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As the title implies, Jam features of wealth of poems driven by a distinct music resulting from Joe-Anne McLaughlin's studies in both jazz and blues. Propelled by strong rhythms and line breaks, McLaughlin's poems present a variety of characters trying to get by on the strength of "Waller's boogies / or Morton's rolls / Hot Lips' riffs / or Bessie's groans." An original and exciting voice, McLughlin's poems are introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Stephen Dunn. Joe-Anne McLaughlin is the author of The Banshee Diaries, published in Canada in 1998. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and was included in the Puschart Prize Anthology VIII. She lives in Munnsville, New York.
Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass’s Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child’s birth, a kiss,/ or even me—in my chilly kitchen/ with my ...
In Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker’s robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn’t usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open. Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).
Sean Thomas Dougherty celebrates the struggles, the dignity, and the joys of working-class life in the Rust Belt. Finding delight in everyday moments—a night at a packed karaoke bar, a father and daughter planting a garden, a biography of LeBron James as a metaphor for Ohio—these poems take pride in the people who survive despite all odds, who keep going without any concern for glory, fighting with wit and grace for justice, for joy, every god damned day.
For over twenty years Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more populist traditions that extend back to Walt Whitman. His subject matter ranges from basketball to Bjork, from blue collar workers to Biggie Smalls, from Luciano Pavarotti to women waiting at a diner outside a prison in Upstate New York. Selecting from the best of eight previous collections, this New and Selected reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty's writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future. A former Fulbright fellow, Sean Thomas Dougherty works at Gold Crown Billiards in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award, this book-length poem is a collection of voices-in-dialogue—overheard, remembered, internal—that represents the mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of humanity, the hypocrisy bred in the bones of American venture. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news, and poets fill these pages, capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential.
Theophobia is the latest volume in Bruce Beasley's ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim's Deviations" and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley seeks the Biblical Kingdom of God among Dolly the cloned sheep, the wonders and horrors of extremophilic creatures living in astonishing intensities of temperature, robotic phone operators, and Wikipedia's explanation of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit. Bruce Beasley is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007). He has won fellowships from the NEA and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes.
Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins' previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.
"These soul-infused, deftly crafted stanzas pulse with the rhythms of a poet who lives his life out loud. Sean Thomas Dougherty has always shunned convention in favor of his fresher landscapes—and this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon."—Patricia Smith Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be. The author of ten previous poetry collections, Sean Thomas Dougherty teaches poetry at Case Western University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.
A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter's latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." Sutter's poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground. Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in Minnesota and Iowa. He retired from the University of Wisconsin–Superior in 2011 and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota.