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A probing collection of new and selected poetry from Jonathan Aaron. A poem uses words to try to get at what can't be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled. As Wislawa Szymborska said, "Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'"

A collection of plays that spotlights women whose professions are pitted against their gender. Each play in this collection explores an imagined moment in the life of a little-known scientist sidelined by gender. Six brilliant women--Pythias of Assos, Susanna Lister, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Lise Meitner, Esther Lederberg, and Barbara McClintock--vibrantly inhabit these pages (and stages) at points where their personal and professional selves intersect. These plays can be performed together as an evening of theater for smart audiences.

Poems that depict the reality of life in rural America. Angel Sharpening its Beak, Michael McGriff's fifth collection, searches for meaning at the intersection of surrealism, place, and poverty in rural America. From long sequences to dense enigmatic sketches, the poems gathered here honor the inner lives and daily encounters of those surviving, working, and seeking joy at the margins of contemporary life.

Poems that explore literary and religious depictions of grief to honor the loss of a mother. Requiem is a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church's canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. Historical and religious mourning rites, and the grief work of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, and Mozart, among others, establish a lyric dialogue around aesthetic representations of grief, invoking a doubleness between the griever and the grieved; a mutuality and interconnectedness that illuminate the role of witness in poetry, mortality, and transcendence. Requiem enacts our deepest longing: to honor and immortalize the beloved.

Poems that center on the sinister American cryptid, the Goatman of Pope Lick. In her sixth collection Goat-Footed Gods, award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the infamous Goatman of Pope Lick, identified by The Washington Post as one of the deadliest cryptids in America. The Goatman or Pope Lick Monster, a legendary creature long rumored to roam the woods around Driskell's Kentucky home, is alleged to have caused the deaths of at least five young people at Pope Lick Trestle, a railroad bridge with a ninety-foot drop at its center. The Goatman lyrics are braided with poems about Driskell's child's traumatic injury from a fall. Always at the heart of Driskell's poetry is her insistence that the path to the sacred is found not through the doctrine of ancient gods, but in walking clear-eyed through the dark woods of our historical past and exploring the never-ending wonder of the natural world.

A poetic exploration of life amid intimate losses. In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others' suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet's own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.

A new poetry collection from Eleanor Stanford that is musical, sexy, and darkly funny. These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.

Poems that reflect on the current tragedy in Ukraine. In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to "cut yourself with a dull razor." She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience. Joseph Millar's lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar's sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems' subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions--love, work, death, desire--and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.

A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic. In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.

"Karenmaria Subach's Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in rich lyrical detail through history and the world of fantasy/mythos. Through formal poems, riddle, and sustained lyric contemplative expression, Subach offers her own "blue perfume flask with a gold band," the "trade" of art, hard-won through what the writer has survived. In these poems, Hadrian and Antinous, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Snow White and the Prince, as well as a range of separated lovers and characters divided by war, death, and family trauma are explored in their often-desperate predicaments. These poems are narratively dense, voice- and image-driven, full of passion and rage, and they draw on the poet's training in literature, languages, and history"--

"In Cemetery Nights, Dobyns explores a full range of human experience, from the fabulous storytelling of our dreams to the mute, explosive passions of domestic life, from vital distortions of familiar myths to strange tableaux of creation and death. Most of the poems are narratives-often frightening and sometimes downright funny-spun with a dark extravagance and aimed, with striking exactness, at our essential lives. The world of Cemetery Nights is haunted by regret, driven by desire and need, illuminated by daring make-believe; Mr. Dobyns has created here a remarkable bridge between pure entertainment and deep psychological insight"--

"From observation to contemplation, into memory and back to the scorched and gorgeous present, Hoppenthaler's fourth collection voices a hard-earned weariness that acknowledges but resists resignation. As Grammy Award-winning songwriter Rosanne Cash puts it, "Hoppenthaler's attention to the specifics of nature-hummingbirds, Japanese maples, snowfall-are like embroidery, stitched through and holding together the sharp memories and images of loss, longing, regret, and hope." These subtle yet powerful poems assay aging, spirituality, contemporary political concerns, death, the struggles of a mentally ill child and related marital pressures, and the poet's odyssey ends with resiliency and purpose reinscribed"--

Rolly Kent returns to poetry with a book that explores the mysteries and comforts of the known and unknown. Phone Ringing in a Dark House is filled with the mystery of loss, love, and the restorative powers of memory and language. In these forty-eight poems, the product of an intense return to poetry after a twenty-year absence, Rolly Kent writes about ordinary moments when the known and unknown overlap. These poems are, as one of the stars in the night sky says early in the book, a response to our wish not only to live but to "live again."

A collection of poetry by Allison Joseph.

"There's Something They're Not Telling Us is a meditation on the nuances of domestic life, of learning to exist in the constant presence of an other. Through the interrogation of a thesis on what holds us to the present moment, the collection explores the rapture and isolation of marriage and the quotidian. The poems ask us to consider what it means to live on a planet charged with entropy and in bodies that move towards natural and unnatural ends. The work does not purport to provide answers so much as it aims to keep the reader in the text, which is experiential and alive"--

"Michael McFee's twelfth collection of poetry explores challenging subjects-the realities of aging, the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the disappearance of Appalachian culture-in poems that discover enduring pleasures in the details of our everyday lives. It also includes vivid, lively, and imaginative responses to quirky words, a jazz standard, family members, celebrities, and several paintings. As one reader has said, "In his poems filled with quotidian experience, the objects of the material world shimmer with consequence: they are alight with attention-McFee's, and through his art, ours. He is one of our best poets.""--

"The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder is a gathering of "punk formalist" lyrics that collectively are a meditation not on mortality so much as on the terror of extinction, how that terror is the reservoir of love. Katrovas declaims from the margins of faith, the cliff edge of doubt, seeking to measure the conductivity of private troubles to public issues. Katrovas' "riffs" are verse essays jotted in the antechambers of nightmares and erotic dreams"--

"Bel Canto is a collection belonging to the post-confessional tradition, whose protean speaker, a fast-talking theorist brimming with hypotheses and maxims, seeks to dismantle various power hierarchies by a dramatic staging of interiority and sensuous rebirth of meaning and desire, in moving, complex, funny, and cutting poems that cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. Suggesting that revolutionary change will be linguistic, or will not be at all, Bel Canto critiques the alienating forces of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy by restoring primacy to lyric subjectivity, sensibility, paradox, and alterity through a kaleidoscopic array of registers, modes, and idioms ironic and sincere. "What human could stay so quiet?" asks the speaker of "Epistle": "One who is secretly on fire.""--

"In the wry and tender poems of Barbara Edelman's All the Hanging Wrenches, we encounter creatures both wild and domestic; family, friends, strangers, and history, all deftly transfigured through poignant turns of phrase. Edelman's delight in wordplay is contagious. Time and the boundaries of memory are fluid amid adventures, reflection, and the glorious contradictions that are real life. "At the shoreline where waves flowed through windows in rock, we rode in and came out changed, our brains full of ocean," Edelman writes. With great good humor and sadness in equal portion, this is a book of quiet triumph in which all the ghosts abide"--

A reissuing of National Book Award winner Denis Johnson's first two collections of poems