Books

Rescripting the Ecstatic in the Midst of Violence

Winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

An Introduction to the Life, Work, and “Difficulty” of Reginald Shepherd

Winner of the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Poems that Zoom In on the Mysterious and Transformative Nature of Expression

Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the reader, a “representative life” of our time.

In Evidence is a collection of poems in the voices of allied troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps in Europe in the spring of 1945. Barbara Helfgott Hyett heard poems in the eyewitness testimony of United States soldiers. She has shaped the words of thirty speakers into a songle narrative, a single voice.

With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review, aptly describes this book: “intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.” To read her poems is to “discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human.”

Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.

The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.

Now back in print, this heralded second collection by the award-winning poet centers around the Greek myth of Niobe and the theme of endurance.

One of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. The poems are richly human documents rooted in Alegria’s knowledge of and love for her subjects.