All-American Poem

Author

Patricia Smith

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling...

Author	B.H. Fairchild
ISBN	1882295161

I might give this book five stars just on the basis of the poems "Beauty" and "Body and Soul." The first is a stunning hymn to the American resistance to beauty (that soft and useless presence in the world). The second is one of the greatest poems to use a sport (baseball) as its platform--though of course...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0880012129

my boyfriend studied with robert haas in grad school. my dad lives in the same neighborhood as robert haas and keeps meeting him at uc berkeley lectures where they end up seated together. when my dad and my boyfriend met, they bonded by unceasingly talking about robert haas as "bob." this sounds slightly...

Author	Claudia Emerson
ISBN	0807130842

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...

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	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822957930

Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John

When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering...

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	0393079554

The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous"...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679765840

Brilliant, engaging, human and personal. Levine is one of the greats.

Ask for Nothing

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward...

Author	Jack Gilbert
ISBN	0394523865

4 Stars for the 1982 portion of the book. 3 Stars for the context of 1962. 1962 was to me, a lot of searching in vague, philosophical and sometimes superfluous ways. 1982 was funny and raw, drawing more vividly from everyday, yet unordinary experiences. There is more beauty and simplicity in those observations...

Author	Michael Dickman
ISBN	1556592892

"Dickman's book moves with careful intensity as it confidently illuminates buried, contemporary suffering."—Publishers Weekly

"Elizabeth Bishop said that the three qualities she admired most in poetry were accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery. Michael Dickman's first full-length...

Author	Tony Hoagland
ISBN	1555972683

Winner of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets

In his second collection of poems, Hoagland's generous effervescence and a jujitsu cleverness sparkle through line after line confronting negotiation and compromise, gender and culture, sex and rock music, sons and...

Author	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN	1932195459

The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals,...

Author	Kim Addonizio
ISBN	0393068528

A lyrically intense fifth collection from “one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets” (San Diego Union-Tribune).

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected...

Author	Bob Hicok
ISBN	1931229112

Chosen alongside celebrated poets Louise Glück and Czeslaw Milosz, Bob Hicok’s Animal Soul was the standout surprise of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award nominations. According to author David Wojahn, a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, this collection of poetry “is the best...