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Prickly is a medley of nonacademic, unprofessional poems written by a cantankerous, often drunken cab driver. They range from prose-like narratives to more lyrical poems. The subjects areloosely based on Schneider's cab fares who are often mentally deranged or physically ill and also from his personal life, the domestic life of a below-blue-collar gringo and a Mexican immigrant. There is sex, humor, rants on artists and writers, and the thorny beauty of the American Southwest.

Joel Allegretti's Platypus presents the reader with, among other treats, a cento meant to be in the voice of Victor Frankenstein, a ghazal composed of the generic names of psychotropic drugs, and a tribute to the thirty-three villains from the 1960s Batman TV series. Featuring poems, short stories, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even text art, Platypus is a hybrid work named after the ultimate hybrid animal.

Queen Kong opens with an autobiographical poem chronicling childhood through graduation from college. This not only informs the reader but also clearly infuses subtle meaning throughout the remainder of the book's poems, which are all lyric in nature. It is this subtlety that poignantly pervades the crown section of the book: a collection of hard-hitting feminist poems that Bradley wrote in dialogue with famous feminists across history. Queen Kong takes the reader by storm, just like her male counterpart took New York, except Queen Kong is a powerful journey for women (and men) everywhere.

A Night in Duluth is an uncertain and often tongue-in-cheek dream in which the voice of the poet makes due, speaks to what is both lost and found-to the confusion of being in an American oligarchy where poverty is growing as fast as private prisons and every bowl of soup is likely to contain a fly. Weil imagines this Duluth as a sort of dark night of the soul in which hope and cynicism can be erased as easily as grease paint from the face of a performer. There are moments of tenderness and respite, but the surreal presence of the dead informs almost all the poems and the idea of pratfall, and dead pan, the acts of making due in a diminished life and surviving by a kind of comic-tragic shtick is all pervasive. Weil considers this his most difficult and honest book. It is a puppet theater in which most of the audience is comprised of ghosts

Dante's Unintended Flight is series of linked prose poems, inspired by Vogel's two-week hiatus in Florence, Italy, in the summer of 2014. It contends with the complexities of gender--particularly womanhood, which Vogel weaves as being a maelstrom of contradictions, quandaries, and conundrums. It is set across a span of time in the city of Florence, and alludes to both history and modern society. These poems also give a nod to feminist theory in the context of fragmented story. The complicated and sometimes incendiary relationship between "man" and "woman" is illustrated here in a very surreal and introspective narrative, which extends as if a prolonged dream, amid what would be the almost "drugged" haziness of summer in perpetual flight.

Poetry. As funny and entertaining read backward as it is read forward, TO IDI AMIN I'M A IDIOT AND OTHER PALINDROMES never fails to push the limit of thinking and unbridled curiosity. Fred Yannantuono's wit coupled with the insightful illustrations of Philippe Petit-Roulet create in this book a perfect storm of word play that you can hold in your hands, heart, and head to read and contemplate over and over.

COOL LIMBO is a series of dazzling portraits that are accessible yet complex, hilarious yet poignant, down-to-earth yet ethereal. Like its cover, which features the title poem's sexy 70's chick lounging-stoned-by the pool (as she neglects the water-winged kids she's supposed to be babysitting), the book is the best kind of party-unofficial, unpretentious, and unabashed. And everyone's there "on plastic lawn furniture...with six packs and lit cigarettes:" From Liz Taylor, Gertrude Stein, and The Golden Girls, to Orpheus, Vanity Smurf, and Stevie Nicks. Poem after poem, these figures somehow mingle with the poet, in the not-so-still life studies of his boisterous family and friends, building a narrative about the departure from suburbia to the big city (from the ghost of a boy to a realized though sometimes-haunted man)-all while commenting on, as Elaine Equi puts it, the "constantly shifting sexual codes" assigned to men and women alike. Few places can you find a poem about a gay porn star that concerns itself with the meaning of objectivity and art just pages after a charged feminist manifesto called "If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth." But beyond that colorful variety of subject and theme, not to mention his mastery of dialogue and what Mark Bibbins calls "devious one-liners," what's most remarkable about this poet in his debut collection is his ability to confront the serious and painful while never abandoning his sharp sense of humor and playful spirit.

A long overdue collection, WEST OF MIDNIGHT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, by Franz Douskey, places new works alongside pieces drawn from a decades-spanning career to illustrate the breadth of an influential and singular voice in poetry. Franz Douskey's insights are uniquely his, his voice direct and his imagination meteoric. Douskey has lived long and large. His readings and travels with such notables as James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Ai, Charles Bukowski, and F. D. Reeve are legendary. The poems are rich in wit, irreverence and a furious honesty. Everything is autobiographical. From intimate relationships, political quagmires, baseball and eroticism, Douskey wields an acerbic wit and a delicate command of tone to dive into the contradictions that make us human. From the haunted urban alleys of a turbulent childhood to his rhapsodic journeys through the nocturnal deserts of the Southwest, Douskey revels both in the absurdity of modern civilization and the heart-stopping beauty of the natural world. --Robert Reinhardt

MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM is a blues memoir in verse. With brutal honesty and lyrical prowess, Tony Medina plays the changes in an intimate collection that sticks like a stinging Ali punch and moves like a New York City subway train through the raw, unmitigated terrain of his psyche. Sparked by the sudden death of his father in Harlem, MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM examines his relationship with a long-lost mother who abandoned him at birth, exploring his Bronx projects childhood and his relationship with the paternal grandmother who wrestled him from the clutches of the State and raised him, culminating with a reunion with his terminally ill mother, attempting to fill in the gaps of a precarious past destined to collide with its bare-bones present. In this, his fifth full-length collection, Tony Medina is at his most personal and revelatory.