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A New Poem from the Author of The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and The Book of Delights

A critical examination of the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mexican-American brothers whose graphic novels are highly influential The brothers started in the alt-comics scene, where their ‘Love and Rockets’ series gained prominence. Their depictions of latinidad and sexuality push against the edicts of mainstream Anglophone culture, but they also defy many Latino perceptions of life, politics, and self-representation.

Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or strangeness of the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What strikes me about his, though, are the ways that visual imagery, diction, and cadence are modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’ the inanimate object speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to describe the way it touches ‘death / that life may be revealed / in green stupidity . . . fluent / as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a diver swimming among stingrays asks, ‘How long does it take us / in water sunlight permeates / to forget needing ever to be told?’; the unusual diction suggests both the speaker’s suspension in water as well as his apprehension of joy. The reader may hear faint echoes of Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but the language is Kiesselbach’s own.

Barresi’s poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.

A unique sequence of narrative poems focusing on Galileo’s life, relationships, and work. George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written.

Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these poems trace the timelines of Kercheval’s life forward and backward, offering a moving examination of the connections that bind us together into families and communities.

In Natural Causes, a collection haunted by death, compassion, and love, the penchants for metaphor and resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever.

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this set of interconnected stories center around a retired prize fighter living in Las Vegas. The characters are as unforgettable and intriguing as the dialogue.

Winner of the 2007 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award

Ranging in subject matter from traditional literary matter to Hong Kong action films, the poems in this collection provide unusual perspectives on American society.

Winner of 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

These artful, yet accessible poems are concerned with the body, desire, anxiety, and obsession—how what we want redeems and isolates us. They urge complete exploration of one’s physical and mental selves as a means to remain alive in the material world.

Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.

A new more mature Daisy Fried, writing about grown-up problems with the same insouciance and even more range and skill.

Finalist, 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.

Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Krygowski’s poems—often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous—are lovingly grounded in the ordinary. They are thinking poems—tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it.