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Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age is an unwaveringly confident debut collection and an exciting contribution to contemporary poetry. This collection does not invite us but compels us to look with the poet, as Petronella addresses the female body and female relationships with rare candor and emotional resonance. This collection is remarkable in its lyrical precision as well as its unique command of narrative, which together reveal a storyteller whose power is speaking aloud what has been deemed unspeakable. Her stories are of loss, yet Petronella refuses to romanticize grief, choosing instead to highlight the many guises and contours of grief’s ugliness. Petronella’s speakers are therefore appropriate in their disgust, their suspicion of meaning, even as the poet herself tries to make meaning through language, acknowledging its limits as well as its freedoms along the way—and taking head-on the underlying fear of both the poet and the aggrieved that “this is something / I can’t turn into something else.”
Leavetaking is an Alaska-based essay collection propelled by movements of departure and return. Corinna Cook asks: What can coming and going reveal about place? About how a place calls to us? About heeding that call? And might wandering serve not only to map new places but also to map the most familiar ones, like home? Departures and returns in these essays derive in large part from the narrator’s personal experiences of cross-continental travel by pickup truck and by airplane, human-powered expedition-style travel by kayak, regional travel by ferry, and her daily or local travel on foot. But the movement of coming and going at the heart of this collection exceeds the physical, for these essays are also intent on understanding spiritual and psychological pulses of proximity and distance in human connections to other people, their stories, and their homes.
"I take deep pleasure in these poems, wishing to park in front of them--sexy and larger than life as they are--with my feet up and a big bowl of popcorn." In a collection peppered with odes to films and stars, an elegy for Whitney Houston, and more than a few surprises, Eileen G'Sell gives us more than a little 'history, hilarity, the strewn blooms of rhyme.' Settle in, my friends. You are in for a treat." --D.A. Powell
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Angela Voras-Hills’s Louder Birds, her debut collection of poetry, is a beautiful study of the natural world, motherhood, and the inherent desire for meaning. This collection of complex lyric poems holds a haunting absence at its center, an absence that is “impossible to navigate.” Yet Voras-Hills presses on, untangling the distinctions that surround her (human and animal, domestic and wild) with both bravery and respect. She writes, “The boundaries between home and the road / are insecure: it’s impossible to navigate this landscape. / We’ve all been in the presence of something dark / and have chosen not to seek shelter.” As the poet hones in on naming the void, her surroundings grow more threatening—but not once does she surrender or turn back. Voras-Hills’s poems are smart enough to know the distinctions themselves are tenuous at best, and wise enough to know that we must always pay our dues to the world beyond our door. Wondrous, ruminative, and revelatory, Louder Birds is a collection that is not to be missed.
In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying. One of the New Yorker's Books We Loved in 2016 What emerges is an infinite series of false endings—each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Part elegy, part confessional, part battle cry, Last Sext confronts both eternal longing and the mystery of mortality, with language hot, primal, and dark, as Broder’s fans have come to love.
A captivating memoir of the author's journey through France in search of the Impressionists and their art, interwoven with personal histories of the artists, and illuminated with contemporary photographs that re-create and reimagine their work.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Lawrence Schimel. "Panini's poems have flesh and bones and they sing and mourn with the beauty of a naked lover in front of our eyes. He is much of a beautiful Frankenstein of a poet, a surgeon devilishly using a scalpel. His poetry does not reveal, dissect; does not contemplate, entice; does not talk, whispers; intimate and dangerous like a poisoned psalm. Each poem's a human puzzle, memorable and intriguing, always inviting. This book is a cartography of desire."--Carlos Pintado
Free-wheeling and surreal yet deadly serious, and including the viral hit 'Rape Joke' ('An oblique mini-masterpiece' Guardian), this book shows one of our most original poets at her virtuosic best. 'Lockwood has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our times and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get' STEPHEN BURT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Lockwood should enter the canon forever . . . her lines left me crying on the subway' KAT STOEFFEL, THE CUT 'The little hairs on my back rose often while reading Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals . . . That's biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake' DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES