Books

Winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

“Nicole Terez Dutton’s fierce and formidable debut throbs with restless beauty and a lyrical undercurrent that is both empowered and unpredictable. Every poem is unsettling in that delicious way that changes and challenges the reader. There is nothing here that does not hurtle forward.”—Patricia Smith

Whirlwind is one woman’s heartfelt, yet mordantly witty, sexy exploration of the breakup of a marriage in poems that keep their linguistic edge while seething with a story they must tell.

Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Selected by Dorianne Laux

This collection examines how the loss of a parent at a young age can color the way that child looks at the world even when the child is no longer a child.

Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or strangeness of the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What strikes me about his, though, are the ways that visual imagery, diction, and cadence are modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’ the inanimate object speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to describe the way it touches ‘death / that life may be revealed / in green stupidity . . . fluent / as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a diver swimming among stingrays asks, ‘How long does it take us / in water sunlight permeates / to forget needing ever to be told?’; the unusual diction suggests both the speaker’s suspension in water as well as his apprehension of joy. The reader may hear faint echoes of Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but the language is Kiesselbach’s own.

Appetite is a book of poetry that explores identity, particularly masculinity, through the lenses of popular culture, relationships, and place.

This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which Weaver analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. In The Government of Nature, Afaa Michael Weaver explores the trauma of his childhood—including sexual abuse—using a “cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism.” Weaver is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body.

Winner of the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

In Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser’s poems are driven by the powerful engines of love and desire, giving voice to those deep pressures that most move us, body and soul: “I put my native tongue / To work, open to / The dark instincts of ecstasy.”

Daisy Fried’s third poetry collection is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, whether watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, or trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, or yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender . . . She tells their stories with savage energy, wit, humor and political engagement.

The Switching/Yard deals with the horizontal worlds of the birth table, the continuum of gender roles, and the head-on landscape of power and home as seen through the train yards of the West.

Boston Strong is a commemorative chapbook that beautifully reproduces Richard Blanco’s poignant poem presented during the May 30, 2013 benefit for many of the victims of the tragic events during the 2013 Boston Marathon.

The net proceeds from the sale of this book benefit The One Fund Boston

“What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened ‘long and late’ to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same ‘deified heart’ that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and Nahuatl, as if all the poems belonged to the same poet, which they in fact do, as the glorious multitudes of Peter Everwine, one of the masters of our age.”—Chard deNiord

The revised collection of Larry Levis poems selected by David St. John. Each of Levis’s books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books.

“Reading Jeffrey McDaniel’s gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.”—Major Jackson

“These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed reading a book so much.”—David Budbill