Poetry / American / General

Winner, 2021 Northern California Book Award | Finalist, 2021 Patterson Poetry Prize Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man’s land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house ...

In his new poetry collection, Chard deNiord explores the paradoxical nature of unknowing. I WEPT WITH JOY ABOVE THE RIVER I wept with joy above the river.I wept with sorrow above the river.My tears were clear, both sweet and bitter.One leaf cried out to another,“Empty me ...

Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980...

The Woman in the Corner keenly observes and gives voice to the ambiguities and astonishments that we often turn away from—in human relationships and in our own unruly hearts. In poems that speak fearlessly about sex and grief, mothers and daughters, and friendships and marriage, Krygowski examines the beauty ...

The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous “technology culture,” even as it’s a time when the urge to memorialize ...

The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. ...

Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.

EVEN THEN Who will mend the wings of the angelsafter the last great battle? For history will not endeven then,but continue unwindinginto the dark. ©2019 Michael Wurster. All rights reserved.

Author of two previous collections of poetry: BLACK HOPE (1997) and ANTIDOTE FOR NIGHT (2015). de la O is also the publisher of the journal ASKEW. Keats at Fourteen She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen’s border,a hectic rose flaming each cheek. Her lips move, no words. The boy ...

Apt and tender and candid.–Donald Revell; A New Collection from the editor of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY

In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016–2018, try ...

With eleven full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has gained national recognition as a writer of poems that are complex yet reader-friendly. Sidebend World shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, ...

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall’s Refuse documents a young biracial man’s journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall ...

I Would Lie To You If I Could contains interviews with nine eminent contemporary American poets (Natasha Trethewey, Jane Hirshfield, Martín Espada, Stephen Kuusisto, Stephen Sandy, Ed Ochester, Carolyn Forche, Peter Everwine, and Galway Kinnell) and James Wright’s widow Anne, presents conversations with a vital cross section of ...

The speaker in Cape Verdean Blues is an oracle walking down the street. Shauna Barbosa interrogates encounters and the weight of their space. Grounded in bodily experience and the phenomenology of femininity, this collection provides a sense of Cape Verdean identity. It uniquely captures the essence of “Sodade,” as it ...