Books

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.

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.

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.

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.

City of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American.

Richard Blanco was selected as the 2013 inaugural poet by President Barack Obama.

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Alicia Suskin Ostriker struggles with the meaning of family, politics, and faith.

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.

With rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

In the winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Shara McCallum presents a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the struggle of those in exile to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country.

A portrayal in verse of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body, between the identity and persona of both the author and the reader.

The poems of Shepherd’s third book seek to redefine the meaning of mythology, from the ruined representatives of Greek divinity to the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.

A selection of poems from three previous books as well as new work, Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a wry, self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity.

Becker investigates how marginalized individuals negotiate public and private spheres, while inventing sustainable communities. She also explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and painter Rosa Bonheur’s lifelong relationships with women.

In Peter Meinke’s eleventh collection, he writes poems of humor and sadness. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well.

Winner of the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection presents 33 narrative, linguistically-adventurous poems on love, sex, relationships, work, and news of twenty-somethings in the 21st century.