thrust
Heather Derr-Smith

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award

This potent collection revisits a backwoods Virginia girlhood marred by sexual violence. In explosive poems, which explore the confluence of trauma and desire, Heather Derr-Smith reclaims a troubled past, empowering the present through an unlikely chorus of grace and fury.

“Derr-Smith uses an intently packed, beautifully crafted pile-up of images to explore a rural Southern upbringing defined by the ugliness of abuse. In a world shaped by violence, by the casual male assumption of authority, and part of ‘a family of seekers, pick ax and lust,’ she's a girl pursuing the intensity of experience on her own terms”
—Library Journal, starred review

“...essential feminist and southern literature.”
—The Iowa Review

“This is poetry that is breathing: aliveness that is both measured and wild.”
—TC Tolbert

Heather Derr-Smith is the author of the poetry collections Each End of the World, The Bride Minaret, and Tongue Screw. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-486-7 / 62 pages / Poetry

To See the Queen
Allison Seay

Winner of the 2012 Lexi Rudnistky First Book Prize in Poetry

In her debut collection, Allison Seay portrays a world fraught with the powers of its own harrowing imagination—a world intermittently real and imaginary, with unforgettable characters conjured subliminally as a young woman’s saviors from a deathly sadness. Achingly personal, To See the Queen describes one woman’s psychological wilderness, then blesses us with the story of its population, regrowth, and ultimate transcendence.

“To See the Queen is a masterful book.... These are frightening, moving, deeply human poems—poems such as these are sorely needed.”
—J. G. McClue, Colorado Review

“To See the Queen is a striking addition to contemporary poetry. Seay strikes the perfect balance between the sacrament of the mundane and the heart of the human conflict. She sings out to that need to imagine and mourn, that ache to find comfort and visualize hope.”
—Ann Persons, Shenandoah

“Fabular and finely-drawn, ethereal and exacting, this is as satisfying as poetry gets.”
—Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

“To See the Queen, Allison Seay’s haunting, spectacular debut, is a voice in communion—magically intimate and distant”
—Claudia Emerson

Allison Seay has published poems in Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry, and other journals, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-423-2 / Poetry

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Tokyo Butter
Thylias Moss

Inventing new poetics as she goes, Thylias Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science.

Moss’ imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogative but in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

“Tokyo Butter is Moss at her most distinctive... She is priestess and debunker, skeptic and celebrant, in a single dazzling trajectory”
—Linda Gregorson

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her eight previous books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Slave Moth, named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by Black Issues Book Review, Rainbow Remnants in the Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky and Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code.

Hardcover / $24.00 (Can $30.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-319-8 / 134 pages / Poetry

Town Crier
Sarah Matthes

Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

The poems in Town Crier wryly express the pervasive nature of loss, how it suffuses all aspects of life: memories, hopes, love, sex, lunch. The death of the author’s dear friend, the poet Max Rivto, becomes the cornerstone of the book, a foundational pain along on which the poems are built. Sarah Matthes is equal parts jester and conjuror, sensing the precious alchemy of laughter and lament, crying out to those who have left hew and those who remain

“The poems in Sarah Matthes’ astonishing debut make me feel more alive. Also smarter, funnier, sadder, more generous, and far more nimble.”
—Lisa Olstein

“… a momentous introduction to a sensitive voice.”
—Foreword Reviews

Sarah Matthes received a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize. She is the recipient of the 2019 Tor House Prize from the Robinson Jeffers Foundation and has received support for her work from the Yiddish Book Center. She lives in Austin but she will always be from New Jersey.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-527-7 / 96 pages / Poetry
 

Tributary
Carey Salerno

Tributary tells the heartbreaking story of family fracture–of sisters’ estranged, a brother excommunicated. Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty. As they do, they mirror our national systemic crises of Islamophobia, sexism, gun violence, fanatical religiosity, and white nationalism. In Tributary, a woman rejects the laws of the “book of truth” that she is raised under in order to discover and claim her own morality.

“Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.”
—Victoria Chang

“The poems in Carey Salerno’s astonishing Tributary move with the same tenacity and elegance as the river that symphonizes the collection.”
—Adrian Matejka

Carey Salerno is a poet and essayist. She is the executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books. Salerno is author of Shelter and co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. She teaches for the University of Maine at Farmington and resides in New Jersey.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-529-1 / 96 pages / Poetry
 

Uncommon Prayer
Kimberly Johnson

Uncommon Prayer is a book about desire, and about the ways in which desire can and cannot be expressed, contained, or controlled by language. Invoking the structural organization of the liturgical hours, the calendar, and the alphabet, Uncommon Prayer explores how external forms might compensate for the incommunicability of human want―that is, how the parts of expression that aren’t found in dictionary definitions might help to make up for what our words never quite manage to express.

