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Announcing the newest winner of the oldest annual literary prize in the United States
A best-of collection from one of Canada’s most ambitious poets Problematica — a scientific term used to describe species that defy classification. See unidentifiable. George Murray is a strange beast. Lauded as one of Canada’s leading poets, his work has been published around the world, but here at home, he has never really “fit in” with his contemporaries. By turns archly formal and thoughtful, insouciant and hilarious, each of his six books seems intent on staking out its own identity, standing alone in stark contrast to all others. Yet, in this judicious selection of new and selected poems spanning Murray’s 25-year career, we see threads and patterns emerge like fractals. From...
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A “luminous [and] memorable” debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss (Publishers Weekly). “We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never...
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of their presence the way spirits in haunted houses trod over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. The poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving this sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. Though they often specify dates, there’s an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. If there really was a 1980 or 1848 or 1499, Davis implies it is somewhere. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.
Poetry. Winner of the 2020 International Book Award for Poetry. Winner of a 2019 Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Indie Reader Discovery Award for Poetry. In HIJITO--selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize--Carlos Andrés Gómez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. As a vital and tender exploration and deconstruction of contemporary society, his poetry engages with America's ever-changing landscape and the ways in which race, gender, and violence coalesce. Called powerful, truthful, and sublime by Cornel West, Gómez's words are a necessary paean t...
Poetry. "A town is a tin of children in an ocean," writes Anna van Valkenburg in her debut poetry collection, QUEEN AND CARCASS, a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht's maxim "Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life" as a touchstone. At once ecstatic, meditative, and grotesque, the poems in QUEEN AND CARCASS confront some of the most fundamental existential questions.
Poetry. LGBT Studies. A 2011 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Gay Poetry. "In these roughly whispered poems, Klein somehow--miraculously--manages to evoke a past of empty suitcases, of ghosts, while being fully present in the moment, in the now. In this way each phrase, each utterance, is completely weighted--their music enters us deeply, even as they seemingly drift past"--Nick Flynn. "Every once in a great while, someone writes a book that changes the way I read poems. Michael Klein's is one of those books. Its language is so close to the bone, there's nothing to interfere with or soften the intimate transactions between reader and poem. When the subject is death, or love, or the great metaphysical questions asked by the soul--and every poem in the book is on that scale--we see that meaning and language are one and the same"--Chase Twichell. "Everything in this book is terrifying and beautiful and necessary and there isn't one syllable that isn't absolutely required by the times we live in. This is a wholly original and essential book"--Lynn Emanuel.
'Winner of the 2017 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Eduardo C. Corral, Arsonist is a shape-shifter of a book, a book that leaves the reader with an existential 'shivering', yet, it is on fire. Loaded with lethal chemicals, like, let us say, desire, abandonment, separation and industrialized lives without homelands, burning in their brutal severance, 'Arsonist' is a spilling and boiling caldron of zig-zag figures, of wild colors split from their root, 'a son's desperate attempt to / clear the air' -- of things that long to congeal, yet, they smash into blanks, smoke and the questions of forgiveness and birth. Here, a relentless, piercing clarity, a precious text without trappings, an examination of loss and love. I salute Zihuatanejo for this blistering beauty among the ashes.'' --Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015-2017
Poetry written by Jane Craven. Winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize given annually by Cloudbank Books.