Poetry / General

Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems probe the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape – the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straightforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility.

In this collection of one hundred sonnets, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Ronald Wallace once again proves himself to be one of our most versatile and affirmative poets.

Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, Eve’s Striptease suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Julia Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing – sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s.

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had “an all-but-completed manuscript” of poems. After Levis’s death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy.

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

The fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn. The Falling Hour is a book in which the workings of personal history collide with the forces of public history, examining loss and cultural legacies. Marks a significant advance from Wojahn’s previous works, as he employs both strict forms and free verse.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith – Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth – in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

The third poetry collection from Allison Joseph. In Every Seam documents the passage from girlhood to womanhood in an urban environment fraught with brutality, yet seething with energy and vitality.

For the young Kenji Takezo, the innocent surfer who inhabits this collection of poems, balance becomes more than just trying to stand on a wave. It is a way of surviving in a world as precarious as the ocean, a world constantly turning on itself.

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.

Peter Meinke is one of the most readable poets. The surface clarity of his lines and his aptness for metaphor make these poems accessible and mysterious. They have real subjects – Dessert Storm and acorns, coffee and Tolstoy – but at the same time give entry to that interior world where all feelings and moralities grow.

This volume of poetry from Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of her most ambitious, ranging from laments and celebrations for a flawed world to meditations on art and artists, to a powerful exploration of illness and healing.

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.