The Ghost Soldiers

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	Forrest Gander
ISBN	0811213811

His poetry has been called "desperately beautiful" by Thom Gunn in Agni Review, and "original and fascinating" by John Ashbery. With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths...

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	Bob Hicok
ISBN	0822958422

One of the best books of poetry I've read. Hicok can hit hard, but he doesn't lose himself in savagery--there's room in his attitude for sensitivity and bemusement. Often, when he does work with a bitter pen, he aims it at his own self, but even there he flavors his vinegar with compassion. Most importantly,...

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	Dean Young
ISBN	0822958724

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.

Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea...

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	Frank Stanford
ISBN	1557281939

Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction,...

Author

Charles Simic

Philosophy is for the young. Poetry is for the aged.


I said that.

4 1/2



Well, for anyone who didn't catch the Dylan references (including the three words above) ... Not so far-fetched now, okay? And who was being complimented most? Maybe it was Charles, ...




Charles...

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	0977770990

SCARY, NO SCARY, the follow-up to Zachary Schomburg's acclaimed first collection of poems THE MAN SUIT, is a book of skeleton gloves and skeleton keys--at once dark and playful. With loneliness and levity Schomburg takes the reader on a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own...

Author	Heather Christle
ISBN	0980193834

The Difficult Farm is where you’ll find surprising jolts of the sweetest kindness delivered via poetry that’s new, urgent, blessed, beautiful, careful, tenacious, a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all. When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara Wier

This...

Author

Mary Ruefle

"Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely...

Author	Beth Ann Fennelly
ISBN	0393066053

With elegant wordplay and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly explores the "unmentionable"—not only what is considered too bold but also what can't be said because words are insufficient. In sections of short narratives, she questions our everyday human foibles. Three longer sequences...

Author	Alice Notley
ISBN	0143112546

A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poets

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of...