<P><B>Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry (2009)</B><BR><B>Runner-up for the Northern California Book Award for Poetry (2009)</B></P><P>Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the...
<P>This volume represents, under one cover, the major work of the man whom critics and readers have designated the authentic poet of his American generation. For this collection, James Dickey has selected from his four published books all those poems that reflect his truest interests and his growth as an artist. He has added more than a score of new poems –; in effect, a new book in themselves –; that have not previously been published in volume...
<P>Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes,...
<P>A book of new poems by a major writer is an event. A book of new poems that marks a different, more powerful approach is cause for celebration. «What I looked for here,» James Dickey tells us about The Eagle's Mile, «was a flicker of light &#8216;from another direction,' and when I caught it –; or thought I did –; I followed where it went, for better or worse.» In this new work, Dickey edges away from the narrative-based poems of his...
<P><B>Winner of the Pen Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry (1990)</B></P><P>New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality –; adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as :If...
<P>Left dead after our cultures were broken by triumphant enemies, our stories changed to suit others. We now change them again to suit ourselves. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls purports to give power to the dead—voices to the victims of genocide both ancient and contemporary—and presence to women. Medea did not kill her sons; Dido founds a city, over and over again, the city of the present author's poetry. In these poems the poet asserts that though her art comes from a...
<P>A politico-linguistic problem, a conflicted hairstyle, and a conflict-bound drone, Fauxhawk works in the space where dissent becomes materialized, ironized, and commodified. Engaging drone optics, redactions, renditions, comedy, and cinema, Ben Doller wrenches exuberant music from the drone of the everyday. The citizens in these poems are fraught in their passivity, both ashamed of being and of being surveyed. Occupied by the material forces conspiring against poetry, Fauxhawk...
<P>The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent «great recession» of 2008–;2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to...
*Of interest to readers of contemporary poetry and audiences who follow contemporary art. The book has a lot in common with process-oriented and performance-based art projects, and also shares concerns with art engaging social practice and relational aesthetics. Also, translators, translation scholars, people who are bi-lingual or multi-lingual, especially bi-lingual Spanish & English speakers.*Author is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts, Brown University*Author was...
Poet Lenard D. Moore is known internationally for his involvement with the Haiku Society of America and is a revered North Carolina poet and founder of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. He edited Blair’s anthology All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. Blair is reissuing this collection, The Geography of Jazz, first published in 2018.