Walk A Little Slower: A Collection of Poems and Other Words by Tanner Olson

 Walk A Little Slower: A Collection of Poems and Other Words is a book of hope, honesty, and joy by Tanner Olson. This collection of more than 60 poems and writings will invite you to slow down, lean in, hold fast, and to keep going. In the midst of the uncertainty and unknown, the already and not yet, the hopes and fears, we can easily forget that life was meant to be enjoyed. Tanner Olson’s writing weaves together faith, questions, humor, and hope as he encourages you to walk a little slower

March Book (Grove Press Poetry) Part of: Grove Press Poetry (12 books) | by Jesse Ball

 March Book is a wonder and a revelation. A shockingly assured first collection from young poet Jesse Ball, its elegant lines and penetrating voice present a poetic symphony instead of a simple succession of individual, barely-linked poems. Craftsmanship defines this collection; it is full of perfect line-breaks, tenderly selected words, and inventive pairings. Just as impressive is the breadth and ingenuity of its recurring themes, which crescendo as Ball leads us through his fantastic world, quietly opening doors.

In five separate sections we meet beekeepers and parsons, a young woman named Anna in a thin, linen dress and an old scribe transferring the eponymous March Book. We witness a Willy Loman-esque worker who "ran out in the noon street / shirt sleeves rolled, and hurried after / that which might have passed" only to be told that there's nothing between him and "the suddenness of age." While these images achingly inform us of our delicate place in the physical world, others remind us why we still yearn to awake in it every day and "make pillows with the down / of stolen geese," "build / rooms in terms of the hours of the day." Like a patient Virgil, insistent and confident, Ball escorts us through his mind, and we're lucky to follow.

Words for My Daughter (National Poetry Series) by John Balaban

A National Poetry Series title, selected by W.S. Merwin. "These stunning and courageous poems haunt us with their compassion. Balaban is the master of juxtapositions. As the landscape of a ravaged Vietnam melts into the American Southwest we are reminded that there are no national boundaries to the human spirit."--Maxine Kumin

Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass

 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist, 2015

Featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac

“Ellen Bass’s new poetry collection, Like a Beggar, pulses with sex, humor and compassion.”—The New York Times

“Bass tries to convey everyday wonder on contemporary experiences of sex, work, aging, and war. Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly

“In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—Booklist

Ellen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness.

From "Another Story":

After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table.

Janet and I just watched a NOVA special

and we're explaining to her mother

the age and size of the universe—

the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies.

Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall.

How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness.

I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry,

and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass.

This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says,

even though we gave her the Maker's Mark

while we're drinking Glendronach...

Ellen Bass's poetry includes  Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line  (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award.  She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun  and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University

Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space: Poems by Catherine Barnett

 The loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces―at bedside vigils and in city streets―quickens Catherine Barnett’s metaphysical poems, which are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience. Here loneliness is filled with belonging, which is in turn filled with loneliness, each state suffused and emptied by the other. Barnett’s fourth collection is part manifesto, part how-to manual, part apologia: a guide to the homeopathic dangers and healing powers of an emotion so charged with eros, humor, and elusive beauty it becomes a companion both desired and eschewed, necessary and illuminating.

Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is never far from grief or a comedy of bewilderment, inadequacy, hope. Entering Barnett’s world is a little like entering an electrically charged cloud, and the prospect of either falling or getting caught in a storm brings vertiginous and unpredictable pleasures. Bristling with uncanny intelligence, the poems are sometimes quiet elegies, sometimes meditations on art, love, and the failures of love that so often define love. Barnett might be called a realist―her style is radiantly exact―yet somehow she is a guide both into and out of the existential void. She has written a tender, dazzling collection of estrangement and intimacy

Swift: New and Selected Poems by David Baker

A sweeping achievement from a poet whose "rhythms are as alive to the roll and tang of syllables on the tongue as they are to the circulation of blood and sap" (Rosanna Warren, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize citation).

