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Here be divagations, wanderings through Covid-stricken Manhattan streets woven together with accounts and excursions through the mind's spaces, memories real and imagined, incidents and adventures comic and sad in a world off-kilter, a mix of marvelous and concrete, quotidian and outré all playing against a pandemic background of " Time, the chorus," now luxurious as prose-poem, now expansive as fiction or essay, sheltering in place or moving through landscapes foreign and domestic, all held together floating in nervous air while the mind tells stories like Scheherazade, trying to trick the tyrant into a change of heart and set us loose again to wander where the sun never sets and Ya-Honk! goes the wild gander. It's an amazing book. These prose meditations circle, engage, even deflect the looming presence and isolations of the Covid year. Swann's "emergent occasions" are vividly described city streets, domestic moments, dreams recalled or proposed and wonderfully angular, brief narratives. In their digressive qualities they recall Defoe's Journal, not as source but as precedent. Covid left us all with varied emptiness and arbitrary time. Swann offers us his effort to fill in the blanks. -Michael Anania ... chronicles the Covid-19 pandemic as dystopian sci-fi literature, capturing the uncertainty and fear through direct experience.... And then, as can happen, when the daily trappings of life are stemmed and a community is ordered to shelter in place, the writer extracts resources from his files-memory, imagination. In the fertile, isolated mind, in the storehouse of recall and creativity, the vignettes arise. Astute and conversational, Swann's fragments swirl swiftly from encounter to concept, from ordinary moment to momentary insight. -Martine Bellen ... Brian Swann tells us the Iroquois term "ononharoin" is the ceremony in which the brain is turned upside down, where you can only riddle to get what you want. His prose poems and fictions circle real-time memories ... to recreate the mysteries of one "who captures the blue in the prism all around" and "the noise the emptiness makes." The narrator finds maggots under the floormats in "The Other Side," a man "who strangles balloons into sausages" in "The Contortionist," and a penknife that animates a desk in "Ducks." Each piece is a kind of riddle, plunging into life and where they emerge is always a surprise. -Terese Svoboda

We have poetry-words with wings," Wang Ping declares in The River Within. Ping's "words with wings" render the vitality of natural forces through corporeal experience. Her love poems extol life forms as varied as elephants, cephalopods, and the virus. Ancient, sentient memory is excavated to tie us to Earth, to be mindful of Earth's pulse and our heartbeats. At the center of this sublime collection is the stunning extended poem "How a Droplet Becomes a Tsunami: Field Notes from Standing Rock" that recalls the years-long oil pipeline protest, the history of Sioux genocide, and a consequential canoe trip that led to the Kinship of Rivers project. With precision and pathos, Wang Ping follows the pipeline account as it flows into the story of rivers, of water, drop by droplet. This is a book to be savored. -Martine Bellen, author of An Anatomy of CuriosityI have a long history of communication with Wang Ping, who has had an instructive and fascinating life between China and the United States. She has been remarkably creative with her time here and her expanding understanding of the American nation and the N. American continent.... her AWP award-winning book Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi, was totally refreshing and important.-Gary SnyderEvery day is different. Every row is different. Every stroke is different. Nothing stays the same. Every day, the Mississippi. Every day, a different river. Wang Ping is a poet by profession and a rower by routine.She sees a deep connection in these things. Flow. Rhythm. Cadence.-John Branch, in "A Long Shining River of Verse, Flowing from a Rower and Writer," NYTSince her first book of poetry, Flesh and Spirit, Wang Ping has been a major moral and spiritual force in American letters.... Her model of consciousness: the cephalopod, which thinks with its limbs. As she writes in the poem,"Magic,""This is the sound of magic / running through our veins / Moving the sky and earth / Passing though us like rivers / All the noise on earth will die / But not this silence of faith / The innocence persisting to believe / To see more than can be seen." ... she is doing the good work of saving us. One strategy: a crown of river sonnets of nearly perfect formality.-Paul Hoover, editor of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology

