Books

Winner of the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Keeper is a book of lyric poems concerned with relationships of different sorts—with the natural world, with people and animals, and with the unseen and unknown.

Read a review on Keeper from the Valparaiso Poetry Review

Read a review of Keeper by Judith Kitchen, excerpted from the Winter 2014 issue of Georgia Review

This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who always has the last word.

Imperial is a collection of poems, both serious and hilarious, ranging in subject matter from marriage, divorce, popular culture, to the pitfalls, perils, and predicaments of middle-aged, middle-class, mid-American suburban life.

On the Street of Divine Love is a collection of twenty-five years of Barbara Hamby’s poems—word drunk excursions into the American female consciousness with stops in Italy, Paris, and London.

Bloom in Reverse moves from death to life as it chronicles the aftermath of a friend’s suicide and the end of a turbulent relationship, working through devastation and loss while on a search for solace that spans from local bars to online dating and beyond to ultimately find true connection and sustaining love.

The poems in Tiger Heron examine intimate lesbian friendships over a lifespan, while also reaching into core human experiences, such as the deaths of parents. Becker similarly explores relationships between humans and other creatures. Her villanelles and other shaped stanzas showcase contemporary formalism.

Sound of the Ax is a collection of over 400 wise and witty sayings and 26 aphoristic poems by one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, William Stafford.

The Americans is an attempt, in poetry, to document American life by juxtaposing past and present, history and imagination.

Winner of the 2014 Juile Suk Award

Peter Meinke moves fluidly through free and formal shapes, taking the reader on a tour through America in the 21st century: family, politics, love, war and peace, old age and death are looked at in ways that are surprising, clear, and warm-hearted. Lit by flashes of anger and laughter as he surveys his territory from the vantage point of old age, the poems are, in the end, both sane and profound, set to Meinke’s own music.

Rosser’s poems explore some of the darker corners of the human panorama—failure, loss, disillusionment—but always brightening them with humor and her playful attention to the compensatory alchemy of language, which can transform the sometimes base metals of our lives to noble ones.

Nude Descending an Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet engaged with politics, history, and the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological urgency.

Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The poems of Best Bones allude to landscapes of history, fable, and childhood myth, yet are fraught with modern day predicaments that create an atmosphere at once familiar and strange, playful and haunted, and verging on disaster. With imaginative intelligence, Nordgren maintains a snow-globe control of the whole scene.

Winner of the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

The Dottery is a book of poetry arisen from a thought experiment—what if there was a school before birth where gender was taught?

This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two previous books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.

Winner, 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award

The poems in Immigrant Model explore issues of individual and communal identity in the face of conflict, conflicting “truths” or histories, and uprootedness. They explore the notion of homeland as it relates to one’s roots, adopted space, psychological terrain, and gendered body.