Books

This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.

Edson began publishing poetry in the 1960s. He has been called “the godfather of prose poems in America” by Booklist’s Ray Olson. Edson has been quoted as saying “Prose comes so naturally that one doesn’t really have to choose it, it’s already in one’s mouth”.

Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in ]Open Interval[ locate the self in the interval between body and name.

Finalist, National Book Award

Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Enacting the Zen proverb “fall down seven times, get up eight,” this collection explores the ways we fall—through disillusionment, disappointment, and plain, old-fashioned mistakes, and the ways we rise up—out of personal debacles, unfortunate circumstances, family legacies, and collective struggles.

Winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Lynn Emanuel

Winner of the 2010 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

The elegies in Temper interrogate the way grief leaves us confrontational, in a state of fracture.

Shadow Ball gathers together in one collection the best of Charles Harper Webb’s prize-winning books, as well as a selection of his newest poems.

Poems that explore the territory of advancing age—its tragicomedies, its passions, its engagement with the world.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

“Joanie Mackowski’s hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body’s strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”—John L. Koethe

“As always with a Bob Hicok book, fascinating and a book you sort of can’t help but pick up and suddenly, two hours later, find yourself having read straight through. I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.”—Corduroy Books

“I have long believed that Lynn Emanuel is one of the most innovative and subversive poets now writing in America. Her aesthetic and artistic choices consistently invoke a complex hybrid poetics that radically reimagines the shape of our poetic discourse. The brilliant, shattering, and disturbing poems of Noose and Hook are not only wry critiques of recent poetic and cultural activity in this country but also compelling signposts to what yet might be possible in our future. This is Lynn Emanuel’s most exquisite and powerful book yet.”—David St. John

“Sometimes we have questions that seem to defy answers or even suppositions but then we find Love and Strange Horses to help us map out a course to continue loving life. A really wonderful, thoughtful read by an intriguing new voice.”—Nikki Giovanni

Winner of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award (Poetry)

A book of contemporary poetry exploring the fine, shifting line between faith—secular and spiritual faith—and fanaticism in an insecure age, American Fanatics is a lyrical, pop-culture inflected meditation on democracy, morality, beauty, commerce, and the cost of falling dreams.

Winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

A collection of lyric poems that address issues of death and personal crisis by filtering them through an obsession with monsters and animals.

Winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

“There is something in American poetry that might be called the book of the small town or, equally, the tale of the good family; or, if you like, the American Grafitti Suite. Poems that discover life’s bonuses in new love, wise parents, old books, venerable nature, and the mysteries of all that endures in the face of the viciousness no life escapes—are, well, worth the wait. That’s how I feel about Paper Anniversary. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W. C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival.”—Dave Smith

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.