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The poems in this collection beg the question of what leads up to and what is happening as things labor to come into being.According to the scholar and poet, Charles Stein: "Magic is pragmatic, or better performative, phenomenology. But phenomenology is the magic of ontogeny." Robert Podgurski's IN THE SHADOW OF THIS BRANCH is itself deeply invested in a thaumaturgy or wonder working of the magic of nascency. The poems in this collection beg the question of what leads up to and what is happening as things labor to come into being. As Michal Ajvas expressed in his novel, Empty Streets "I realized that in trying to express what a thing communicated, I was making a thing of the communication--an unusual and fantastic thing perhaps, but of what is not yet a thing, a matter from which things are formed." And yet, Podgurski is not so presumptuous as to assert he knows precisely what this process of emergence is, but that it warrants acknowledgment, further exploration, and to facilitate the possession of the senses in its sway."Robert Podgurski's poems deploy systems and structures akin to the sacred geometry of the temples and monuments he meticulously elucidates in his rare scholarly works. The micro-macro play in these poems show the center is everywhere."--Raymond Foye"If Robert Podgurski didn't exist, I think I would have had to invent him -- a practicing magician who also thinks about magic; whose careful scholarship and conceptual clarity are dimensions in an intensive, theurgic armamentarium; and a poet whose poems are hazards in a vital ontological probing. One enters them to the degree that one is correspondingly willing to hazard what might be found there: events in the living future of magic, a future not at all Not Yet, but more pertinently -- From Now On."--Charles SteinPoetry.

PROVOCATIONS explores arguments about literary and spiritual Creations, through definitions of selves and others, and the self with others. Questions of resistance and transcendence, both internal and interpersonal, and to the "facts" of our existence are addressed throughout. Questions about mortality are the convergent points, ultimately, of the 'provocations' in the self-questioning that is the central thrust of the text.

CONTINUED CASES is a collection of poems satirical, social, and political. A sequel to Hague's Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009) it was written partly in response to the 45th presidency of the United States. It addresses practices, policies, and personalities as well as opines on education, the arts, and the fate of the environment. One of the book's epigraphs is from the 2017 prayer card at the funeral of Wayne Barret, author of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. "Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers ... So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care." In CONTINUED CASES, Hague does his best to offer opposition to the outlandish, the illegal, the inhumane. At the same time, as a native Appalachian from the Ohio Valley steel town declared in the 1970s to have the worst air in the country, he recollects the personal damages of industrial extractive industry. Aware of the agrarian traditions of Jefferson, the democratic, populist appetites of Whitman, and the counter-cultural politics of the Sixties, Hague offers seasoned witness to our times.

Knock-knock! Who's there?Ultimately for all, it will be age. At first, it seems like a bad joke--needing a cane, memory loss, more care, forgetting even one's own name. In KNOCK-KNOCK, Lewis creates the persona of an older physician who should've known what's in store. Sometimes the reality is grim, but there's humor, love, and even romance in his inventive and poetic story-telling. "Lost-and-found / is not a planned / destination." Yet we all eventually find ourselves there."Old age is no joke. The body breaks down; the mind wanders away. For many, if not most, aging is existentially challenging and physically demeaning. And yet Owen Lewis' KNOCK-KNOCK finds a variety of entry points into this penultimate human experience. The eighteen poems (in the numerology of the Kabbalah, life) gathered here range from mild ruminations on the disconcerting experience of losing and forgetting inconsequential things, to more intense poems, exploring critical conditions: impaired ambulation, deterioration of vision, cardiac failures. Like all good healthcare providers, Lewis - a medical doctor, himself - is always writing toward the fear of mortality that lies at the heart of aging, and that frightens most of us, nearly to death. Through poetic storytelling, deep empathy, psychological courage, and a gimlet eye, he finds both solace and meaning (and yes: sometimes humor) in this phase of life."--Kate Daniels"KNOCK-KNOCK is a sophisticated chapbook about aging and the brain by a prize-winning poet and professor of psychiatry. The poems come to the reader in a variety of shapes, moods and sounds. The book opens with the speaker's tender first encounters with such age-related issues as the use of a cane for mobility and the occasional challenges of memory. Music is an important element (and subject) in the subsequent poems about more serious symptoms and the fears they inspire. Only a clinical expert in diseases of the mind could have constructed the drama of the scenes that follow."--Michael SalcmanPoetry.

In this striking collection of poems, Joel Bettridge crafts a poignant mix of lyrics, half-stories, epigrams, speculations, histories, and songs to study how evolution, especially that of people, is guided more or less by magic. OF SPECIES documents the relentless transmutations of our human selves and the environments we inhabit; reveals the facts coded in myths, prayers, and rituals; unearths the forgotten gods who live in gene pools, artifacts, and biomes. These poems map our created and changing world, offering a vision for how to belong now to what we are on the brink of losing."'Awake, awake: look awry, look new, ' insists Bettridge's new breathtaking collection, OF SPECIES. Gods, gullies and crevasses, Homo georgicus and horses, bark beetles, and more, all burrow out from the 'artifacts of light' that are these poems. Too fierce to be pastoral, too urgent to be elegiac, this collection widens the imagination of what nature poetry might be, what it must do. Some books are meant to be read--this one wants to be lived."--Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness"Bettridge's collection invites the reader into an entangled existence where we have permission to be curious and intimate about everything: What even is a species or an animal body without other species or other animal bodies? What is the unlearning required for a human to see beyond the categories of human and nonhuman, to look beyond categories at all? 'What is the ambition of grasses? / What dreams as they throng / With the winter in abeyance?' The conversations that emerge from these questions are perhaps the conversations we should all be having more often. Beautiful and expansive, OF SPECIES is a significant work."--Janice Lee, author of Separation Anxiety"OF SPECIES begins with a knock-out introduction, 'HORSES, ' in which the poet confesses that horses in two beguiling illustrations by artist Rick Bartow have begun speaking to him, initiating him into a world of metamorphosis, one that he duly records in a series of stunning theriophanies--of beast, of person, of divine power. This book is a marvel of formal and tonal shifts that Joel Bettridge manages with enviable ease, from the stateliness and earnestness of the 'Transmutations' that initiate each new section to the magical open-form free verse interspersed by the short, pungent epigrammatic poems the poet has been dazzling us with for years. In this daring collection, Bettridge has devised a creation mythology for evolution and it really sings. A masterful book!"--Peter O'Leary, author of The Hidden Eyes of ThingsPoetry. Nature.

