A Hunger

Author	W.S. Merwin
ISBN	0689101902

Merwin was born 30 September 1927, and died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic...

Author	Heather McHugh
ISBN	0819512168

When McHugh got the MacArhtur nod last year, it made me scramble to find some of her work on the internets, but as anyone who's read McHugh knows, I think that's a bad way to read her work.... These are poems that I think require a level of attention, to sound as well as idea, that I can't quite sustain when I'm...

Author	Brenda Hillman
ISBN	0819522430

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold,...

Author	James Tate
ISBN	0819511927

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992)
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)

The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger...

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1880238136

I read "Song" in graduate school and immediately bought this book, but never made it all the way through. Now I am ashamed of my graduate school self, because this book? INCREDIBLE. It's not always easy to get through Kelly's poems, because they're very dense, but they're also immaculately crafted....

Author	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	0374526982

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway...

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1889330612

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially...

Author	Carl Phillips
ISBN	0374267162

Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course...

Author	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556592167

C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.

Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected...

Author	Gabrielle Calvocoressi
ISBN	0892553154

Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the...

Author	Jorie Graham
ISBN	0880016167

This podcast (a Q&A between Graham and Silverblatt) helped me tremendously in my reading of Graham: http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/jor...

I love the story in this of Graham's teenage daughter coming to her and saying that she felt "bad." Graham's response: a thesaurus, to look...

Author	Roger Reeves
ISBN	1556594488

From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became...

Author	D.A. Powell
ISBN	1555973957

kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home

no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"

In...

Author	Lynda Hull
ISBN	1555974570

The definitive collection of the poems of Lynda Hull, "perhaps the most intensely lyrical poet of her generation." (Mark Doty)


If each of us
contains, within, humankind's totality, each possibility
then I have been so fractured, so multiple & dazzling . . .
--from "The...

Author	Maurice Manning
ISBN	0300089988

This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters,...

Author	Sabrina Orah Mark
ISBN	0975499017

Funny and frightening, moving and unsettling, the prose poems in Mark’s debut collection take readers on a wild ride

The Babies, by Sabrina Orah Mark, is the premier winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Contest, judged by renowned poet Jane Miller (Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555973965

Harvey, whose debut collection was praised by the New Yorker
as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically
inventive," offers her second stunning collection

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
-from...

Author

Simone Muench

There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.
—from the introduction by Carol...

Author	Amy Gerstler
ISBN	0142000647

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler’s new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD...