Books

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

WInner of the 2017 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Teaxs Institute of Letters

In the Volcano’s Mouth is a traditional American road narrative rewritten for the new century, centering women—for so long victims or mute sidekicks in these types of stories—as the powerful central figures in a journey that is unequivocally feminist yet universal.

Many of the poems draw from conversations and informal interviews with hobos, hitchhikers, and other American nomads the author met over the course of nearly a decade spent on and off the road. This book continues an investigation into poetry’s role as a documentary or ethnographic form, in the legacy of Charles Reznikoff and CD Wright.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?

Smith’s poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.

Mortality in Smith’s work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.

The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake.

A prose poetry/flash fiction collection that interrogates Bertrand Russell’s classic A History of Western Philosophy through scathing wit and acute observation.

When her “smart” phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways—committing to and battling with—various principles and beliefs.

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class.

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

“One marvels at the force of seeing in Schwartz’s No Way Out But Through and cannot help but feel a particular gratitude for her abundant humor. Go all in with these poems; you’ll reap unknown rewards. She possesses a quick-witted imagination that sanctifies memories and makes room for the wondrous nature of our cosmopolitan lights.”—Major Jackson

Past Praise for Martha Rhodes’s Mother Quiet:“The aim of poetry (and the higher kind of thriller) is to be unexpected and memorable. So a poem about death might treat it in a way that combines the bizarre and the banal: the Other Side as some kind of institution—a creepy hospital, an officious hotel or retirement home. Martha Rhodes takes such an approach in ‘Ambassadors to the Dead,’ from her abrupt, unsettling, artfully distorted, indelible new book Mother Quiet. Blending the matter-of-fact with the surreal, as a way of comprehending the stunning, final reality, Rhodes is an inheritor of Emily Dickinson’s many poems on the same subject.”—Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

For the Scribe continues Wojahn’s explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import.

What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors “who supposed their children’s children would be rich and free?” What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by “intolerable, unquenchable human desire?” How do we cope with all the wars? In the midst of the dark matter and dark energy of the universe, do we know what train we’re on? In this cornucopia of a book, Ostriker finds herself immersed in phenomena ranging from a first snowfall in New York City to the Tibetan diaspora, asking questions that have no reply, writing poems in which “the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle.”

In Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, Beatty travels the turns and collisions of over twenty years of work. She moves from first-person narratives to poems that straddle the page in fragments, to lines that sprawl with long lines of train tracks. Always landing in meaning, we are inside the body—not in a confessional voice, not autobiography—but arriving through the expanded, exploded image of many stories and genders.

A Plea and an Awakening to Peace as a Process and a Transient State.

A new collection of poetry from the poet and novelist Ron Koertge.

Bradley Paul’s third book, uses common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world