Geometry of the Restless Herd by Sophie Cabot Black

Inverting the pastoral, Sophie Cabot Black uses the keeping of animals and tending of land to interrogate the self and in turn reveal new truths about the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary America.

In Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black stages a powerful allegory for the social and political realities of our human world. Through hauntingly metaphysical poems set within a sheepherder’s domain, Black conjures fields of harvest and resurrection, of wagers and outcomes—animals to keep, and those destined for slaughter. Here, both singular voices and polyvocal choruses argue through discourse, asking who has the real power, and how are we to survive the violence we do to each other?

Black’s scenes are at once oneiric and raw: a squeaking gate wails against neglect; a field receives a runt body; a raccoon flees with egg dripping from its mouth—all while lush rains and long winters quiet the dead. Navigating both confining pens and wide-open spaces, these poems ask startlingly immediate questions about captivity and freedom, protection and exploitation, confronting the predicaments of late capitalism: industries of infinite regress, technologies that exceed us, and a soul stranded somewhere between expectation and redemption. Ultimately, these stark pastorals paint a moving portrait of life: as utterly inseparable from the world it inhabits

Lilith's Garden by Victor H. Anderson

 A companion volume to Anderson's award-winning first book of poetry, Thorns of the Blood Rose, these poems were selected by the author before his death to be contained in the present collection. Picking up where the first book left off, the poems explore themes of love, death, the beauty of the natural world, and devotions to the Goddess and God in their many guises. Some of the poems which were deemed too scandalous for inclusion in the previous work are published here for the first time

Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets by David Biespiel

Long Journey showcases work by over eighty of the Pacific Northwest's leading poets. Of the nearly two hundred poems collected in this remarkable anthology--the first of its kind for the Northwest--most are new and previously unpublished, providing readers with a fresh look at the state of contemporary poetry in the region. Featuring poets from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana

The Next of Us is About to Be Born: The Wick Poetry Series Anthology in Celebration of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center by Maggie Anderson

 “The books in the Wick Poetry Series present exciting writing by new and emerging poets. Diverse, surprising, and politically and emotionally charged, this series has published some of the best new poetry being written, chosen by many of our most beloved and respected poets. The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is a valuable addition to the landscape of contemporary poetry.”―Harvey Hix, Finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry for CHROMATIC

The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is an anthology of fifty-five poets published in the Wick Poetry Series celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Designed to be an eclectic grouping, the anthology illustrates the exciting new directions poets have been taking from the early 1990s to the present, in keeping with the Wick Poetry Center’s mission of encouraging new voices.

Since 1992 the Wick Poetry Series has published first books of poems by many of the country’s best young and emerging poets, including Victoria Redel, Richard Tayson, Honoree Fannone Jeffers, Kate Northrop, Lee Peterson, and others. The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize is offered annually and judged by well-known poets, including Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, and C. K. Williams. The Wick Center also sponsors a series of chapbooks by Ohio poets selected through two competitions―one for students enrolled in Ohio colleges and universities and one for any poet living in Ohio. This series, edited by Maggie Anderson, has published early work by many poets now publishing their second and third books, such as Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jeanne Bryner, Diane Gilliam, Joe Bonomo, Matthew Cooperman, and Mary Ann Samyn.

Including two to three poems by each poet, the range of form and subject matter of The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is varied and far-ranging. Since some of the poets were still in undergraduate or graduate programs when these poems were written, the collection makes an excellent text for use in college and university poetry workshops. In addition to the now well-known poets, there are many whose work is just beginning to be published

A Book of Poems for Black Kings by Fulterius King

A Book of Poems for Black Kings is a profound and empowering anthology that speaks directly to the hearts and souls of Black men and Black boys. This collection of poetry and prose is designed to validate their lived experiences, provide strength during trials, and facilitate deep soul-searching and self-discovery. Through poignant and powerful pieces, this book explores the multifaceted nature of power, vulnerability, and purpose within the Black male experience.

In the first section, "New Braids," readers will find poems that uplift and inspire, celebrating the strength, resilience, and inherent dignity of Black men and boys. These poems serve as a source of empowerment, reminding readers of their rich heritage and the greatness they carry within. The second section, "Managing the Frizz," delves into the complexities of vulnerability, offering a safe space for Black men and boys to confront and navigate their emotions during challenging times. These poems provide comfort and understanding, emphasizing that vulnerability is not a weakness but a powerful aspect of their humanity. The final section, "Afro - The Let Out," takes readers on a journey of introspection and soul-searching. Through deeply reflective and thought-provoking poems, this section encourages readers to explore their inner selves, understand their true essence, and embrace their individuality.

