Poetry / American / General

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.

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.

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.

Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetrySelected by Crystal Ann Williams

Hour of the Ox examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley’s twenty previous collections, 1980-2014. Buckley’s poetry is unique in its use of current science and cosmology, recent facts and theories mixed in with a lyrical underpinning.

In Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Martha Collins relentlessly traces the history of scientific racism from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fairthrough the eugenics movement of the 1920s.

Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant.

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world’s wealthiest nation.

Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. As in all of her work, Dolin’s lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

David Hernandez’s Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez’s voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division that separates one from the other.

Collected here are poems from Peter Oresick’s previous books, beginning with The Story of Glass (1977), and to them are added 36 new poems called Under the Carpathians. His work—known for working class and Catholic themes—probes labor and social history, post-World War II America, Eastern European identity, Eastern Rite Catholicism, and Russian icons and fine art and especially Pittsburgh-born pop art icon Andy Warhol.

In For Dear Life, with accessibility, wit, and humor, Ronald Wallace evokes a wide variety of subjects that range from the traditional themes of lyric poetry—love, death, sex, the natural world, marriage, birth, childhood, music, religion, art—to the most unexpected and quirky narratives—an ode to excrement, a catalogue of comic one-liners, a celebratory testimonial to his teeth.

In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence.

Winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2017 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers AwardWinner, 2016 BCALA Literary Award, Poetry CategoryFinalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category

Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.

Winner of the 2014 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Winner of the 2106 Society of Midland Authors Literary Award (poetry category)

Karankawa is a collection that explores some of the ways in which we (re)construct our personal histories. Rich in family narratives, myths, and creation stories, these are poems that investigate passage—dying, coming out, transforming, being born—as well as the gaps that also reside in our stories, for, as Rocha suggests, the opportunity to create myths is provided by great silences.