“This is poetry that can make a head hurt, but in the best ways.. . . The experience is disturbing and consoling, foolish and wise, and so many other seemingly opposite descriptors. It is compelling the whole way through and for a long time after.”
—David Thacker, Poetry Northwest

“A most welcome addition to this ongoing, probably neverending pursuit of what Eliot himself called ‘next year’s words.’’
— Mark Jarman, Hudson Review

Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker and Slate. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Utah Arts Counsel, and the Mellon Foundation. She is Professor of English at Brigham Young University.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-447-8 / 62 pages / Poetry

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Undertow
Anne Shaw

Winner of the 2007 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize.

This impressive debut is propelled by wanderlust, its music derived from the rumble of freight trains and the heave of ferries through literal and imaginative waterways. Whether set in Maine or in Arizona, in Ecuador or in Thailand, in waking or in dreaming, each poem resounds with the beauty and remoteness of its locality. Re-imaginings of travelogues by some notable explorers and naturalists, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Georg Eberhard Rumphius, underscore the collection's restless yearning for motion. Undertow marks the emergence of a distinctive new voice.

“Anne Shaw's impressive first collection, Undertow, is an exploration, in the key of doubt, of all that moves below the surface of a cosmos riddled with light....  She is brilliantly exact, noticing the way a ‘greenbottle fly/ alights on a grain of rice.’ Such exactitude is rare, as is this poet's synthesizing vision.”
—Carolyn Forché

“The poems in Undertow—luminous, clairvoyant, and radiant—are spun as if from the finest silk, the threads almost invisible, their tensile strength unimaginably strong. Few debuts are as candid and uncanny, generous and fierce, or elaborate and distilled as Anne Shaw's first book is.”
—Eric Pankey

Anne Shaw is the author of Dido in Winter. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals such as Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner. Recipient of an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Paperback / $14.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-338-9 / 84 pages / Poetry

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Unexpected Elegies
“Poems of 1912-13” and Other Poems About Emma
Thomas Hardy

Selected, with an introduction by Claire Tomalin

When Emma Hardy died in 1912, her husband, the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, began to write “Poems of 1912–13,” a series of elegies that are among the most moving in the English language. Although the couple had been estranged for years, after her death Hardy fell under Emma’s spell again and was enthralled by her as he hadn’t been in decades. He transformed his hopelessly revived love into poetry, pouring out his yearning and passionate attachment to a love forever lost.
“Poems of 1912–13” and the other elegies about Emma included in this volume have been read and discussed by poets and scholars for almost a century but never collected in their own book. Their accessibility, emotional power, and focus on the mysterious complexities of marriage make them of interest to a broad public. Readers will cherish this beautifully produced, illustrated volume of poetical testaments to enduring love.

“Thomas Hardy’s vivid, surprising, and metrically resourceful elegies, so ruthlessly truthful and wrenchingly clear, so filled with nostalgia and remorse, so tender, grief-stricken, and alive, are one of the great, shattering, open-hearted legacies of twentieth-century English poetry. We are made more human in reading them.”
—Edward Hirsch

Thomas Hardy (1830-1928) is the author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, and many more classic novels. Claire Tomalin is an award-winning biographer and critic.

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-361-7 / 66 pages / Poetry

Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive
Patrick Rosal

Winner of the 2002 Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop

Patrick Rosal’s poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shape their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longing—sexual and filial—and on the poet’s Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind. 

“[A] book from whose pages you'll emerge shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new.”
—Junot Díaz

“[An] astonishing first collection by a young poet of immense gifts.”
—Thomas Lux

Patrick Rosal is the author of the collections My American Kundiman,  Boneshepherds, and Brooklyn Antediluvian. He teaches in the creative writing program at Rutgers–Camden and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can. $21.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-293-1 / 68 Pages / Poetry

Vanitas, Rough
Lisa Russ Spaar

With her trademark language—baroque yet colloquial, immediately recognizable but impossible to duplicate—Lisa Russ Spaar has written her most sumptuous and alluring poems to date, each one bursting with an appetite for the sensuous and the lingual. “Is syntax erotic?” she asks in in “Vanitas, Rough,” the book’s title poem. “If so, please. Please read. Here.”

