Books

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.

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, poetry category. Winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, poetry category.Finalist for the 2015 NAACP Image Awards in Poetry. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus’ fifth-century B.C. trilogy “The Oresteia,” which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides, Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely “to loose battle” or “sow chaos,” a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

Michelson’s poems explore the boundaries between the personal and the political, and the connections between history and memory. Growing up under the shadow of the Holocaust, in a Brooklyn neighborhood consumed with racial strife, Michelson’s experiences were far from ordinary. His sense of humor and acute awareness of Jewish history, with its ancient emphasis on the fundamental worth of human existence make this accessible book, finally, celebratory and life-affirming.

Winner, 2016 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award from the Arab American National Museum

“The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It’s gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forche some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art.”—Sapphire

Brain Camp explores with clarity and vividness a wide spectrum of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality—all from a perspective both universal yet distinctly Webb’s. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as a mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order.

Winner of the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Emanuel’s version of a “new and selected poems” turns convention on its head. She ignores chronology, placing new poems beside old, mixing middle and early poems with recent work, and liberating all her poems from the restraints of their particular histories, both aesthetic and autobiographical.