Poems born out of the author's experiences from living forty years in Greece.Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home."For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm, ' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear, ' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters"Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert WrigleyPoetry.

In ON THE LONG BLUE NIGHT, Eliot Cardinaux's debut poetry collection, language is a ruined landscape through which the estranged voice of the poem threads a narrow way. As Patrick Pritchett writes, "this is poetry written at the frayed edge of history, ushered by the tutelary spirits of Celan and Mandlestam, full of longing and a deep listening to the silence.""In Eliot Cardinaux's unsettling and intimate debut collection, 'the lateword' illuminates a landscape of ruins that is still redeemable by the yearning of logos, its flickering presence marking a way forward for the poem in a time when poetry has found itself held hostage by sociological sermonizing, empty positivism, and puritanical grievances. 'Won't you take what is given, / pain in the branches / ringing the gavel, / cradled like a lamb, ' asks the poem. Bright with spiritual darkness, this is poetry written at the frayed edge of history, ushered by the tutelary spirits of Celan and Mandlestam, full of longing and a deep listening to the silence."--Patrick PritchettPoetry.

"John Mulrooney's Spooky Action takes us on a high-velocity, free-associational journey through our times. These poems arise out of a capacious imagination determined to meet and keep in mind whatever the world delivers, to make a music out of what is. Sometimes the world offers the poet an evanescent beauty, as when, for example, he sees a gust of snow that "plumes angelic" over a city street. But more often the world confronts him, and us, with no small amount of lies, myopias, loss, and suffering. Mulrooney's poems follow our difficult human trail wherever it leads, and in the process, he widens and deepens our sense of the real, which is of course why poetry matters, and this poetry definitely matters."--Fred Marchant"The delicate imprint of a bicycle tread is what these poems look like and read like. They are magical as they avoid every unwanted impediment and make room for Mulrooney the poet. When the wheels stop spinning, they leave a whirl of words that settle into place for even a ghost to enjoy."--Fanny Howe"Einstein spoke dismissively of "spooky action at distance," the idea that separate objects could somehow share a simultaneous condition across space and time, or what is sometimes referred to as quantum entanglement. Yet the phrase persists and serves as a powerful metaphor for the work poetry does. In John Mulrooney's amazing new book, lyric performs this entanglement, bridging distant states of mind and registers of experience with a swiftness and a surprise that is indeed spooky.... The suffering and loss of this world haunts these poems with an elemental pathos, the power of a fading logos written in the language of ghosts who still speak out of the dark in a human voice."--Patrick PritchettPoetry.

Twenty-five years in the making, with some poems dating as far back as forty years, To Sleep in the Horse"s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, is George Kalamaras's chronicle of his Greek ancestry--literary, artistic, and familial. This book retells the lives of some of Kalamaras's favorite Greek poets and artists, most often with his characteristic Surrealist outpouring and accretion of imagery, interlacing his inquiry with myth and the metaphor of the infamous Trojan Horse. He embraces pillars of Greek Letters, such as Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos, and George Seferis--three poets who helped form the backbone of Kalamaras's poetics forty years ago. Yet he moves beyond these well-known Nobel Laureates and Lenin Prize recipients. He delves into a plethora of modern and contemporary Greek poets who he has studied during decades of poetic apprenticeship, most of whom are little-known in the United States. Many of these figures are at the forefront of the Greek avant-garde, questioning (implicitly or explicitly) Greece's two military dictatorships in the last century. This abundant collection of poems takes us on a 300-page journey not only of Kalamaras's literary and artistic forebears but also of his familial roots from Zakynthos, Pharaklatha, and Solaki--places in Greece from which three of his four grandparents emigrated during the early part of the last century. Imbuing this collection is Kalamaras's ongoing poetic project of "seeing one in the other." He affirms the value of "an archeology of Being," a project in which he continues to chronicle the world around him, attempting to unearth the value of poets who have come before him, affirming the living presence of the "dead." Poet George Vafopoulos says in one of the book's opening epigraphs, here now I stand before all the Greek poets. George Kalamaras similarly takes this "stand," and in the process embraces his literary, cultural, and familial history, taking us on an odyssey to unexpected places both inward and outward."In his tenderly written new book, former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras is taking us on a poetic voyage of perpetual metamorphosis, deflating time and space, (re)uniting both sides of the Atlantic, invoking the Pelasgian magic of the Aegean within, and elegantly compounding both his immigrant and poetic ancestral lineages. Poetry is a haunted practice, Peter Gizzi writes, particularly well-equipped to speak with the dead. Kalamaras has artfully proven this existential fact. Like in Jack Spicer's After Lorca, Kalamaras resurrects, blows life into, and converses not with one, but with many dead, who all seem to constantly flow in and out of him and in and out of each other."--Giorgia Pavlidou, author of inside the black hornet's mind-tunnelPoetry.

World famous musician and composer Lera Auerback's poems about her Russian childhood.

A labyrinth of tantalizing yet unstable mysteries and geographies.