“Spaar’s language has become more muscular, more erotic, and more insistently visceral. . . .[She] sounds like no other poet writing today.”
—Jennifer Chang, The Believer

“An entrancing world of lush language and passionate imaginings.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Spaar is ringleader of a stunning lexicon.”—Christopher Matthews, Shenandoah

“[Her poems] are the perfect marriage of the realism of William Carlos Williams . . . and the sleepless heaven-seeking of such cloistered ecstatics as Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manly Hopkins.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, including Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Orexia and the editor of three poetry anthologies. She was a 2014 Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-420-1 / 62 pages / Poetry

Vermeer in Hell
Michael White

Winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award

Through the paintings of Vermeer, Michael White explores new landscapes and transforms familiar ones in this extraordinary new collection of poems. This captivating masterwork transports us across eras and continents, from Confederate lynchings to the bombing of Dresden, through its lyrical inhabitations of some of Vermeer’s most revered paintings, each one magically described and renewed. More than mere ekphrasis, Michael White explores the transformative possibilities of great art in his fourth collection.

“White translates his passion for Dutch painting into dynamic, striking poems. A book not to be missed.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Vermeer in Hell is Michael White’s museum of ghosts and shades, of narratives woven masterfully out of the personal and historical alike—out of the lived, the envisioned, the loved, and the terrible.... Out of Michael White’s vision, each poem achieves for us the delicacy and durability of Vermeer’s own art.”
—David Baker

“It is not an overstatement to call this poetry Genius.”—Laura Kasischke

“In these elegant, powerful poems, Michael White pays homage to a great painter while engaging social realities that affect us all. They are brave, beautiful poems linked by authentic vision and a sensitive, educated ear.”
—Sam Hamill  

Michael White is the author of four collections of poetry and a memoir, Travels in Vermeer, and has published widely in respected periodicals, including The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, and the Best American Poetry. White teaches poetry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-436-2 / 58 pages / Poetry

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The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded
Molly McCully Brown

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017

Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this evocative debut marks the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself. Molly McCully Brown's poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed—or inflicted—their agony. Yet for all the horrors it channels, Brown’s visionary book uplifts through communion. In her poems, Brown listens to the callers from a dark past and takes on their anguish.

“Molly McCully Brown’s first book of poems, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread. It arrives as if clutching a spray of dead flowers. It is beautiful and devastating.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Brown's humbling and heartbreaking poems restore dignity to lives sacrificed in the name of perfection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

“What fury and furious restraint, what elemental honesty crackles in this book’s spare, strong, skilled lines. It is one of the most astonishing debuts I can remember.” 
—Beth Ann Fennelly

“Her poems imply whole novels and biographies and autobiographies—the ephemeral and eternal lifetimes of those who speak here.”
—Laura Kasischke

“This is nothing less than a revelatory debut that reveals how to stitch something undeniably beautiful out of immense pain and solitude.”
—Ada Limòn

Molly McCully Brown's poems and essays have been published by The New York Times, Gulf Coast, Image, Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Online, and other journals and magazines. Raised in rural Virginia in the shadow of the former Virginia State Colony, she is currently a John and Renée Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-478-2 / 78 pages / Poetry

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Wannabe Hootchie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code
New and Selected Poems
Thylias Moss

Thylias Moss, one of American poetry’s great innovators, is a national taxonomist and secular preacher who catalogues our culture and responds in gorgeous outrage to its injustices. This career-spanning volume conveys the hypnotic spectrum of her full poetic output, from Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman, her 1983 debut, to Slave Moth, her acclaimed 2006 novel in verse, to more than fifty pages of new poems. 

“It’s tempting to confuse Moss with the characters she describes, so deeply does she appear to inhabit their lives. . .[with] her trademark intensity and ferocious intelligence.”
—Jabari Asim, Washington Post Book World

“As if the muse of Wallace Stevens were transplanted into the body of a black, female pop-culture maven.”
—David Yaffe, Village Voice

Thylias Moss is Professor Emerita in the departments of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her eight previous books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Slave Moth, named Best Poetry Book of 2004 by Black Issues Book Review, Tokyo Butter, and Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky.

Hardcover / $29.95 (Can $39.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-412-6 / 248 pages / Poetry

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The Wise and Foolish Builders
Alexandra Teague

This chilling collection by the author of Mortal Geography (winner of the California Book Award in poetry) is a verse exploration of American progress and its consequences, featuring rifle heiress Sarah Winchester and her unsettling Mystery House, with cameos by Harry Houdini, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and many other fascinating figures.

“Teague’s powerful, relevant poems. . .give us a glimpse of our past, and mirror our present.”
— ALA Booklist

“What a fascinating book—a brilliantly deft weave of curious history, and haunting air, ‘thickened with a churn of voices.’ What vivid poems could feel more prescient in our troubles times?”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

“In poems of startling formal range and remarkable intimacy, Alexandra Teague creates a world as full of surprises as the Winchester Mystery House it chronicles.... This book challenges us to consider the house we’ve built together and how we’ll ever find our way outside of it again.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi

“Her poems are ingenious documentaries that explore American westward expansion and the gun that helped it happen.”
—Jill McDonough

Alexandra Teague teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Idaho. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-460-7 / 96 pages / Poetry

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What Silence Equals
Tory Dent

The “brilliant and challenging” (Library Journal) exploration of living with HIV by the winner of the 1999 James Laughlin Award. First published in 1993, this virtuosic collection defined writing about AIDS for a generation of poets. Chaotic and incantatory, it is a submersion into the railing consciousness of a young woman on the precipice of mortality, its “dazzling and valiant poems...the psalms of our present moment“ (Sharon Olds).

