Poetry / General

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.

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

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.

Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.

City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.

Weaver’s life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed. The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning.