Poetry / General

Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states “It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves.”

Winner of the 2013 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly

Looking for The Gulf Motel offers a genealogy of the heart: how Blanco’s family’s emotional legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his Latino identity, sexual identity, and understanding of the big questions of life and death.

Frederico Garcia lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca’s sojourn to America, Nathalie Handal, a poet from New York, went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucia. Handal recreated Lorca’s journey in reverse.

White Papers is a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, questioning what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial society.

Winner of the 2013 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry

“A Song of Songs, which is not Solomon’s but Alicia Ostriker’s. A great age-old hymn to life, to flesh, to memory, is revised again on these pages, with gusto, with passion, with clarity, with eros, with grief. If there is God, it is the mourner’s or the mystic’s God; if there is faith, it is the faith in our future. This is gorgeous poetry, as Jewish as it is universal.”—Ilya Kaminsky

Winner of the 2013 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

“Poems that stick with you like a song that won’t stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart.”—Washington Post on Captivity

Winner of the 2010 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

“Glenn Shaheen is claiming new ground for American poetry. His poems are about the nightmares of information overload, collapsing infrastructure, ubiquitous violence, and other ills of late empire. The subjects are not happy, but Shaheen’s clear vision and crisp—often witty—language offer the pleasures of surprise, discovery, and recognition.”—Ed Ochester

Wanda Coleman creates the kind of poetry that excites and ignites those who hate poetry, refreshes it for those who are bored by it, and inspires those who want to write it.

“In The World Falls Away, Wanda Coleman’s poems glow with an almost radioactive edginess. Yet, there is also range and substance giving her intense American voice staying power. To use, Whitman’s word, her work has ‘amplitude.'”—Diane Wakoski

Winner of the 2012 annual Book Award presented by The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Poetry in America offers lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources.

Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. She also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.

World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshot.

Read a press release about this book

Winner, 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Co-winner of the 2013 Nicholas Roerich Museum Poets’ Prize

Edited and with a foreword by Robert Philen

“Clay, red clay in particular, recurs several times throughout the collection as a motif of earth. It is the substance of creation, but always of impermanent things, whether heroes or Babylonian statues with feet of clay, or of things durable but fragile, such as the cuneiform tablets of ‘A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon.'”—Robert Philen, from the Foreword

Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power.

“These poems speak out of a global consciousness as well as an individual wisdom that is bright with pity, terror, and rage, and which asks the reader to realize that she is not alone—that the grief he carries is not just his own. Gay is a poet of conscience, who echoes Tomas Transtromer’s ‘We do not surrender. But want peace.'”—Jean Valentine

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

Winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

“There is something in American poetry that might be called the book of the small town or, equally, the tale of the good family; or, if you like, the American Grafitti Suite. Poems that discover life’s bonuses in new love, wise parents, old books, venerable nature, and the mysteries of all that endures in the face of the viciousness no life escapes—are, well, worth the wait. That’s how I feel about Paper Anniversary. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W. C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival.”—Dave Smith