A commentary on America, this book delves into major aspects of contemporary society and expounds upon the country’s qualities, both positive and negative.
This collection follows the physical and emotional struggles of a young boy growing up in 1950s America as he attempts to understand himself and the world around him.
Winner of 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and the 2006 Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award.
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.
Winner of 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Drawing her inspiration from she calls her “waking”, Amber Flora Thomas presents poems that depict humanity’s struggle to overcome its own flaws.
Passionate and compassionate, these poems are both deeply imagined and accessible to the general reader, focusing on personal and political life in American society.
Muriel Rukeyser earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism. In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser’s translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz’s work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem ‘Wake Island.’
Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.
Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.
Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award.
Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine.
The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.
“Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok’s poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our ‘clumsy living’ with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which ‘the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.
While Richard Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with social issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.
