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This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity. Within these pages, the poet is joined by a ';sticky trickster-self' named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower's tall tales.Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

Danielle Vogel's newest collection creates a latticework for repairthe repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated selfbut does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of ';displacements,' ';miniatures,' and ';volume,' Vogel initiates readers into the seance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a ';new, interrupted unity.' In The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, accordwriting with, reading withis always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. ';It only takes one letter on the page,' Vogel writes, ';and we are already inside one another's lungs.' To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn's sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn's work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaud, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America's fascination with violence and death, revealing that ';a human being in love with mystery is never finished.' This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

"e;Brilliant . . . Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is . . . dedicated to grieving the world as we know it."e; -Ada Limon, author of The CarryingThis collection of poems traces literal and metaphoric fault lines-rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Tess Taylor's hometown-an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault-these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses-mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink-equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious-a fearsome tremor of a book."e;Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy."e; -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

From former Missouri Poet Laureate William Trowbridge comes the full and final seriocomic saga of over-the-hill superhero Oldguy and his Quixotic misadventures, with comic book art by Tim Mayer.

A packet of letters discovered in the frame of an eighteenth-century Chinese painting starts a search in western Alaska for a remarkable orchid.

This culmination of a life of poetry, art, and social justice "e;has the freshness of an opening argument and the majesty of a man's last words"e; (Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst).Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty. His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself. Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem. A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems. As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter. This is the book that he wished to send into the world."e;There's rock-bottom integrity, a dignified modesty, and a quizzical, persistent quest for meaning in this collection. It's a final bequest to the living from an intensely generous man."e; -Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems"e;The poems of William Louis-Dreyfus testify to an inner life of great richness, but one that freely slipped across the border of the self into the world beyond . . . a fine collection of his work, and it is good to have it at last."e; -Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect

If you're one of the millions of Americans lying awake at night, asking yourself, How did we get here? you need to read Bad Stories. In a short, sharp lamentation, New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond explains why the election of a cruel con artist was not only possible, but inevitable.

Vampire Planet is an eclectic, witty, and often moving New & Selected collection of poems from a writer whom former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins calls "the wisest, most entertaining wise guy in American poetry."

Primary Source presents Jason Schneiderman's most exuberant volume of poetry, as he plays with the literary canon and explores his own personal archive. Starting with rewritten lyrics that put Cole Porter's "You're the Top" squarely in po-biz, Schneiderman takes on everyone from Shakespeare to Ashbery, making stops along the personal and the political, and interrogating ideas of race, sexuality, and love. Playful and profound, Schneiderman's light touch is guaranteed to send tingles up your spine.