Granted

Author	Terrance Hayes
ISBN	0143116967

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant....

Author	Tarfia Faizullah
ISBN	0809333252

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi...

Author	Tyehimba Jess
ISBN	0974635332

“It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake.”—Brigit Pegeen Kelly, National Poetry Series judge

A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060779195

My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...

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 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	Jean Valentine
ISBN	0819567132

Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0300076339

The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555974805

Matthea Harvey's Modern Life introduces a new voice that tries to exist in the gray area between good and evil, love and hate. In the central sequences, "The Future of Terror" and "The Terror of the Future," Harvey imagines citizens and soldiers at the end of their wits at the impending end of the world....

Author	Mary Ruefle
ISBN	0887484670

from Indeed I Was Pleased with the World by Mary Ruefle:

Grief


First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshine
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light,...

Author	Lucie Brock-Broido
ISBN	0679765999

I ordered this book from a second-hand site and enjoyed the annotations a previous reader included in this collection. Reading someone else's thoughts on the poems and their editing suggestions (which actually made a couple poems better!) was really fun and interesting.

More to do with the...

Author	Brian Turner
ISBN	1882295552

Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James’ own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes...

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	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374119023

A powerfully moving meditation on life, nature, and the beyond, from one of our finest American poets

This is an old man’s poetry,
written by someone who’s spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.
     —from “Ancient of Days”


Charles...

Author	Ruth Stone
ISBN	1556592078

“Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.”—Galway Kinnell on...

Author

Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor...

Author	Brigit Pegeen Kelly
ISBN	1929918488

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader...

Author	Ross Gay
ISBN	0822961350

It feels like I read this book very quickly even though I read most of the poems at least 3 times. Not because that's my way of doing things (it's not), but because when I reached the end of many of the poems I would scream out "WHAT!" as in "what did I just read?!" and go back to feel it all again. And there isn't...

Author	Emily Dickinson
ISBN	1558491554

These three letters, which Emily Dickinson drafted to a man she called "Master," stand near the heart of her mystery. Although there is no evidence the letters were ever posted, they indicate a long relationship, geographically apart, in which correspondence would have been the primary means of communication....

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	Arda Collins
ISBN	0300148887

Announcing the 2008 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize

Arda Collins is the 2008 winner of the annual Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Mesmerizing and electric, her poems seem to be articulated in the privacy of an enclosed space. The poems are concrete and yet metaphysically...

Author	Jamaal May
ISBN	1938584023

I loved this.
It was so raw and emotional and everything I wanted in a poetry book.

I've never been the biggest poetry fan. A lot of times it takes someone sort of walking me through each reference, the extremely metaphorical writing, the significance of the form and structure of the poems,...