• finalist for the National Book Award for his second book • Publishers Weekly described Ben Lerner as “among the most promising young poets now writing.” • Lerner is barely 30, publishing his third book • BA and MFA from Brown University • former student of C.D. Wright • teaches poetry at University of Pittsburgh • at age 23, he was the youngest poet published by Copper Canyon Press • author of two...
In the bold tradition of the “Misty Poets,” Ha Jin confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape. The poems of A Distant Center speak in a voice that is steady and direct, balancing contemplative longing with sober warnings from a writer who has confronted the traumas of censorship and state violence. With unadorned language and epigrammatic wit, Jin conjures scenes that encompass the personal, historical, romantic, and environmental,...
Jenny George’s debut showcases an astonishing poetic talent, a new voice that is intensely focused, patient, and empathic. The Dream of Reason explores the paradoxical relationships between humans and the animals we imagine, keep, fear, and consume. Titled after Goya’s grotesque bestiary, George’s own dreamscape is populated by purring moths, bats that crawl like goblins, and livestock—especially pigs, whose spirit and slaughter inform a central series of portraits. The poems invite moments of...
"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book Review Quietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present,...
"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."—Jamaal May "Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." — Glappitnova Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and...
“Kooser . . . must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated.” — Library Journal “Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.” — Minneapolis Tribune “Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.” — The Bloomsbury Review Four decades of poetry—and a generous...
Honored as one of «Nine Great Poetry Books of 2014»— The New Yorker “ The Poem She Didn’t Write is a breakup book, full of the kinds of invective and taunts honed by a person who has spent, as all of us have now spent, infinite hours online. Its complex tones arise from the poet’s wanting equally to seduce and to repel a lover whose deepening silence only provokes rhetorical escalation. The effect can be like reading e-mails in someone’s...
an electrifying, idiosyncratic addition to the ever-growing library of Civil Rights Movement books C.D. Wright is using the tools and techniques of poetry to write a «people's history» of an ugly racist event in her beloved Arkansas The hero of this book is a woman named «V,» who became a life-long mentor to C.D. Wright C.D. Wright examines racist events in her native Arkansas and creates a layered, nuanced, and riveting tribute to a cantakerous and heroic white woman with the courage to...
This is an attempt to expose our human achievement beginning from creation or the big bang to the present time. In between, we will find an outlook of nature and how it protects us, supplies our needs, and even encourages us to cooperate for the good of man and the universe. In addition, you will find this book to stimulate your imagination and, in some cases, satisfy your curiosity.
Braided Creek contains more than 300 poems exchanged in this longstanding correspondence. Wise, wry, and penetrating, the poems touch upon numerous subjects, from the natural world to the nature of time. Harrison and Kooser decided to remain silent over who wrote which poem, allowing their voices, ideas, and images to swirl and merge into this remarkable suite of lyrics.Each time I go outside the worldis different. This has happened all my life. *The moon put her handover my mouth and told meto...
"To be both visionary and accurate, true to physics and metaphysics at the same time, is rare and puts the poet in some rarefied company. Black, like a few other younger poets, is willing to include all the traditional effects of the lyric poem in his work, but he has set them going in new and lively ways, with the confidence of virtuosity and a belief in the ancient pleasures of pattern and repetition."—Mark Jarman, American Poet Lush and daring, Malachi Black's poems in ...