“In searing poem after searing poem, without lessening the tension of giving any kind of relief, Dent describes exactly what it is to be in her skin, in her head...One of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis”
—Adrian Oktengberg, The Women's Review of Books

“Tory Dent charts her own waters. She's a poet of brilliance and shadows.”
—Eileen Myles, Denver Quarterly

“These poems are intelligent and alive, emanating not from what the author terms ‘the negative state of my positiveness’ but from the vertiginous cavern's edge: they are not poems about a disease but weather reports from an existential state.”—Ellen Kaufman, Library Journal

Tory Dent (1958-2005) is the author of three volumes of poetry: Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies Life Sentences, The Exact Change Yearbook,  and In the Company of My Solitude.

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-196-5 / 88 pages / Poetry

Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems
Aleš Debeljak

Writing through wars, genocide, and political upheaval, Aleš Debeljak is a poet of Slovenia, of Europe, and of the West. Courtly yet elusive, his writing, in its variety of shapes and forms, presents a contemporary world that relentlessly sweeps us up in its currents, depicting its residual traumas and surprising pleasures with aplomb. 

“[A poet] sensitive to the enormity and complexity of our historical and intellectual predicament.”—Charles Simic

“‘Language can't compete with silence,’ Aleš Debeljak tells us. Wrong. His can. Both the silences and the language of his poetry decapitated me when I first encountered it; it determined and renewed my writing. English-speakers who encounter these perfect translations will surely experience what I experienced. Debeljak's poetry is like silk, like thunder.”
—Tomaž Šalamun

Aleš Debeljak (1961-2016) was the author of thirteen books of essays and nine volumes of poetry. He won numerous awards, including the Prešeren Foundation Prize (Tel Aviv), and taught at universities throughout Europe and the United States. He lived in Slovenia, where he was a professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljuljana.

Paperback / $20.00 (Can 23.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-365-5 / 178 pages / Poetry

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The Wynona Stone Poems
Caki Wilkinson

Winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award

Meet Wynona Stone. She's on track to lose her job, she doesn't love the weatherman she's sleeping with, and everything she tries (cosmetology, astrology) falls short. So she stays home making models, watching soaps, and staring down “doubt, a storm that's never not approaching.”

“In focusing on her title character, a singular creation, Wilkinson says something about what it means to be female—living, loving, aging—in turns of phrase that are odd and perfect and stick to you like gum.”
—Lena Dunham

“One of the most innovative collections I have read in years. . . .wildly imaginative, superlatively tailored, and. . .genuinely enjoyable.”
—D. Gilson, The Rumpus

“The poems in this mind-bending book are painfully hilarious and quietly inspiring—my inner ear is ringing still. The sheer invention of these characters and their off-kilter world is stunning. The skill of the poet is evident in every jangly line, every pitch-perfect word. What a thrill it is to have this book in the world!”
—Maurice Manning

“Thank the ‘snow angel without wings’ that Caki Wilkinson has turned her fierce formal powers to this tale of thwarted potential.... Wilkinson makes art of a major kind, turning the trauma of
aging into poetic gold.”
—Julie Sheehan

Caki Wilkinson received her MFA from the Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her first collection, Circles Where the Head Should Be, won the Vassar Miller Prize, selected by J. D. McClatchy. She is Assistant Professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-446-1 / 82 pages / Poetry

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X Marks the Dress
A Registry
Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess

“Organized as poems, footnotes, appendices of missing text, and poetry fragments, Darling and Guess’s paratext resists normative expectations, much as the three personas of the poems—the bride, the [trans] groom, and his/her mistress do.”
—The Boston Review

“While marriage may be taking no prisoners in this collection, it’s clear that the union of Darling and Guess was a perfect one. They produced a stunning, vivid, and emotionally visceral feminist rumination.”
—Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing

“By turns narrative and lyric, imagistic and minimalist, X Marks the Dress is a collaborative tour de force of great emotional and epistemological weight.”
—Lambda Literary Review

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-six books and the recipient of numerous awards. She divides her time between the United States and Europe.
Carol Guess is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University where she teaches Queer Studies and Creative Writing.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-547-5 / 00 pages / Poetry