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Beautiful Wall
by Ray GonzalezBeautiful Wall takes us on a profound journey through the deserts of the Southwest where the ever-changing natural landscape and an aggressive border culture rewrite intolerance and ethnocentric thought into human history. Inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and American upbringing, Ray Gonzalez's new collection mounts the wall between the current realities of violence and politics, and a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten past.Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association, he is a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Birth Marks (American Poets Continuum)
by Jim DanielsIn Birth Marks, Jim Daniels examines how our origins mark us forever. From Detroit to Pittsburgh, he explores the lives of ordinary people in a world which often seems tilted against them. His tough, unflinching poems recount family myths, urban decay, his own lies, and the struggle for survival in a post-industrial world as the economy crumbles around us.
The Black Maria
by Aracelis GirmayTaking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, The Black Maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better."to the sea"great storage house, historyon which we rode, we touchedthe brief pulse of your flutteringpages, spelled with salt & life,your rage, your indifferenceyour gentleness washing our feet,all of you going onwhether or not we live,to you we bring our carnationsyellow & pink, how they floatlike bright sentences atopyour memory's dark hairAracelis Girmay is the author of two poetry collections, Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (American Poets Continuum)
by Lucille CliftonThe long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets working today.
The Book of Goodbyes (American Poets Continuum)
by Jillian WeiseWinner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award The Book of Goodbyes speaks to a certain deranged love that throws into question sex, legality, gender-politics, disability, and the end of an affair. The book shifts between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction, and is organized like a play with Act I, Intermission, Act II, and Curtain Call.
Book of My Nights (American Poets Continuum)
by Li-Young LeeBook of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity.Marketing Plans: o National advertising o National media campaign o National and regional author appearances o Advance reader copies o Course adoption mailingLi-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.
Book of the Edge (Lannan Translations Selection Series)
by Ece TemelkuranEce Temelkuran is arguably Turkey&’s most accomplished young writer. In Book of the Edge, she describes an allegorical journey wherein the speaker, or explorer, encounters strange creatures, including a butterfly, bull, swordfish, sow bug, and cruel city dwellers. These poems point to the undeniable connection between all living beings.Born 1973 in Turkey, Ece Temelkuran (www.ecetemelkuran.com) has published eight books of poetry, prose, and nonfiction. An award-winning daily columnist for Milliyet, she was a 2008 visiting fellow at the University of Oxford&’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.Translator Deniz Perin received the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators.
The Book of Things (Lannan Translations Selection Series #18)
by Ales StegerFrom his first book of poems, Chessboards of Hours (1995), Aleš Šteger has been one of Slovenia's most promising poets. The philosophical and lyrical sophistication of his poems, along with his work as a leading book editor and festival organizer, quickly spread Šteger's reputation beyond the borders of Slovenia. The Book of Things is Šteger's most widely praised book of poetry and his first American collection. The book consists of fifty poems that look at "things" (i.e. aspirin, chair, cork) which are transformed by Šteger's unique poetic alchemy.Translator Brian Henry is a distinguished poet, translator, editor, and critic.From Publisher’s Weekly:Steger’s efforts sometimes bring to mind such Western European figures as Francis Ponge and Craig Raine, who also sought to make household things look new and strange. Yet Steger brings a melancholy Central European sense of history- his objects tend to remember, or cause, great pain: "It pours, this poisonous, sweet force,” Steger writes of "Saliva,” "Between teeth, when you spit your own little genocide.” (Nov.)From Guernica, a Magazine of Art and Politics:It is a rare treat to have an English translation before the ink has dried on the original. By which I mean, a mere five years after the book’s Slovenian publication, Brian Henry has brought these poems to life for those of us not lucky enough to read Slovenian. Henry’s translations are impressive for sheer acrobatics.