A Treatise on Stars by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau)

Winner of the Bollingen Prize

Finalist for the National Book Award

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award

Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

Powèt Nan Pò A / Poet of the Port by Indran Amirthanayagam

 Indran Amirthanayagam is a true global poet, and this book in Kreyòl ayisyen (Haitian Creole) is his most important thus far. Here, an outside observer, living in the land as a cultural attaché, gives the language and culture of Haiti the ultimate respect-poems that bring the joys and pain, love, mysteries and history of the everyday life of the people into Poetry's orbit. Amirthanayagam is a poet like no other (he also writes in Spanish, French, Portuguese), and this book is a grand achievement. -Bob Holman, Poet, Professor, Producer: The United States of Poetry, founder: Bowery Poetry Club

This book is a Love poem to Haiti written in the language of the Haitian people by a Sri Lankan-born poet who lives in the United States where, among other things, he writes a Poetry/Culture column for the newspaper Haiti en Marche. His love of that island is real and in the finest tradition of immigrant culture. -Jack Hirschman, emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems by Charles Bernstein

 All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein's best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein's characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry's sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America's most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer

The Other Side/El Otro Lado by Julia Alvarez

The New York Times Book Review has praised Alvarez’s fiction as “powerful...beautifully captures the experience of the new immigrant’s doorway where a memory is not yet the past and the future is still a dream.” 

These same qualities characterize her poetry—from the “Making Up the Past” poems, which explore a life of exile as lived by a young girl, to “The Joe Poems,” a series of beautifully sensual and funny love poems that celebrate a middle-aged romance. The collection culminates in the poem of the title: the twenty-one-part epic about the poet’s return to her native Dominican Republic, and to the internal affirmation of the conflict and the last one that the trip caused. Innovation and bold invention, the interaction of sound, the senses, and the rhythm of two languages, all characterize Julia Alvarez’s art in transforming precious memory into unforgettable poetry

La revisión del New York Times Book Review ha elogiado la ficción de Alvarez como "poderosa…captura maravillosamente la experiencia del umbral del nuevo inmigrante donde no está todavía una memoria el pasado y el futuro sigue siendo un sueño."

Estas mismas calidades caracterizan su poesía–desde sus poemas en “Making Up the Past,” los cuales exploran una vida del exilio, según vivido por una muchacha joven, hasta los poemas de "The Joe Poems," una serie de poemas maravillosamente sensuales y divertidos acerca de la celebración del amor a la mediana edad. La colección culmina en el poema del título: una épica colección de veintiún partes sobre el regreso de la poeta a su República Dominicana nativa y a la afirmación interna del conflicto ocasionado por su último viaje.  La innovación y la invención, la interacción del sonido, el sentido, y el ritmo de dos idiomas, todas caracterizan el arte de Julia Álvarez al transformar memoria preciosa en poesía inolvidable

The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised by Donald Allen and George F. Butterick

 This anthology includes many of the major poets to have emerged and gained pre-eminence since World War II, and whose writing reflects not only the significant changes in this nation’s postwar history, and the coming to grips with a nuclear age, but also an entirely new way of looking at and structuring reality. United by their “postmodernist” concerns with spontaneity, “instantism,” formal and syntactic flexibility, and the revelation of both the creator and the process through the writing itself, these 38 poets represent very diverse strains of an essential American individualism. Included are many of the poets whose work first gained widespread national attention with the 1960 publication of The New American Poetry: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and others. Among the poets included here for the first time are Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Jerome Rothenberg, and James Koller. In addition to a new preface by Allen and Butterick, the book provides autobiographical notes of all the poets and listings of their major works

Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems by Bill Berkson

 Titled after a Jackson Pollock painting at once figural and abstract, this collection spans nearly fifty years of Bill Berkson’s poetry in all its deftness and variety. His poems, full of nuance, intensity, and exuberant wit, spread meaning across the page like quicksilver. Engaging in a mix of topics and styles, Berkson deals with aspects of the observable world, dreams, art, elements, and ecstasy to create a body of work suffused with light.

Born in New York, Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic, and teacher. Formerly a professor of liberal arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, he lives in San Francisco and New York

Actual Air by David Berman

Released in paperback in 1999 by the now-defunct Open City and praised everywhere in the then-ascendant print press industry (including names that still make waves today like The New Yorker and GQ), David Berman’s first (and only) book of poetry was and is a journey though shared and unreliable memory. Uncannily inspired, Berman’s poems walk through doors into rooms where where one might hear “I can’t remember being born / and no one else can either / even the doctor who I met years later / at a cocktail party” (from “Self-Portrait at 28”), or praise “the interval called hangover / a sadness not co-terminous with hopelessness” (from “Cassette Country”) and “that moment when you take off your sunglasses / after a long drive and realize it’s earlier / and lighter out than you had accounted for” (“The Charm of 5:30”). At that time, Berman was called a modern-day Wallace Stevens and a next-wave John Ashberry, with his own logic, awareness of pop culture and sensitivity to the details of the post-postmodern world in his poems. Alongside his lyrics to a half-dozen infamous Silver Jews records, Actual Air endeared Berman to lovers of poetry, prose, and music alike. Poet James Tate said it best: “It is a book for everyone.” And poet laureate Billy Collins could only add, “This is the voice I’ve waited so long to hear.” The second edition of the hardcover version of Actual Air is limited to 1000 copies. Features of the second edition are: new larger dimensions and enlarged typeface, new dustjacket artwork variant, deluxe cloth boards, updated full-color endpapers, dust-jacket featuring a photo of the artist around the time of publication, and of course the poems that inspired all this fuss in the first place

Zen Master Poems by Dick Allen

A unique voice in American poetry evocative of Han Shan’s Zen verses, Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, and the writings of Jack Kerouac.

What a long conversation

we never had!

All those rivers?

we never crossed together.

You so busy with your own life,

I so busy with mine.

Dick Allen, one of the founders of the Expansive Poetry movement, has won the Robert Frost Prize, the Hart Crane Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize—among others. His work has been anthologized five times in the Best American Poetry volumes, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Tricycle, The Buddhist Poetry Review, and The American Poetry Review, as well as numerous other publications. He’s a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a former Poet Laureate for the state of Connecticut, where he lives and writes

Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series) by Kazim Ali

 This groundbreaking, transgenre work―part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past―is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

The Iron City: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series) by John Bensko

Queste vivide poesie narrative e liriche si concentrano su scene e personaggi delle regioni produttrici di carbone e acciaio dell'Alabama, una fonte improbabile ma ricca di meditazioni sulle emozioni nascoste delle nostre vite. La città di ferro è un mondo in cui un bambino e le persone che lo circondano sono intrappolati nel mistero dei loro dintorni, cercando di raggiungere amore, comprensione e chiarezza. L'acclamato poeta John Bensko crea immagini potenti di spazi chiusi, sia fisici che emotivi, e della sorprendente radiosità che evocano. Attraverso la metafora centrale di una materia prima che contiene non solo la sua storia ("Memoria di delicate / Felci, foglie, ossa di pesce") ma anche il suo futuro ("Carbone, la roccia che brucia"). La città di ferro esplora l'abisso tra bambino e adulto, riflettendo su vene esaurite, risorse utilizzate in modo improprio e il luccichio di una promessa nel profondo sottoterra

Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka by Jean-Philippe Marcoux (Editor)

 This collection of original essays brings together some of the most important critics and scholars of Amiri Baraka’s oeuvre. Some Other Blues consists of career-spanning conversations on the many trajectories, bifurcations, and intersections in and of Baraka’s black art. Every chapter is grounded in the desire to illuminate Baraka’s multilayered creative output—whether through critical analyses, literary historiographies, or musicological and biographical reassessments of his work. Every contributor attempts, in their own unique ways, to delineate how the contours of poems, short stories, essays, and editorials reveal the poetics and politics of Amiri Baraka. At the same time, every chapter looks outward at what Baraka saw as the fractures and fissures of our society—moments in the history of African America that have needed

The Summer of Black Widows by Sherman Alexie

THE SUMMER OF BLACK WIDOWS presents poetry that has continued to grow in power, complexity, and vision. According to reviewer James R. Kincaid, "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time," and the many honors and an international following of readers from his poems, stories, and novels proves the claim. Chris Faatz from The Nation agrees, calling Alexie "a young writer who is taking the literary world by storm … a superb chronicler of the Native American experience … he is a master of language, writing beautifully, unsparingly and straight to the heart."

Poetry. Native American Studies