Vivid Partitions is a lyric study of the illusions that separate us from our true selves. It begins with poems that contemplate a lost time of greater intensity and purpose. This meditative phase is broken by an erotic awakening, no less radical for being mingled with a sense of violated solitude. As love grows, so does the competing sense, which attempts to break through the surface of love's illusions, which become still more vivid and possessing, even as the thwarted demand for a restored solitude gets more destructive, threatening a return to the abyss. The animal fables and hushed night-pieces of the latter part of the book evade further conflict and accept what remains unreconciled. As a whole, Vivid Partitions moves toward an acceptance of our separation from our true selves, while also hinting at a path to the truth that spares illusion.n this extraordinary debut, Uri Rosenshine pries open both the beauty and the disintegration of everyday experience. With exceptional poetic precision, he sets out to give things their "due poignancy" and attunes his reader to the sense of being in the midst of a lifetime. Ranging masterfully from the intimate to the speculative, this is poetry that enables you to linger and to see anew what is right in front of you. -Martin Hägglund, Yale University, author of This Life Rosenshine's poems possess an optic at once capacious and dazzlingly acute. They are enrapturing, cutting in their wit, and expansive in their geographies. Taking in the rhododendrons above a lover, tracing everything from shipyards and floating lanterns to different continents and the neuroses of intimates, they illuminate the nightscapes of Chagall and the monads of Leibniz while nodding to that moment of speech that is on the cusp of being. Here is a voice in the process of a brilliant blossoming. -David Francis, Yale University, translator of Footwork: Selected Poems by Severo Sarduy True to its title, Vivid Partitions is the rare work that sharpens our sense of reality by wresting a trove of brilliant images-plants, Stevensian parrots, curios, well-appointed rooms-from the dense fabric of the quotidian and everyday. Rosenshine's poems divulge the "major content" of a young lifetime and give voice anew to the ancient need to live a life of beauty and form. A remarkable first work. -Jensen Suther, Harvard Society of Fellows

You've lost everything, my enemy said. No, I answered, I still have you, Jeff Friedman writes in his inspired new collection of prose poems and micros, Ashes in Paradise. His fabulist inventions, biblical retellings, lyrical improvisations, and contemporary mini tales brilliantly depict the deep sorrows and absurd tragedies of these dark times. In Ashes in Paradise, a monster who looks like everyone else says to a monster hunter, "If you believe in monsters, perhaps you are a monster." The cops shoot a boy so many timesthathevanishes,and "Alltheycanseearetheholes."Amarriedcouplepurchases a tube of orgasms from Amazon only to watch the orgasms turn into bubbles popping above them. And a woman gives birth to herself and tells her husband she needs "a break and some new clothes." Surreal and darkly humorous, the prose poems and stories in this collection glow with the intensity of heaven-and hell.Jeff Friedman shows us the flexibility, stamina, and hilarity of the prose poem in his latest book Ashes in Paradise. Fabulist renditions of the political horror and unease of our times (the pandemic, police violence, political unrest) are set against wry, revisionist Biblical tales and neo-surreal domestic dramas (discounted orgasms delivered by Amazon Prime).... he brilliantly deflects our world's terror back onto the world and we, as readers, see ourselves and laugh an uneasy laugh. -Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story and Queen for a Day: New and Selected Poems ... In these short (but in no way slight) poetic surrealist tales we encounter: puppets that go hunting, an underwater beggar, a man who eats a piece of a star, a couple who order orgasms on Amazon, a chair that growls ... With an absurdist's wise irony Friedman makes good sense of what undergirds our very real precepts of what guides us, what trips us up, and what along with us, has its grip on the wheel. -Robert Scotellaro, author of God in a Can and Bad Motel Ashes in Paradise revolves around themes of otherness, hope and loss: with recurring holes, monsters, masks, lovers, avocados, animals and dreams, a father and mother, sister and brother. Stars and angels, vampires, spots, chairs, a coyote. A lover giving birth to herself. Jeff Friedman's prose is magical yet real, worldly and otherworldly. This book is a planet of its own. Wonderful, original, and lovely. -Kim Chinquee, author of Oh Baby and Wetsuit

From the melancholy, pandemic-inflected New Poems ("Can meaning take its storied place on suddenly vacant shores?") to the vatic lyricism of To Be Read in the Dark ("the smiling assassin / isn't a dream / what is embodied / asks us to listen"), to the meditations on gifts and giving in Among the Names ("among men / who find in the taking / the gift they seek / (use = accumulation"), this gorgeous and overdue volume amply demonstrates the amazing depth and breadth of Maxine Chernoff 's subjects, structures, approaches, language, and empathy. -Sharon Mesmer In Maxine Chernoff's new collection of excellent earlier and brilliant melodic new poems, beautiful staccato images follow one another in short lines that dance down the page in a magical stream. The poems are alive with surreal vigor, and surprises abound. In their formality and artfulness of design, they are also pleasantly unpredictable. The natural world fascinates Chernoff (birds, a leaf, a raindrop), and her insight into a wide range of other subjects is always rendered with the same lyrical intensityand poignancy she brings to the natural world. -Clarence Major Chernoff translates ashes to clay, and life to light, in this seafarer epic that navigates both land and sea with wisdom. She is at home in her vision but at ease in the company of Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers and Mina Loy. -Andrei Codrescu, author of Too Late for Nightmares: New Poems Maxine Chernoff is a wordsmith par excellence. Her new collection covers political turmoil, pandemic anxiety, and matters of the heart and body, while finding language for our fractious times. Chernoff 's poems are indeed "lacing the world in / tangled sound and / string." -May-Lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants and Tomorrow in Shanghai: Stories