Brand New Spacesuit (American Poets Continuum #179)
by John GallaherIn Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about caring for his aging parents. These poems offer snapshots of the poet’s memories of his adoption and childhood, his father’s heart attacks, his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (American Readers Series)
by Li-Young LeeIn the foreword to Li-Young Lee&’s first book, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, &“What characterizes Li-Young Lee&’s poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.&” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country&’s most beloved poets. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family&’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.
Broken Hallelujahs (American Poets Continuum)
by Sean Thomas DoughertyFusing street scenes (from Budapest to New York City) with family history (African American and Jewish), Sean Thomas Dougherty uses both traditional and experimental forms to explore issues of identity and family. Deeply rooted in music and performance, Dougherty&’s poetry resists easy categorization, revealing the complexity of our lives and times. Sean Thomas Dougherty lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the BFA program for creative writing at Penn State Erie. He is a nationally renowned performance poet and author of nine previous poetry collections. He was a finalist for the 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize.
Buffalo Girl (American Poets Continuum Series #199)
by Jessica Q. StarkIn these hybrid poems, Jessica Q. Stark explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women's bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes — lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of wildflowers. Several illustrations from old Red Riding Hood children’s books can also be found embedded into these pieces. Juxtaposing the moral implications of Little Red Riding Hood with her mother's photography, Stark creates an image-text conversation that attends to the wolves lurking in the forests of our everyday lives. Opening the whispered frames around sexuality and sex work, immersed in the unflattering symptoms of survival, Buffalo Girl burgeons with matrilineal love and corporeal rage while censuring the white gaze and the violence enacted through the English language. Here is an inversion of diasporic victimhood. Here is an unwavering attention to the burdens suffered by the women of this world. Here is a reimagination, a reclamation, a way out of the woods.
Burning of the Three Fires (American Poets Continuum #124)
by Jeanne Marie BeaumontBurning of the Three Fires shows Jeanne Marie Beaumont using her characteristic variety of techniques: dramatic monologues, lists, prose poems, object poems, and ekphrasis, to which she adds biography, elegy, and rites. This book takes a multifaceted look at womanhood: there are dolls, historic and modern girlhoods, mythic retellings of characters from Goldilocks to the Bride of Frankenstein, emotionally charged domestic trinkets, and even a conversation with Sylvia Plath conducted via a Magic 8- Ball.Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of Curious Conduct (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004) and the National Poetry Series-winning book Placebo Effects. She lives in New York City.
Bye-Bye Land (American Poets Continuum)
by Christian BarterWinner of the Isabella Gardner Award, this book-length poem is a collection of voices-in-dialogue-overheard, remembered, internal-that represents the mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of humanity, the hypocrisy bred in the bones of American venture. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news, and poets fill these pages, capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential.
Carpathia (American Poets Continuum)
by Cecilia WolochHer traveling poetrics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift.--Sacramento News & ReviewThese poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery, grief, and joy. Poems from this collection were selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award.Cecilia Woloch was named 2004 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her last collection, Late (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003). She is founding director of the Summer Poetry Workshop in Idyllwild, California. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California, and travels extensively in Europe.From Devils Lake Journal:"Celia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succombs to loss, where "fat bees [fall] into the wine” and the ghost swans have "wings of death.” The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I’ve seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up to be more peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful.”From The Cosmopolitan Review:"One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry is that it so beautifully and skilfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness...Underneath it all, there lies a clear conviction that each of us could have been somebody else, could have been born and lived somewhere else, and yet "We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world.”
Casual Conversation (New Poets of America #47)
by Renia WhiteA Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy. Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause. Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?
Caw (American Poets Continuum Series #181)
by Michael WatersIn passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality—an artist’s infatuation with a doll, an interspecies relationship, an ex-lover whose presence lingers in recipes, ecclesiastical birds, and a sex toy holding a loved one’s ashes—Waters delivers impeccably crafted narratives infused with his signature lyrical gestures. At the book’s core is a sequence of twenty-five poems on aging, dementia, and caregiving, chiseled phrase by phrase toward unflinching and memorable closure. Caw is a brilliant, intimate and moving addition to Waters’s body of work and may be his most powerful collection yet.
