Bøker i Phoenix Poets-serien

"In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--

"Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, documents a life in which even the most intimate experiences are mediated by the flattening interface of technology and a world in which language is no longer produced solely by humans but by artificial intelligences as well. The poems circle the topics of replication, reproduction, and inheritance, and the way these processes are born out in language, history, and biology. In these poems, a baby is born; the world shrinks into tiny pockets under the new logic of contagion; two people are wed; the roses which washed up ashore centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. All of this is set against a backdrop of ecological ruin, of decimated chestnut trees and a beached baby whale. The collection mirrors the restless spirit of the present, shifting between voices and forms. At times the poems take the form of experimental essays, and elsewhere the sonnet is reimagined and reinvented as a disembodied voice from the distant future. A portal can be a way out or a way in-or a website at the center of many networked websites. These poems take delight in the strangeness of contemporary life, even as they grieve something intangible which has been lost"--

"Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction. Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them"--

"Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, roadside goldenrod and toxic chemicals in the watershed, The Upstate is a collection of poems about southern Appalachia in its contemporary moment of change. Layering a personal lyric voice with an awareness of social, political, and ecological crises, Lindsay Turner redefines regional poetics as necessarily, inextricably attuned to global structures. These poems both observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation while also raging in their own quiet way against the continuation of such devastation. Arising from moments of darkness and desperation, the poems in The Upstate nevertheless affirm poetry's role under the conditions they describe. Turner's words weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield such treasures from the forces that amass against them. An elegy for pastoralism in a time of disaster, The Upstate is buoyed by a restless sense of discovery and the call to chronicle a world that has all but given itself over to instability and flux"--

"Negro Mountain is the name of a ridge in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania--its summit is in fact the highest elevation in the state. Named for a Black man who was killed fighting on the side of his white masters against Indigenous peoples during a scouting expedition to the region in the mid-eighteenth century, this mountain ridge is also the metaphorical center of C. S. Giscombe's sixth full-length book of poetry. Negro Mountain is a subtle, erudite interrogation of the contact zones where Blackness, white supremacy, Indigeneity, and endangered animal populations enter into complex and multifaceted dialectics of survival and erasure. From the vantage of this ridge, Giscombe maps the psychogeography of surrounding region and the tangled human and nonhuman forces that have shaped it. To say that such work is strictly 'regional, ' however, is to underestimate Giscombe's commitment to and deep engagement with the archive, and his poetry deftly connects relevant points across time and space, from the mid-Pleistocene period to nineteenth-century Jamaica to the vilest corners of the internet. This saturation of sources, voices, and modes yields a parallax synthesis of the personal and the historical-all filtered through the singular voice of a poet who has been honing his craft for decades"--

"Comprised of a series of long, lyrical narrative poems, Dong Li's debut collection of poetry braids forgotten histories, family sorrows, and political upheavals into a panoramic view of China and the people who embody it across generations. The Orange Tree navigates the personal and the political, grounding its abstract meditations in the raw, worldly experience in characters whose lives bear striking affinities across disparate eras. Cycling between mythological time, ancient history, and modern memory, Li offers unexpected perspectives on epochs that resemble our own-not the least of which are the poems' unflinching meditations on the brutality of war. Throughout the book, images and phrases are compressed into portmanteaus of premonition, signaling as nouns the metaphoric inventions that one will come to find-"the anguishednight," "the farawayorangetree," "the launderedyears," "the drifteddream." Like the legend of a map or the runes on a relic, these puzzles invite us to parse the words of The Orange Tree, breaking them apart and creating entrances that lead deeper into the elaborate architecture of Li's poetic world-building"--

"Viewed from a distance, interdisciplinary artist and poet Annelyse Gelman's Vexations could be described as a long poem-a book-length narrative work in the tradition of epic or romance. Vexations is fragmentary and dreamlike, however, chipping away over time at the very foundation on which such a narrative tradition typically rests. The central drama of Vexations is centered around the journey of a mother and her daughter through a speculative world that seems utterly contemporary and, at the same time, indexical of alternative unsettling futures. Threats and anxieties are inextricable here: environmental disaster, medical treatments, medication, motherhood, grasshoppers, horses, shopping malls, evolution, inheritance, advertising. "There was no other world to bring a child into," Gelman writes. Endlessly, intoxicatingly inventive, nearly every line of Vexations is worthy of independent attention, even as the work as a whole advances its tragic narrative on multiple fronts. As the work traverses scales from the dramatic scope of its quest narrative, on one hand, to the miniaturist phenomenological precision of its lyric progression on the other, Vexations balances affective intimacies with dystopian political vision, and the result is a singular, genre-warping work of contemporary poetry"--

"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.""--

"Peter Balakian's "No Sign," the centerpiece of this book, is the third multi-sequenced long poem in a trilogy begun in "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" (2010) and "Ozone Journal" (2015). The three poems follow a persona whose journey is informed by a series of experiences set in New York and the surrounding Jersey Cliffs from the 1970s to the present. In the mix of a dialogue between two lovers over decades, reminiscent of an eclogue updated via the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), we see an evolution of kaleidoscopic memory-from the haunted history of the Armenian Genocide to the AIDS epidemic, to climate change and the erosion of the planet-that gives the trilogy a unique historical power and psychological depth. The poems in the trilogy are defined by inventive collage-like fragmentation and elliptical, granular language. In the tradition of the American long poem from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to Charles Olson, Balakian has created something new, what one critic has called, "a panoramic work of contemporary witness...of an unprecedented magnitude of violence and dissociation, as well as transcendent vision." Balakian rounds out this new collection with his signature lyrics and narrative poems, where seemingly minor, personal moments in one life expand into the vastness of our messy, shared history"--

In his first collection of poems, many of which were written during his years as a US Army Special Forces medic, Graham Barnhart explores themes of memory, trauma, and isolation. Ranging from conventional lyrics and narrative verse to prose poems and expressionist forms, the poems here display a strange, quiet power as Barnhart engages in the pursuit and recognition of wonder, even while concerned with whether it is right to do so in the fraught space of the war zone. We follow the speaker as he treads the line between duty and the horrors of war, honor and compassion for the victims of violence, and the struggle to return to the daily life of family and society after years of trauma. Evoking the landscapes and surroundings of war, as well as its effects on both US military service members and civilians in war-stricken countries, The War Makes Everyone Lonely is a challenging, nuanced look at the ways American violence is exported, enacted, and obscured by a writer poised to take his place in the long tradition of warrior-poets.

A collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier.

New and selected poems by renowned poet Lloyd Schwartz.

Poems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster.

The poems in No Chronology offer lyrical meditations on our shared experiences, illuminating life's deep discomforts and peculiar joys.

Taking cues from medieval sea charts-portulans-the poems in Jason Sommer's collection bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey.

Blending styles, voices, and settings, Campion's poems show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are.

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker's year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics--including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles--and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to "protect our own" and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.