Memoir of the Hawk

Author	Franz Wright
ISBN	0375709436

In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery....

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1882295269

I came to "Pity..." after having read "Sad Little Breathing Machine," so my thoughts on the collection are a bit in reverse. Dean Young's string-of-similes blurb, "this book astonishes me the way I am astonished by jeweled clockworks, siege machinery, the musculature of the shark and hummingbird,"...

Author	Russell Edson
ISBN	0932440657

Never having done any creative writing as an adult, I took my first writing course many years ago, back when I was in my late thirties. I was given conventional short stories and poems as models but nothing really clicked with me, that is, I knew I wanted to write but wasn’t really inspired by...

Author

Joshua Beckman

Beckman’s new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is,...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0618154450

That Silent Evening

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without...

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	Henri Cole
ISBN	0374529280

Time was plunging forward,
like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef,
where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
and it was as if that was all God wanted:
not a wife, a house or a position,
but a self, like a needle, pushing...

Author	Dean Young
ISBN	1932416692

People have often tried to pin down what it is that Dean Young does. He has been variously called a New Age surrealist, son of the New York School, a comically tragic poet who knows the pain at the heart of a joke, a lunatic, a stuffed bunny, and a fire engine of the Romantic imagination. But if these things...

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	Chelsey Minnis
ISBN	0977106497

"Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of [Chelsey] Minnis's second collection."—Publishers Weekly

"Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle...

Author	Zachary Schomburg
ISBN	0977770931

Poetry. THE MAN SUIT, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelg�ngers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line--often reading like anecdotal fables...

Author	Jeffrey McDaniel
ISBN	0916397793

I've never been much of a poetry reader, but I picked up this and The Endarkment (which I have yet to read) and have been consuming his poems slowly. His words pop, his lines are edgy but poignant, with metaphors that are fresh yet apt, and so many of his poems have last lines in them that have me murmuring with...

Author	Charles Simic
ISBN	0156001292

Charles Simic now writes in English and lives in New Hampshire, but he was born in Belgrade, three years before the United States entered the Second World War. He has said that "being one of the millions of displaced persons made an impression on me," and that “I'm still amazed by all the vileness...

Author	Stephen Dobyns
ISBN	1852242647

Dobyns is a poet for those who like their language weave loose, narrative, funny, profound. It's not condensed poetry, in general (though some of the early poems, based on Anglo-Saxon riddles are gnomic, riddling, epigrammatic), but rather the wise-cracking writing of a poet with a great sense of...

Author	Aase Berg
ISBN	0977770974

In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read...

Author	Dorothea Lasky
ISBN	1933517638

"In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality, Lasky's poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be."—Julia Bloch, Bitch

"The beautiful thing about Lasky, in all her work,...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0375710787

Always a poet of memory and invention, Philip Levine looks back at his own life as well as the adventures of his ancestors, his relatives, and his friends, and at their rites of passage into an America of victories and betrayals. He transports us back to the street where he was born “early in the final...

Author	Mark Leidner
ISBN	0983520305

Poetry. Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me is Mark Leidner's first full-length collection of poems. A collection of poems that might make you feel like a flower, like a black hole, like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor, like you have to get on fire, then slowly walk around your old neighborhood,...