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Litany for the City
by Ryan TeitmanSelected by Jane Hirshfield from over six hundred manuscripts, Litany for the City is the winner of the tenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Of Litany for the City, Hirshfield writes, "This book carries both startling imaginative freedoms and the impulsion of a person navigating the terrain of his life by means of the star-chart and sextant of poems--a winning combination, for me."Ryan Teitman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He holds an MA and MFA from Indiana University. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson (American Poets Continuum Series #196)
by Rusell EdsonA baby that keeps losing its brain, a cow in a wedding gown, a woman whose chest is a radio — bizarre and whimsical figures populate this collection of dreamlike prose poems from Russell Edson (1935-2014), with a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic.A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Edson’s whole career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness. Craig Morgan Teicher calls us to witness Edson’s obsessions with the curious, the absurd, and the peculiar, and the ways in which they can haunt our daily lives. The prose poems in this collection mold our everyday into something extraordinary and unsettling. Edson’s poems are surreal fables in which his characters experience all that life throws at them— marriage, parenthood, technological advances, aging, dying, the afterlife— through irreverent dialogue and vivid imagery in turns both humorous and grotesque. Russell Edson is a vital and ever-contemporary poet with a unique moral and comedic vision, whose literary career quietly yet definitively shaped the prose poetry subgenre as we know it now.
The Living Theatre (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Bianca TarozziWINNER OF THE 2018 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY TRANSLATION In this first US publication of celebrated Italian poet Bianca Tarozzi, narrative poems (presented bilingually in both English and the original Italian) carry us through the poet's childhood memories of World War II under Mussolini, harsh post-war conditions, and mid-century changes that transformed Italian life, specifically for women. A unique figure in contemporary Italian poetry, Tarozzi draws significant influence from acclaimed American poets-Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill-interweaving powerful subjects with humor and heart.After:you have packed the suitcase, shut off the gas,turned all the lights out, locked the windowand the big outside door,when you lean against a wall, afraid of falling,and wait, expecting the vehicle,the means that will transport youfar away,when the sky sails clear,blue, and annihilating above the overpass,and you have no past or future,in that empty momentpoetry pitches its tent.Bianca Tarozzi was born in Bologna in 1941. Her father was a political prisoner under Mussolini, and then a Senator after the war. She received a degree from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and taught English and American Literature for many years at the University of Verona. The recipient of numerous literary honors, she has translated into Italian the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Housman, Denise Levertov, and Louise Gluck. Also the author of many books of poetry, she began writing poems in 1947, and continues to this day. She currently splits her time between Venice and Milan, Italy.
Long Lens: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Continuum)
by Peter Makuck"Peter Makuck sees through the detritus of daily life to what matters. . . . It’s that essence that lives deep down in things, looked for in people, sea- and landscapes, and creatures, that lifts the quotidian toward the marvelous, and animates this selection of poems from four decades."—Brendan GalvinFrom "Long Lens":Folding laundry, I can see our clotheslinewaving its patches of color like the flagof a foreign country where I had happily livedin a small clapboard house surrounded by pines.I can hear my mother in her strong accentsaying she didn’t want a dryereven when we could finally afford one—Our sheets won’t smell of trees and sunlight anymore.Long Lens represents forty years of Peter Makuck’s work, including twenty-five new poems. With precise language, Makuck’s imagery evokes spiritual longing, love, loss, violence, and transcendence. His subjects include the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; scuba diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a small plane; rescuing a boy caught in a riptide; and lucid observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, and a pelican tangled in a fishing line.Peter Makuck taught at East Carolina University from 1976 to 2006, where he founded Tar River Poetry. He was 2008 Lee Smith Chair in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. Winner of the Brockman Award and the Charity Randall Citation, he lives on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.
Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum #Vol. 76)
by Alan Michael ParkerIn Love Song with Motor Vehicles, Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker’s robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn’t usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open.Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).
Mandatory Evacuation
by Makuck PeterThrough lyrical narrative, the poems in Mandatory Evacuation find radiance in everyday people and subjects by the simple act of noticing-of seeking that which matters most. Like returning home with new eyes after a devastating storm, these poems startle us to awareness, focusing on the passage of time, the beauty of small, fleeting moments, and the importance of paying attention.
Model Homes (American Poets Continuum #Vol. 87)
by Wayne KoestenbaumWayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet’s present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements.Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He was co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, has published three books of poetry and three books of prose, and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books and other periodicals. He lives in New York, NY.
Mother Country (American Poets Continuum Series #183)
by Elana BellMother Country examines the intricacies of mother–daughter relationships: what we inherit from our mothers, what we let go, what we hold, and what we pass on to our own children, both the visible and invisible. As the speaker gradually loses the mother she has always known and upon whom she has always depended to early onset Parkinson’s disease and mental illness, she asks herself: “How do you deal with the grief of losing someone who is still living?” The caregiving of a child to her parent is further compounded by anxiety and depression, as well as the pain of a miscarriage and the struggle to conceive once more. Her journey comes full circle when the speaker gives birth to a son and discovers the gap between the myths of motherhood and a far more nuanced reality.