Ceive
by B.K. FischerA poetic retelling of Noah’s Ark set in the near future, Ceive is a novella in verse that recounts a post-apocalyptic journey aboard a container ship. This contemporary flood narrative unfolds through poems following the perspective of a woman named Val, who is found in the wreckage of her flooding home by a former UPS delivery man. As environmental and political catastrophes force them to flee the Eastern Seaboard, Val and her rescuer take refuge alongside a group of pilgrims seeking refuge from the catastrophic collapse of a civilization destroyed by gun violence, climate crisis, and social unrest. The ship of cargo and refugees is run by the captain Nolan and his wife Nadia, who set sail for Greenland, now warmed to a temperate climate. The couple place Val in charge of caring for a neurodivergent young boy who holds knowledge of analog navigation. Mourning her missing daughter, Val experiences both isolation and a wellspring of compassion in survival, an indefatigable need to connect. She and the other pilgrims weather illness and peril, boredom and conflict, deprivation and despair as they set sail across stormy, unfamiliar waters. Drawing from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, the Bible, and the Latin root word in receive, Ceive is a vision of eco-cataclysm and survival—inviting meditations on biodiversity, illness, social law, sustenance, scripture, menopause, sensory perception, human bonds, caregiving, and loss, all the while extending a call for renewal and hope.
Celestial Joyride
by Michael WatersIn these poems of taut clarity, craft, and texture, Michael Waters continues his bold exploration of sensual pleasure and moral transgression as means of affirming spiritual faith. Just as a joyride suggests recklessness and exhilaration, so Celestial Joyride is an energized journey marked by spiritual recklessness in the face of perpetual mortality. Compelling, musical narratives offer rich meaning and vivid consequence.Michael Waters's poetry books include BOA Editions titles Gospel Night, Darling Vulgarity, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program.
Cenzontle (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America #40)
by Marcelo Hernandez CastilloWinner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers AwardAn NPR Best Book of 2018
The Chair
by Richard GarciaOne of America's foremost prose poets, Richard Garcia's The Chair simultaneously takes place in the natural world and a speculative world rich in the fabulist tradition: historical figures roam like ghosts, time is pulled and twisted, and narrative spins effortlessly out of language. A core of autobiography grounds these poems that are rife with surprises uniting the mythic and the everyday.Richard Garcia's awards include an NEA, a Pushcart Prize, and the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA program and lives on James Island, South Carolina.
Chaos is the New Calm (American Poets Continuum)
by Wyn CooperChaos is the New Calm expands the parameters of the sonnet form, putting rhymes in unusual places, inventing new stanza structures, and addressing a variety of subject matter ranging from travelogue to inner monologue, from social commentary to solitary musing. These poems are alive with sound, rhythm, and lyric insights into the world.Wyn Cooper&’s poem &“Fun&” was adapted by Sheryl Crow for her hit song &“All I Wanna Do.&” He collaborates on music and spoken word with novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Cooper is co-organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. He consults for the Poetry Foundation&’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
The City in Which I Love You (American Poets Continuum)
by Li-Young LeeContentsI.Furious VersionisII.The InterrogationThis Hour And What Is DeadArise, Go DownMy Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out LoudFor A New Citizen Of These United StatesWith RuinsIII.This Room And Everything In ItThe City In Which I Love YouIV.The WaitingA StoryGoodnightYou Must SingHere I AmA Final ThingV.The Cleaving
Clues from the Animal Kingdom (American Poets Continuum #167)
by Christopher KennedyIn his fifth collection of poems, Christopher Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. Looking to animals and their instincts for inspiration, drawing shape from the poet’s Irish Catholic working-class roots, these prose poems transcend grief and depression by seeking humanity’s place in the natural world.
A Cluster of Noisy Planets
by Charles RaffertyCharles Rafferty’s latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time—day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch—these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.