Indran Amirthanayagam is a true global poet, and this book in Kreyòl ayisyen (Haitian Creole) is his most important thus far. Here, an outside observer, living in the land as a cultural attaché, gives the language and culture of Haiti the ultimate respect-poems that bring the joys and pain, love, mysteries and history of the everyday life of the people into Poetry's orbit. Amirthanayagam is a poet like no other (he also writes in Spanish, French, Portuguese), and this book is a grand achievement. -Bob Holman, Poet, Professor, Producer: The United States of Poetry, founder: Bowery Poetry Club This book is a Love poem to Haiti written in the language of the Haitian people by a Sri Lankan-born poet who lives in the United States where, among other things, he writes a Poetry/Culture column for the newspaper Haiti en Marche. His love of that island is real and in the finest tradition of immigrant culture. -Jack Hirschman, emeritus Poet Laureate of San FranciscoHere is a long love note to Haiti-a beautiful centering of it by poet and diplomat Indran Amirthanayagam. Written on the eve of his taking the country's leave, the poems offer up the complicated negotiations of the heart's farewell: to the land, to relationships forged, to a specific cultural sensibility and cosmology. Amirthanayagam situates himself simultaneously as insider and outsider, a stance that supports a space of great sympathy, clarity and fertile opacity. Here is a poet keenly aware of the work of poems, and poets, to word the world-and to create the bridges that connect us. -Danielle Legros Georges, Boston Poet Laureate, 2015-2019Language takes center stage as subject and objective in these intelligent and essential poems by Indran Amirthanayagam. How to recenter what is personally important and politically necessary? The solution is radical poetic license. License as in drive, marry, shoot. In these poems written by the poet in Haitian Creole, and then self-translated into English, readers are given Haiti in this urgent moment, and in presenting us with Haiti, we are given humanity. -Kimiko Hahn, Chancellor, The Academy of American Poets, author of Foreign Bodies

Self-confessed 'wise guy of the prose poem' and also its unofficial laureate, Peter Johnson is one of America's foremost practitioners and critics of prose poetry. The publication of his While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems provides an important opportunity to reflect on the reputation of a master of the form, who, according to poet and critic Chard deNiord, 'almost singlehandedly revived the currency of the prose poem during the nineties and early oughts.' Indeed, Johnson has been a major force in the development of the American prose poem for more than three decades and has contributed significantly to its prominence on the world stage.... But it is his darkly comic and often deeply poignant prose poems that have done most to advance the form. His own writing possesses many of the characteristics he prioritizes and supports as a critic and editor. These include a sobering directness, a persuasive and unostentatious intellectualism, and a powerful sense of the ironic and absurd....

In his 19th book of verse, the New Romantic sonnets of Jeffrey Cyphers Wright are accompanied here by his beguiling artworks. His rhino horns and coral reef trombones, his vast vats of sperm-whale sperm and flame-thrower UFOs will grab you by your anathemas and never let go.

Choreomania explores how trauma binds us, even as it tears us apart, how loss deepens a sense of aloneness, the depths of which remain stubbornly haunted by legacy, language, gratitude and debt. History's outbreaks of collective dancing in times of plague bespeak not merely a world weariness and manic refusal, but also an energized longing to connect, even as we journey inward, to open there some lost gate. No empathy without an imagination, no imagination without its risk of sorry listening. As a book about community in crisis, this collection would investigate our readiness to listen as not only a moral and psychological summons but an art.

In Filthy Creation, Dylan makes sense of her world through art. Her house is a graveyard of inspiring auto parts her mechanic father has dragged home, her family's ongoing Frankenstein diorama, and Dylan's own mishmash of assemblage projects that she sets on fire whenever they don't meet her standards. Dylan and Shay fall in artsy, gothy, queer love even as Dylan is figuring out that her dead dad-whose ghost has been visiting her even though she doesn't believe in such things-was not in fact her biological father, but who was? As Dylan tries to find out, and find herself as an artist, she gets sucked into the world of visiting art teacher, Simon Ambrogio-learning to box and to embrace the more violent side of creativity, and running away from her secret-keeping mother. But she has raw and passionate artwork, and shouldn't that be enough? Filthy Creation asks what it means to be a girl maker. How do girls fit into the false dichotomy between brilliant, monstrous men artists and supposedly domesticated women ones? And how can a young artist even figure out her own identity amid all this noise?

In And Yet It Moves, the poet is an archeologist of mourning rediscovering thatassaults on science and reason are not new phenomenon. Gallagher followsPetrarch who spawns a new lyric in part inspired by lost texts, and who motivates'book hunters' of the Renaissance to search for the buried as well. The worldchanged when Poggio Bracciolini discovered Lucretius' On the Nature of Things ina Benedictine library. Lucretius' poem is a meditation of the universe as infinitenumbers of atoms wandering randomly through space with no master planwhatsoever. The book birthed humanist philosophy, masterworks such as theBirth of Venus, and inspirations for Galileo Galilei. When Galileo's patrons thepowerful Medici rose to the Papacy, they chose their power over science andreason-sentencing and silencing Galileo for life for proving that the earthrevolved around the sun. Digging with his pen, Gallagher brings these storiesback in 'talking sonnets' as if ditching the Latin for the more colloquial Italian ofthe people that came into form during the era. Upon his sentencing, Galileo's issaid to have uttered 'Eppur si muove,' knowing that the truth will eventuallyprevail.

Some Flowers is an original in the earliest and now most necessary sense of that word. In these poems, Hunter imagines the actual earth and weathers of language back to their origins in first substances and first light--their Edens, if you will. And quite wonderfully, this imagination succeeds in vivid company; the canons of the art chime in; the shimmer of love inspires. And yet all of Some Flowers is accomplished in the most effortless and welcoming idiom I have read in a very long time. This is a book to keep near and to believe. -Donald Revell

Born into a wealthy Boston banking family, the nephew of J. P. Morgan, Harry Crosby was the very embodiment of flaming youth in the Roaring Twenties. A recipient of the Croix de Guerre for heroism in the American Ambulance Corps in World War One, he sustained trauma that fueled his extravagant and restlessly experimental expatriate lifestyle with his wife Caresse in Paris, before taking his life and that of his mistress in a notorious double suicide in a New York City hotel room in 1929. The Crosbys'' Black Sun Press was famed for its elegantly designed limited editions, publishing first editions of important works of modernism, including Hart Crane''s The Bridge, and the first excerpts of Joyce''s Work-In-Progress to appear in book form. Crosby''s own poetry has been little seen since its original publication in books by the Black Sun Press, the last of which appeared in 1931. Now acclaimed editor and poet Ben Mazer has brought together all of Crosby''s contemporary magazine and anthology appearances, as well as drawing on poems from five of Crosby''s collections, to present the first authorized edition of Crosby''s poems to appear in book form since 1931.

Surrealism, vivid imagery, and spare language draw on tradition to forge a new species of contemporary fairy tale in these poems about love and its demise, family, and identity. Bicher’s language is brilliantly spare, and her images are precisely and vividly cut, but pain is the whetstone that hones her lines to their keen, sometimes near-lethal edge....

The poems in Hue & Cry, Martin’s second poetry collection, explore the world of art—what inspires creativity? what does genius mean? what awakens the imagination? who decides who is an artist? But these poems are also about the art of living in the world. In particular, the dozen poems in the voices of Picasso’s lovers, wives, mistresses, and friends portray women as creators, subjects, and muses against the backdrop of the entire twentieth century.

From athletic events to family portraits to celebrations of historic scenes, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery speaks with the stately music of complex witness....The drama of these poems is to convert physical life to words without losing touch with physical life.

Michelson traveled for extended stays to Finland, Sri Lanka and China. In poems from these ventures, the narrator’s aggressive, appetitive stance and roiling language is replaced by the more narrative, less self-reflexive language of the witness. This is especially true of the Sri Lanka poems, which represent both the visitor’s wonder at an exotic, tropic world and the explicit terrors of trying to negotiate a police state under siege by violent insurgents. Michelson is at all times acutely aware of the politics in which his poetry operates.

In Scott Withiam’s Doors Out of the Underworld, marvelous things occur: a pear talks to a man and a woman talks to a book. German restaurants dissolve into empty lots and surf clams teach life lessons. His magic touch shines a stark beam into our lives which illuminates both the pains and pleasures of growing older, of discovering more than we knew was there or perhaps wanted to know....—John Skoyles