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Nervous System
A moving and kinetic collection of poetry from the 2018 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Monica Youn Unexpected, unusual, and stirring, the poetry of Rosalie Moffett “takes us to the brink of a world continually unmaking itself,” (Georgia Review). From diving-bell spiders to the nervous system of the human body, from trees growing so heavy with fruit that they split to dogs galloping through snowy hills, Moffett’s world is rendered with precision, intricacy, and extraordinary beauty. Exhilarating in its technical expertise but also steeped in a profound connection to the natural world and the human psyche, Nervous System is a collection from a major emerging voice.
June in Eden
Sometimes June in Eden occupies a garden in a wild landscape. Other times, we're given a terrain where the coveted tree is one that hides a cell tower, where lungs are likened to ATMs and prayers are sent via text message. Rosalie Ruth Moffett's debut collection of poetry, June in Eden, questions the human task of naming in a time where there are "new kinds of war that keep / changing the maps," where little mistakes--preying or praying, for instance--are easily made. The heart of this book is an obsession with language, its slippages and power, what to do when faced with the loss of it. "Ruth," says our speaker, is "a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore--the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless." There is, throughout this collection, a dark humor, but one that belies a tenderness or wonder, our human need to "love the world / we made and all its shadows." Rosalie Moffett's June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.
Solve for Desire
A debut poetry collection exploring the real lives of siblings Georg and Grete Trakl while addressing themes of desire, addiction, loss, and absence. Georg Trakl is one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. Less is known about his sister, Grete: also gifted, also addicted to drugs, and dead by her own hand three years after Georg’s overdose. But in Solve for Desire—selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Caitlin Bailey summons Grete from the shadows. At once sensual and acidic, obsessive and bereft, the Grete of these poems is a fairy-tale sister leaving “missives dropped around the city, crumbs / for your ghost....
Radioapocrypha
A novella in verse, Radioapocrypha envisions what would have happened if Jesus Christ had arrived for the first time not in Palestine two thousand years ago but in a subdivision in Maryland in 1989, the year Depeche Mode released "Personal Jesus." In this suburban retelling of the gospel, Jesus is a hunky post-punk high school chemistry teacher and the disciples are a twelve-member garage band. The story unfolds as recorded testimony and overheard teachings, a series of alternating lyric poems, prose poems, and parables that engage the social, sexual, and racial tensions of an era. Told from the point of view of the Magdalen character, named Maren--and drawing from the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Mary as well as other scriptural sources--these poems sample widely from popular music and 1980s culture to recast and revivify a gritty, surreal, crackpot story of loners, losers, and lovers.
The Stuntman
Musings on the modern epidemic of narcissism in “deadpan, witty poems that flash with plangent images and macabre moments” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). “THE EARTH BROKE OPEN CAUSE WE BROKE IT OPEN,” blares the first line of this enrapturing debut collection mapping the myth of Narcissus and Echo and the Iron Range roots of Bob Dylan onto a world growing increasingly self-obsessed. Against the backdrop of the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Brian Laidlaw examines the ways narcissism has flooded culture. Much like a “hawk has a horizontal sweet spot on its retina / for spotting prey on the prairie,” the speaker of these poems “has a narcissus / shaped sweet spot / all the better to spot himself.” The volume comes combined with a brand new LP from Laidlaw produced by Brett Bullion, co-arranged by Hibbing native Danny Vitali, and featuring members of The Pines and Halloween, Alaska. Expanding on the themes addressed in The Stuntman, the album provides listeners an innovative multimedia experience. “[A] gorgeous debut.” —Chris Martin
Beautiful Zero
From love and war to Shark Week and college football, this award-winning poetry collection “makes both the marvelous and quotidian buzz with brilliance” (Matt Rasmussen). Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like “a knife you don’t see coming.” A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through Beautiful Zero, embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, “Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are.” Winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry
Sanskrit of the Body
In this mesmerizing debut collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series, we’re witness to an expansive travelogue of the human spirit that moves throughtfully through multiples ages, cultures, and beings. Each poem explores in depth, through pensive, evocative images, aspects of the human condition and their place within the rich continuum of animal existence. W.B. Keckler presents these poems in a fugal form, uniting the individual works in what he describes as a “holistic formalism” that reveals the poems’ powerful collective meaning. Lives and afterlives are explored with equal care as Keckler attempts to restore the concept of “spirit” in a modern world often overwhelmed by materialistic priorities. “Readers will find these poems lively and pleasurable. They are deft and rich in language, grounded in the actual—even the ordinary—yet admitting into their brief structures a deeper existence of strangeness, or mystery. Which is to say, that they have entered the true realm of the poetry. In a literary age pleached with sameness, this book is a bright and swirling original.”—Mary Oliver
It's Not Magic
Snapshots of youth, displayed with verve and sparkling clarity, in a new collection of poems that “dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand” (Richard Blanco). From jaunts through New York subways, to a Cincinnati Waffle House, to a chance encounter with one’s future life partner, Sands writes in turns autobiographically and imaginatively, drawing on voices from his private world and the public sphere to create an urgent portrait of youth that is almost rebellious in its sheer, persistent joy. Nostalgic and vivid, this collection of poems is written reverie. Selected by Richard Blanco, Jon Sands is the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series.
Little Big Bully
Winner of the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry In a new collection that is "a force of nature" (Amy Gerstler), renowned Native poet Heid E. Erdrich applies her rich inventive voice and fierce wit to the deforming effects of harassment and oppression. Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we - how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women's resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. What is truth now? Who are we now? How do we find answers through the smoke of human destructiveness? The past for Indigenous people, ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.
Hugging the Jukebox
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