Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1932195122

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language....

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	Mark Doty
ISBN	0252022106

A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered....

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	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060099135

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems...

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	James Wright
ISBN	0819560227

I may skip a detailed review on this, simply because poetry reviews are a real ass kicker for me. Like work. But, that said, it deserves one. Wright is one best poets I've read (and I've read A LOT). One reason for this is that he's SO American in his settings and voice. If you like Whitman, you should like this...

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	Heather Christle
ISBN	0819572772

Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the...

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	Cesare Pavese
ISBN	1556591748

Cesare Pavese was one of Italy’s greatest post-war writers. His poetry was revolutionary—both artistically and politically—rejecting the verbal and philosophical constraints of tradition and utilizing direct, colloquial language. His subjects were peasants, hobos, and prostitutes,...

Author	Mark Strand
ISBN	0307262960

This eleventh collection by Mark Strand is a toast to life’s transience and abiding beauty. He begins with a group of light but haunting fables, populated by figures like the King, a tiny creature in ermine who has lost his desire to rule, and by the poet’s own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery...

Author	Olena Kalytiak Davis
ISBN	1582343527

In her stunning second collection, poet Olena Kalytiak Davis confirms her reputation as a breathtaking verbal acrobat, a daredevil on the high wire of life and love. Her deeply personal poems echo everything from nursery rhymes to classics, revealing poetry buried in ordinary speech. Whether remonstrating...

Author	Tracy K. Smith
ISBN	1555974756

Every poem is the story of itself.
Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
--from "History"
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead...

Author	Kevin Young
ISBN	0307264343

Las Vegas, Nashville, the Midwest, his family's Louisiana home, the state of despair: these are the places that Kevin Young visits in this, his powerful sixth book of poetry. Facing the sudden loss of his father, Young pays homage to his significant clan: to aunties and double cousins, and a great-grandfather's...

Author	Emily Kendal Frey
ISBN	1880834944

Emily Kendal Frey performs grief and dread as a graceful dance, the kind the tree you cut down in your backyard might do on your heart. This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as “The End”, which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to “Walk towards...