Mules of Love (American Poets Continuum)
by Ellen BassBalancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass’s Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child’s birth, a kiss,/ or even me—in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on—thinking of you."Marketing Plans: • National advertising • National media campaign • Advance reader copies • Course adoption mailingAuthor Tour: • Berkeley • Boston • Minneapolis • San Francisco • Santa CruzEllen Bass is co-author (with Laura Davis) of the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 1994), which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Double Take, and Field. In 1980, Ms. Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati. Last year, she won Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, judged by Thomas Lux. She was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, where she has taught creative writing for 25 years. She has also taught writing workshops at many conferences nationally and in Mallorca, Spain.
The Naomi Letters (American Poets Continuum Series #186)
by Rachel MenniesRachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi—and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes—a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance.
Next: New Poems (American Poets Continuum #15.00)
by Lucille CliftonFinalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminated her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."--The Women's Review of Books
Night Angler (American Poets Continuum #172)
by Geffrey DavisWINNER OF THE 2018 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARDGeffrey Davis’s second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace—sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.
No Need of Sympathy (American Poets Continuum)
by Fleda BrownNo Need of Sympathy is an exceptionally wide-ranging poetry collection, touching on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and the natures of poetry and reality. These poems, the eighth collection by Fleda Brown, ask huge questions; they zero in like a microscope on what’s here, at hand. They are spoken with humility, great humor, curiosity, and a deep love of living.
Nomenclatures of Invisibility (American Poets Continuum Series #200)
by Mahtem ShiferrawThrough a lens simultaneously historical and political, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to personal and collective experiences of migration, motherhood, and immigration’s complicated notions of home.In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and state. Through a decolonial poetics, giving name to everything in her path from the Italian colonization of Eritrea (and failure to colonize Ethiopia) to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw’s poems dismantle the empire's sterility of language, both historical and present. In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: “We walk in unison too: our backs bending at once,/ our arms breaking, our abdomens kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again…what else would you be—”
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Continuum)
by W.D. SnodgrassUntil the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle, along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections.from "Nocturnes"Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone.W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Sohrab SepehriSohrab Sepehri (1928-1980) is one of the major Iranian poets of the 20th century. His verses are often-recited in public gatherings and lines from them were used as slogans by protesters in 2009. A painter, wood-worker, and poet, Sepehri wrote these poems after journeys through Japan, China, and India, where he was exposed to various cultural arts and spiritual disciplines.
On the Shores of Welcome Home (American Poets Continuum #176)
by Bruce WeiglIn this Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection of poems, Bruce Weigl meditates on the ghosts and the grace one encounters in life’s second act. A celebrated poet and veteran of the Vietnam War, Weigl offers a nuanced sense of aging as a departure and death as a returning home. With a sage’s eye for mindfulness and a soldier’s longing for the country where he served, Weigl’s poems reveal the long scars left by Vietnam and the new possibilities one encounters in the wake of life-altering experiences.
The Orchard: Song And The Orchard (American Poets Continuum #82.00)
by Brigit Pegeen KellyRichly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly&’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.
The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001 (American Poets Continuum)
by Louis SimpsonFew poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual&’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover&’s quarrel with the world."Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."—Seamus HeaneyEducated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words (American Readers Series)
by Interviews by Tony LeuzziPasswords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry "schools" and "movements" to cut to the art of the matter. Tony Leuzzi's astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. These new interviews provide insights into the poets and their poems without losing any of their mystery. Whether you're looking for deeper understanding of your favorite poets or simply interested in the lives of contemporary artists, Passwords Primeval reveals the interconnectedness of these masters whose voices echo each other from opposite ends of the same canyon.
Postcards from the Interior (American Poets Continuum)
by Wyn CooperPostcards from the Interior is a collection of postcard poems written from different geographical locations and varied states of heart and mind. The first section, "Postcards from Vermont," is composed of poems about Vermont towns and historical landmarks. The second section, "Postcards from the Interior," stretches to include poems from far-flung places, real and imagined. Adroit at juxtaposing the exterior weather of landscapes and the interior weather of the human condition, Cooper writes poetry with the heft of a Romantic meditation and the breezy ease of contemporary song lyrics.Wyn Cooper has published three previous poetry collections. A poem from his first book was turned into lyrics for Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song "All I Wanna Do." He lives in Battleboro, Vermont.
Praises & Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Aída Cartagena Portalatin Angela Hernández Núñez Ylonka Nacidit-PerdomoAs tropical as it is topical, this landmark anthology gives voice to three powerful women poets from the Dominican Republic. Together they present a wide array of linguistic and stylistic elements, and they address shared political and cultural issues that illuminate what it means to be a woman in the modern-day Dominican Republic. Translator Judith Kerman, who began the anthology as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, notes that "contemporary women poets from the Dominican Republic are the most underserved group when it comes to English-language translations." This anthology remedies that omission with poetry that is smart, edgy, and groundbreaking.
Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin
by Janice N. HarringtonA biographical reflection on the art and life of Horace H. Pippin-the best-known African-American artist of his time-Primitive is a critique on current perceptions surrounding African-American folk art, as well as the absence of key African-American history in present-day curricula. Award-winning poet Janice Harrington connects readers with a fascinating, odds-defying artist, all while underscoring the human need for artistic expression.
Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (American Poets Continuum #No. 21)
by Lucille CliftonBrilliantly honed language, sharp rhythms and striking syntax empower Lucille Clifton's personal and artistic odyssey. Hers is poetry of birth, death, children, community, history, sexuality and spirituality, and she addresses these themes with passion, humor, anger and spiritual awe.