In the Next Galaxy

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

Author	Ada Limon
ISBN	1571314717

Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”

A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger...

Author

Tracy K. Smith

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060929480

A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.

Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes...

Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
ISBN	0819511641

Most days, I sit in a Center for Writing, reviewing papers for college students, and clarifying the proper formatting and style required by the Modern Language Association (MLA), as relates to scholastic writing. As I notice varying writing styles, I suggest books for students to read, based on their...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060909269

“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740589

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous...

Author	Zbigniew Herbert
ISBN	0880013818

Mr Cogito is a persona used by Zbigniew Herbert to cogitate about the world in unworldly ways. Not all poems in this thin book employ the good Cogito, but the thinking is surely the same--strange. I do feel that the earlier poems (and the shorter ones) are stronger than the later (and longer) ones.

As...

Author	Brian Turner
ISBN	1882295803

Brian Turner was a rifle team leader in Iraq, and he draws on his own experience as well as the literary and political history of Iraq in this excellent collection of his poetry.

His most famous poems from this collection, "Al-A'imma Bridge" and "The Mutanabbi Street Bombing" place specific...

Author	Philip Metres
ISBN	1938584090

"Sand Opera is what political poetry must be like today in our age of seemingly permanent war."—Mark Nowak

Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems,...

Author	Shara McCallum
ISBN	1938584287

"These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and open-minded—a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering...

Author	Lynda Van Devanter
ISBN	0446392510

Lynda Van Devanter--author of the backlist classic Home Before Morning, which inspired the TV show "China Beach"--edited this powerful collection of poems reminiscent of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. All author proceeds from the book will go to the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project....

Author	Belle Waring
ISBN	1889330086

Waring has worked as a neo-natal intensive care nurse and as Writer-in-Residence at Children's National Medical Center in Washington D.C. Her first collection of poetry, Refuge, won the Associated Writing Program's Award for Poetry in 1989, the Washington Prize in 1991, and was cited by Publishers...

Author	Elyse Fenton
ISBN	1880834898

This collection of poetry was an impressive surprise. I purchased it to support the author, whom I haven't met but who is married to a college classmate of my son's. I am reviewing it, however, because it is remarkable writing and deserves its recent awarding of the prestigious Dylan Thomas prize.

The...

Author	Karen Skolfield
ISBN	1324003014

In a poetic voice at once accessible and otherworldly, gutsy and insightful, U.S. Army veteran Karen Skolfield offers a rare glimpse of a female soldier’s training and mental conditioning. Through the narratives of a young soldier, her older counterpart, and her fellow soldiers, Skolfield searches...

Author	Vievee Francis
ISBN	0814333230

The title of Blue-Tail Fly comes from an antebellum song commonly known as "Jimmy Crack Corn." The blue-tail fly is a supposedly insignificant creature that bites the horse that bucks and kills the master. In this collection, poet Vievee Francis gives voice to "outsiders"-from soldiers and common...

Author	Frank X. Gaspar
ISBN	0299165205

Frank X. Gaspar’s collection of poems is haunted by the presence of mystics and visionaries: Mohammed, Buddha, St. Paul, Augustine, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Milton, Rilke. A Field Guide to the Heavens is punctuated with designs of science, the wondering and rapt observations of...

Author	Jane Kenyon
ISBN	0914086243

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