Bucolics

Author	Natasha Trethewey
ISBN	0618872655

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and...

Author	Wendell Berry
ISBN	0156301717

The America many people would like to believe in is convincingly explored in this volume of poems by a writer close to the heart of things. The sanity and eloquence of these poems spring from the land in Kentucky where Wendell Berry was born, married, lives, farms, and writes. From classic pastoral themes...

Author	A. Poulin Jr.
ISBN	0395745322

I own many books of poetry and a few poetry anthologies. It is rare that an anthology includes all of the poets whose work I admire, but this is one of those. As is the case for many anthologies, for those who are looking for samples of more experimental work, this is not for you. This includes the typical major...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	1929918089

Book 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...

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374525366

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...

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	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	Lucie Brock-Broido
ISBN	0394758528

"Brock-Broido's talismanic words open into a magical territory of 'Domestic Mysticism' . . . A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough' . . . Something in Brock-Broido...

Author	Alex Lemon
ISBN	0977312747

Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores Alex Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him...

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	Joshua Marie Wilkinson
ISBN	0877459819

Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem...

Author	Dean Young
ISBN	0822956977

Finalist for ForeWord Magazine 1999 Poetry Book of the Year

With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes...

Author	Ashley Capps
ISBN	1931968373

In her first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe...

Author	Terrance Hayes
ISBN	0143036866

The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award

Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0060951060

3.5 i love poetry, it is often soothing to me, makes me look at things in different ways. This book came in my Strand book box, and it was a poet of which I had never heard. It highlights the beauty of the natural world, some striking images are invoked. It is also about death, death due to AIDS, but also the natural...

Author	Nick Flynn
ISBN	1555973736

Award-winning poet Nick Flynn takes readers into the dangerous and irresistible center of the hive

I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens' hands, my words
make them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,
& his hands go in.
—from "Blind Huber"

Blindness...

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	A. Van Jordan
ISBN	0393327647

MacNolia by A. Van Jordan is a wonderful poetry collection worth reading many times. It reads like a novel because the author provides a fairly integrated story imagined by Jordan but based on a real life event. He doles out the background information in hints and pieces from several viewpoints throughout...

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	C.D. Wright
ISBN	1556592582

"For a long while now, C. D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical...