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Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry selected by Sheryl St. Germain. Open this book up anywhere and you'll find a poem of fierce and uncompromising energy and insight, a poem that doesn't pull any punches or take any prisoners, a poem that will both stun and uplift, even as it wounds and sometimes descends into darkness. "I've never read a poet who understands more fully the brutal paradoxes of love and of loving damaged things, nor have I ever read one whose epiphanies felt truer. Even more than the real warnings, this collection represents the real thing and you'll be changed by reading it"--Sheryl St. Germain.
"Sandra Beasley eschews the poet-as-speaker convention and unleashes a collection teeming with the inanimate, the anachronistic, and the animal kingdom. In these poems Beasley approaches the world with all of its wild music, Wednesday compromises, migrating battlefields, and lovelorn minotaurs with clarity, humor, and compassion."--
Both bleak and bewildering, Millennial Teeth, the visceral new collection by poet Dan Albergotti, maps a contradictory journey filled with longing and dread, cynicism and hope. A heady mix of traditional forms and more experimental verse, Albergotti’s volume lures readers inexorably into the poet’s obsessions with mystery, doubt, ephemerality, and silence. The poetry in Millennial Teeth will feel both refreshingly new and strangely familiar to Albergotti’s audience. Some poems pay direct tribute to such literary luminaries as Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin, while others give nods to icons of pop culture, from Radiohead to Roman Polanski. The narrator muses on the resurrection of Chr...
To say these poems balance on the fulcrum between grief and joy is too easy. Who's Asking? is a book of questions - about the nature of wonder, of meaning, questions about being caught between earth and heaven like the angels of Paul Klee's paintings who speak some of these poems. In other words, questions about the rigorous yet remorseless undertaking of being human. Large questions that bulge with a terrible asking but also those that bloom from close observation of the most ordinary circumstance. All of them shaded by the unrelenting awareness that Nobody gets saved. And yet this book is gifted with unexpected humor, unequivocal wisdom.
Poetry. "There is an extraordinary lightness to this collection of poems it is as if they are floating just above the surface of the earth, or in dream, as they celebrate love, marriage, family, friends the small accidents and genuine delights of everyday life. The poems are filtered through a sweet and deeply thoughtful sensibility. You will grow to love the narrator of these poems as she leads us, bravely and with caritas, to the threshold of things, frightening or heavenly, "that might be about to happen." Christine Poreba's debut collection is radiantly lovely.: Sidney Wade"
Hive is a remarkable debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance. Written in the voice of a teenage Mormon girl, these poems wrestle with the widening gulf between her impulse toward faith and her growing doubts about the people who claim to know God's will.
Poetry: Tina Braziel's 'Known by Salt' is very much a book of celebrations. One arc of the book is the move from a life in trailer parks to a house that Tina and her husband build with their own hands, stud by stud, window by window. It is also a celebration of Alabama, with its forests, its rivers and lakes, and its creatures: snakes, deer, birds, lizards. Her observations are so keen - 'herons lift their backward knees' - that they make me laugh out loud in my own celebration. This attention to detail is what Roethke called long looking, and it is everywhere in these well-wrought poems."--C.G. Hanzlicek, 2017 Judge, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry 2009 With poems that combine the self-scrutiny of Philip Larkin with the measure of Elizabeth Bishop, Amy M. Clark burnishes her first collection, Stray Home, with exquisite understatement and formal control. Sweeter than Larkin and more intimate than Bishop, these poems address the suppressed pain and shame of living as a childless woman in a world of mothers, the dissociation attendant on depression and fraught family relationships, and the search for a sense of belonging in the face of dislocation. Stray Home cuts deeply to discover the buried emotions and insights universal to all suffering and compassionate human beings. "Clark is able to imbu...
The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winner and nineteenth US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The Best American Poetry 2017 brings together the most notable poems of the year in the series that offers “a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable” (Robert Pinsky). Librarian of Congress James Billington says Natasha Trethewey “consistently and dramatically expanded the power” of the role of US Poet Laureate, holding office hours with the public, traveling the country, and reaching millions through her innovative PBS NewsHour segment “Where Poetry Lives.” Marilyn Nelson says “the wide scope of Trethewey’s interests and her adept handling of form have ...