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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

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....

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.

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

Under the Music is cause for celebration, as it gathers over forty years of Maxine Chernoff's brilliant exploration of a single form: the prose poem. Her pieces abound in witty dialogue, absurdist jokes, sage advice, and a gallery of eccentric characters like "The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning," or "The Woman Who Straddled the Globe."

Every age demands its own mythos. Thilleman creates a thoroughly contemporary mythology of consciousness which names the unnameables so that they might carry us from "Descent" all the way through chaos upon chaos, morass and vision to "what is to be known now."Like William Blake, Thilleman creates a language not grammatical or ordinary, not a language merely of thinking, but a primal language rooted in the poetic of his own body, and thus this universal body we all share with this earth.

Driven is a travelogue in which the narrator reviews his life in the course of twenty four hours. A professor at a small college hopes for something different to happen on the last day of the academic year. And it does. When he leaves his home on Cape Cod for Boston where he teaches, he enters a world both real and imaginary. Two of his passengers are his dead parents. The third is the love of his life from years ago. He navigates issues of loss, class, fame and family as he passes familiar landmarks, stops at the same coffee shops, recalls the dance at the dump, the stories of barflies and entrepreneurs, eccentric colleagues and his newfound sobriety. Is it fiction or nonfiction? That depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.

American culture is strange-and appears even stranger after a hiatus. Cue Everett, back in Chicagoland after living in China. His father has just died, and re-entry to his former life is increasingly complicated. On top of that, while he was abroad everyone Everett cared about dove off the deep end. Exhibit A: Everett's mom, recently widowed, with a newfound faith in healing crystals and a ponytailed guru. Exhibit B: former roommate Dino's newly ascetic lifestyle. Increasingly drifting and desperate, Everett signs on to an unconventional venture: the high-stakes world of mushroom smuggling.Do the ends justify the means? What, even, are the ends? Eastbound into the Cosmos is the story of Everett's attempt to process the longing, the grief, the weirdness. Along the way he discovers the weird in himself, which may just be what ultimately frees him.