David Baker, acclaimed for his combination of “visionary scope” (Gettysburg Review) and “emotional intensity” (Georgia Review), is one of contemporary poetry’s most gifted lyric poets. In Swift, he gathers poems from eight collections, including his masterful latest, Scavenger Loop (2015); the prize-winning, intimate travelogues of Never-Ending Birds (2009); and the complications of history and home in Changeable Thunder (2001). Opening the volume are fifteen new poems that continue Baker’s growth in form and voice as he investigates the death of parents, the loss of homeland, and a widening natural history, not only of his beloved Midwest but of the tropical flora and fauna of a Caribbean island.

Together, these poems showcase the evolution of Baker’s distinct eco-poetic conscience, his mastery of forms both erotic and elegiac, and his keen eye for the shifting landscapes of passion, heartbreak, and renewal. With equal curiosity and candor, Baker explores the many worlds we all inhabit―from our most intimate relationships to the wider social worlds of neighborhoods, villages, and our complex national identity, to the environmental community we all share.

With his dazzling formal restlessness and lifelong devotion to landscapes both natural and human on full display, David Baker demonstrates why he has been called “the most expansive and moving poet to come out of the American Midwest since James Wright” (Marilyn Hacker)

XL Poems by Bakaitis Vyt , Julius Keleras , Vyt Bakaitis

 Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Lithuanian by Vyt Bakaitis. "Keleras comes across as resourceful and dazzling an Odyssean explorer as Baudelaire insisted on for the poet's quest, with stamina to match. One intention evident in his published work is a concern to uncover an abiding significance from passing events. Simultaneously probing for a common basis in actual close-up and in light of eternity, his poems may be said to be lucid snapshots developed in a subtle amalgam of memory and intuition, each successful scan being particularly effective in restoring remnants of dislocated memory to a dreamlike authenticity"--Vyt Bakaitis

The Chapbook: poesie di Charles Bane Jr.

Charles Bane Jr., a Chicago native, is a globally published poet. His work has appeared in print and online at The Indian Diary, The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Clutching at Straws, Durable Goods, Word Pond, and museumviews. com. His poetry was included in "I Was Indian: An Anthology of Native Literature, Vol 1" (Foothills Publishing). He was the only non-Native American included in the volume. In addition, his writing has been the focus of critical review, most recently in "The Poetry of Charles Bane, Jr." in The Calliope Nerve. This is his first chapbook. "We aren't used, in this ravaged era, to poems of happiness, and yet that rarity is what Charles Bane, Jr., offers us. An offering it is, nor can we doubt that this poet conceives poetry as a sacramental endeavor, with human love as our nearest approach to the divine. He takes Buber's "I and Thou" a step further to form what he calls a "monotheism of we." Judaism is supremely the religion of reinterpretation, and this poet's embodiment of it demonstrates that historical tragedy finds its best answer in the tender bonds we form in order to choose not death but life." - Alfred Corn, American poet & essayist The Chapbook is beautifully illustrated by Canadian artist Isabelle Pruneau, and designed by Polish-born artist Karolina Faber. With the touch of these two talented artists, Charles' poems of happiness, struggle, and romance sing off the page

The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008 by Jesse Ball

From the author of A Cure for Suicide and Census comes a philosophical recasting of myth and legend, folklore and popular culture: a fabulist’s compendium of poetry and prose.

Jesse Ball—long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and named one of Granta’s best young American novelists—is one of the most interesting, lyrical, fanciful, and “disturbingly original” (Chicago Tribune) writers working today. And The Village on Horseback is one of his most dazzling and varied works. These experimental pieces—including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize–winning novella “The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr”—ask the reader not to imagine the world for what it is, but for what it could be: a blank tableau on which a spirited imagination can conjure tales out of, seemingly, nothing.

The Village on Horseback is an unmissable treat, a book of voyages to be taken on journeys far and wide

Selected Poems (Penguin Poets) by John Ashbery

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

The late John Ashbery was a poet whose “teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature.” (The New York Times)  This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery’s major long poems, including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work

Martín and Meditations on the South Valley: Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." 

Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Abandoned as a child and a long time on the hard path to building his own family, Martin at last finds his home in the stubborn and beautiful world of the barrio. Jimmy Santiago Baca "writes with unconcealed passion," Denise Levertov states in her introduction, “but he is far from being a naive realist; what makes his writing so exciting to me is the way in which it manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events."

Made Flesh by Craig Arnold

 "Few... could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York

"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book Reviews

A girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.

This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.

Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old