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Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, this book traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes-natural and domestic, political and religious - across America's East and Midwest.

Features an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. This book fuses the poet's point of view with Walt Whitman's to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC.

Intends to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries - dire and hilarious - from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetnal frustration of our cravings for egotriumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit.

The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. In this book, the title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth - a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account.

The evening beyond each chain-lit match seemed to crouch in the shapes of houses, then rose to play havoc in a veil of dogwoods. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, this book is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear.

Where are we going? What are we doing here? you don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations we're racing past, the others out there watching in the dim light, baffled, who for a moment thought the train was theirs. This book offers a collection of poetry.

Features a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time.

Ranging over several stages of a life that features adolescent heartbreak and betrayal, marriage and children, friendship and loss, this book insistently addresses the author's desire to get to the bottom of her obsession with a place that has imprinted itself so profoundly on her consciousness.

Includes poems that sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, this title celebrates communities both invented and real.

A meditation on the body as a source of joy, anxiety, and regeneration, this collection extends the capacity of the lyric to articulate human feeling while considering the complications of love, both human and divine, and the distinctions between them. It is more deeply an attempt to focus on the process of human creativity in general.

Features a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself. This book recounts the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists.

Connie Voisine's third book of poems, "Calle Florista," centers on the border between the US and Mexico and celebrates the stunning, if severe, desert landscape. Southern New Mexico's proximity to Mexico (indeed, it was "still" a part of Mexico until 167 years ago) is also an occasion for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Through a combination of directness and excision, the poems in this book oscillate between describing complex, private sensibilities, on the one hand, and, on the other, cracking the private self open (and vulnerable) to the wider world. The focus on the Mexico-US border is also a way for Voisine to experiment with the speaking voice in the poems: whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can properly tell the story of this place?

It has been seventeen years since Lloyd Schwartz has published a book of original poems, so there is much anticipation from his fans. In "Little Kisses," Schwartz takes his characteristic tragi-comic view of life to some unexpected and sometimes disturbing places. Here we find heart-breaking and comic poems about personal loss (the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, for example, or his mother s failing memory, or a precious gold ring gone missing); uneasy love poems and poems about family; and poems about identity, travel, and art with all their potentially recuperative powers. The book also contains some memorable translations, jokes, and wordplay, as well as formal surprises, all of which Schwartz s readers have come to relish in his verse. His books have been all too few and far between; this new one after so very long is sure to be greeted by an eager readership."

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

A collection intent on worrying the boundaries between natural and unnatural, human and not, Unlikely Designs draws far-ranging source material from the back channels of knowledge making: the talk pages of Wikipedia, the personal writings of Charles Darwin, the love advice doled out by chatbots, and the eclectic inclusions on the Golden Record time capsule. It is here we discover the allure of the index, what pleasure there is in bending it to our own devices. At the same time, these poems also remind us that logic is often reckless, held together by nothing more than syntactical short circuits--well, I mean, sorry, yes--prone to cracking under closer scrutiny. Returning us again and again to these gaps, Katie Willingham reveals how any act of preservation is inevitably an act of curation, an outcry against the arbitrary, by attempting to make what is precious also what survives.

Offers a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our poetic, mythic, and scientific fascination with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, and falcons. Drawing on his own experience working at a raptor rehabilitation center, the author shows these killing birds to be mirrors for humanity.

A book about belief - not belief in the unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems aims to discover infinitude in the most familiar places.

Features poems that are haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century.

Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses, bitterness stings our nostrils. The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Enchanting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares.

This volume brings together James McMichael's poetry and includes works that have previously remained unpublished. James McMichael is the recipient of a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award.

From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton, this book tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness.

A sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.

From Tuscaloosa west to Mississippi then north to Memphis through country as unmusical as I was unloved by the decorous ardor of the South and the voice of one whose griefs were Cherokee, absentee, left in the Chevy and secret. She didn't love my love like Shiva's everywhere and blue and many-handed, some with knives and some with billet-doux.