Three books of poetry:
Nothing to Declare by
A bold new collection of poems of feral beauty and intense vulnerability The poems in Henri Cole's ninth book, Nothing to Declare , explore life and need and delight. Each poem starts up from its own unique occasion and is then conducted through surprising (sometimes unnerving) and self-steadying domains. The result is a daring, delicate, unguarded, and tender collection. After his last three books - Touch , Blackbird and Wolf , and Middle Earth - in which the sonnet was a thrown shape and not merely a template, Cole's buoyant new poems seem trim and terse, with a first-place, last-ditch resonance. In their sorrowful richness, they combine a susceptibility to sensuousness and an awareness of desolation. With precise reliability of detail, a supple wealth of sound, and a speculative truthfulness, Cole transforms the pain of experience into the keen pleasure of expressive language. Nothing to Declare is a rare work, necessary and durable, light in touch but with just enough weight to mark the soul.
Scattered at Sea by
A dazzling new collection from an award-winning poet--longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry"Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one's wild oats, having one's mind expanded or blown, losing one's wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer's disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin's writing on his drug experiences.
Horse Medicine by
Poetry. "Doug Anderson's HORSE MEDICINE has grit and laughter as its main ingredients. We follow the compass needle to wherever it points, and before we realize it, we have crossed numerous borders, and are delivered to some engaging truths. These homages to friends and passing strangers, to everyday souls—being in and of the larger world—transport us to a fidelity that matters in our daily lives. These poems sing in a key we feel and know. HORSE MEDICINE, tinctured with wit and love, goes down so easily."—Yusef Komunyakaa
Letterrs by
Winner of the Poetry Center Book Award from San Francisco State University (2017) LETTERRS is a book of poems that examines and interrogates language to its core, the shapes and sounds. In these poems Orlando White explores the origins and existence of letters, words, typography, the white space of the page, and their philosophical values to the writer/reader.
The Animal Too Big to Kill by
This collection, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, further establishes Shane McCrae as an indispensible poetic voice. With his unmistakable cadences, he probes insistently yet big-heartedly into some paradoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of his upbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists.
The Same-Different by
Deceptively straightforward and subtly pyrotechnic, the poems in Hannah Sanghee Park's debut collection captivate with their wordplay at first glance, then give rise to opportunities for extended reflection. "If / truth be told, I can't be true," she writes, but her startling juxtapositions of sound and meaning belie that claim, necessitating a search for the truth behind her semantic games. Here are dozens of brief sentences that can serve as epigrams to undermine our ordinary ways of seeing, as Park's playfully deployed puns recall the sly paradoxes of Oscar Wilde. The Same-Different ranges from the wonders of the natural world to close human relationships, occasioning the kind of explorations offered in "And A Lie": "The asking was askance. / And the tell all told. / So then, in tandem // Anathema, and anthem."
The Great Medieval Yellows by
Poetry. Emily Wilson's phenomenal third collection, THE GREAT MEDIEVAL YELLOWS, attends to the world with an intense, unyielding focus.
Zone by
Zone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett's fifty-year engagement with the work of France's greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire's poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett, this new edition of Apollinaire stands out not only for its compact and judicious selection of the essential poems but also as the work of an important American poet. The Washington Post has said, "No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett's translations."
Desolation of the Chimera by
"In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity: the poet attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments of his life."--Octavio Paz Written between 1950 and 1962, the poems in this bilingual collection amount to the final poetic testament of one of Spain's most important twentieth-century poets. Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a leading member of Spain's legendary Generation of 1927. He left Spain during the civil war in 1938 and never returned. Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor.
Engine Empire by
Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective consciousness of fictionalized boomtowns in order to explore the myth of prosperity. The first sequence, called "Ballad of Our Jim," draws inspiration from the Old West and follows a band of outlaw fortune seekers who travel to a California mining town during the 1800s. In the second sequence, "Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!" a fictional industrialized boomtown draws its inspiration from present-day Shenzhen, China. The third and last section, "The World Cloud," is set in the far future and tracks how individual consciousness breaks up when everything—books, our private memories—becomes immediately accessible data. One of our most startlingly original poets, Hong draws together individual voices at odds with the world, voices that sing their wonder and terror.