The Eternal City
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Chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to relaunch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship, The Eternal City revives Princeton's tradition of publishing some of today's best poetry. With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.
Stupid Hope
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The final collection by the late Jason Shinder, "one of the finest of our new poets" (Gerald Stern) I close my eyes and try to remember when I was unopposed, when I started to die, buoyant, fragrant, shuddering with love. —from "Before" Jason Shinder's last poems are his moving testimonies to poetry, love, and friendship. With power, clarity, and disarming humor, the poems confront grief and mortality with a humility and fortitude that come only "with hope, stupid hope."Stupid Hope is Shinder's wry, penetrating, and wise farewell.
Voyage of the Sable Venus
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present--titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know. Offering a new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin--five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role has art played in this ancient, often heinous story? From the "Young Black Female Carrying / a Perfume Vase" to a "Little Brown Girl / Girl Standing in a Tree / First Day of Voluntary / School Integration," this poet adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire and how they define us all, including herself, as she explores her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race--a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
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Nineteen different translations of a single poem with comments on each version by Eliot Weinberger and introduction contributed by Octavio Paz.
Take This Stallion
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Poetry. "I have never before read a book like Anaïs Duplan's TAKE THIS STALLION. Her major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness -is oneness a tone? poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn't possible characterize the work." -Jericho Brown
Thief in the Interior
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"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere--in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."--Adrian Matejka Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences. "Epithalamium": A kiss. Train ride home from a late dinner, City Hall and document signing. Wasn't cold but we cuddled in an empty car, legal. Last month a couple of guys left a gay bar and were beaten with poles on the way to their car. No one called them faggot so no hate crime's documented. A beat down is what some pray for, a pulse left to count. We knew we weren't protected. We knew our rings were party favors, gold to steal the shine from. We couldn't protect us, knew the law wouldn't know how. Still, his beard across my brow, the burn of his cologne. When the train stopped, the people came on. Phillip B. Williamshas authored two chapbooks:Bruised Gospels(Arts in Bloom Inc.) andBurn(YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming inCallaloo, Poetry, theSouthern Review, West Branch, and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor ofVinyl Poetry.
A Woman of Property
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"Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side? Praise for Robin Schiff and A Woman of Property Schiff's is a major species of weird, glowing genius. She finds cosmic flow in the most awkward corners and masterminds whole new dimensions in the realms of wit, worry, and 'what if?' I don't know what kind of magic allows this poet to take apart the entire world . . . and reassemble it with more pleasure, depth, loveliness, deadpan wordsmithery and good hard intelligence than it ever had before. I see everything differently now that I've experienced this world.a Nobody writes like Robyn Schiff- her brilliance is singular, her vision compound. We'll be measuring this work's radiance in light-years. 'Brenda Shaughnessy' This brilliant revelation of having and being had winds like a spiral staircase down from the nursery, into the garden, through violence and lust and contagion, to the Greek tragedy that is the foundation on which our American tragedy is built. 'Every time I descend the stairs,' Schiff writes, 'I trespass what I already own'.' Eula Biss, author of On Immunity- An Inoculation"
Cannibal
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Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
Overpour
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Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Jane Wong's powerful first book OVERPOUR weaves together seemingly disparate topics such as war and child's play, language and exile, debt, animals and nature. By doing so, Wong creates a space between for the reader to enter. At the same time, by creating this space, she makes a space for possibility. For instance, in her poem 'Filed Notes Toward War,' Wong writes 'The war is not over. / The streets are lined with little lamps of snow, / melting. Water pours without end. / There is a swan bathing in my mouth.' Montage-like, the poems are also a kind of philosophy by which I mean they are curious. They ask questions of the world. Not afraid of being earnest, Wong's voice is both playful and cerebral, weaving in and out of the world its wars and its violence, poverty and alienation making a beautiful and smart, strange and new, word elixir." Cynthia Cruz
Blackacre
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* Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry * * A Publishers Weekly Fall 2016 Top 10 Poetry Selection * * One of Brooklyn Magazine's 100 Books to Read in 2016 * "Blackacre" is a centuries-old legal fiction - a placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacy, a bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyor's keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Milton's great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desire-her own struggle-to conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?
Felicity
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Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems “If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger,” Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own ♥ to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.
ShallCross
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"Through more than a dozen collections, C.D. Wright pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book,ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead."--The Washington Post "Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything."--Publishers Weekly "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."--New York Times Book Review "C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."--The Gettysburg Review In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans.ShallCrossshows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet. From "Obscurity and Elegance": Whether or not the park was safe she was going in. A study concluded, for a park to be successful there had to be women. The man next to the monument must have broken away from her. Perhaps years before. That the bond had been carnal is obvious. He said he was just out clearing his head... C.D. Wright(1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, includingOne With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award;One Big Self: An Investigation; andRising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire and All
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"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—The Village Voice "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—The New York Times Book Review "Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker "C.D. Wright is one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets."—Publishers Weekly A companion to her astonishing collection of proseCooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of beingand seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetryispoetry. From "In a Word": I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money… C.D. Wright's most recent volume,One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.
Thief in the Interior
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"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere--in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."--Adrian Matejka Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences. "Epithalamium": A kiss. Train ride home from a late dinner, City Hall and document signing. Wasn't cold but we cuddled in an empty car, legal. Last month a couple of guys left a gay bar and were beaten with poles on the way to their car. No one called them faggot so no hate crime's documented. A beat down is what some pray for, a pulse left to count. We knew we weren't protected. We knew our rings were party favors, gold to steal the shine from. We couldn't protect us, knew the law wouldn't know how. Still, his beard across my brow, the burn of his cologne. When the train stopped, the people came on. Phillip B. Williamshas authored two chapbooks:Bruised Gospels(Arts in Bloom Inc.) andBurn(YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming inCallaloo, Poetry, theSouthern Review, West Branch, and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor ofVinyl Poetry.
Model City
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Poetry. "MODEL CITY is built from a missing antecedent, an "it" as mysterious as it is familiar: What was it like? What was what like? One's life? The city from which one fled? The city to which one did so? The last century? The one before that? The weaving in and out of traffic? Love? Candlelight from a curtained window or the dull, digital glow of a smart phone from the balcony below? Here, those old utopic dreams and social experiments collide with the age of excess information, leaving behind broken bits of experience: precise, exacting, aphoristic, arresting - the emotional residue of just how one deals with one's tiny-cog-in-a-big- machine conundrum allowed to curdle into language as concerned with form and structure, with feats of architecture and engineering, as it is with real human relationships. This book is a marvel."—Noah Eli Gordon
Staying Alive
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In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of apocalyptic fiction and non-fiction - The War of the Worlds, The World Without Us, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and The Road, to name a few - the poems, along with a final essay, explore multiple world-endings and their possible outcomes, and pose answers to the questions: will we, how do we, and should we stay alive?
Mz N: the Serial
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The acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a verse novel, not a verse memoir,Mz N: the serial:A Poem-in-Episodesoffers something else--"life . . . a continual allegory" (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet's mind, switchbacking its way through American English,Mz Ntoggles between story and song. This is a poetry both "furious / & alive." Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity,Mz N:the serial:A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing--an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be "one / among other ones" in a "cracking world"? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life,Mz N explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. "Then, what is life?" cried Shelley. So tooMz N.