Books

Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.

Whether cataloging her flower garden or worrying about her son, admiring a trio of aged aunts or recovering from an argument with her husband, the narrator in these beautifully lyric poems deftly explores imagination, relationships, and the unlived possibilities in our own lives. Like the currents of time that pull us inexorably into the future, Sandra Kohler leads us through The Ceremonies of Longing, illuminating the magic that inhabits daily life and ordinary dreams.

The debut collection of Agnes Lynch Starrett winner Shao Wei, a Chinese-American poet, blends fairy tales, New York images, family stories, and the universal rites of passage associated with growing up to paint a vibrant canvas of passion and imagination. She captures the struggle of many immigrants as she describes her efforts to balance the influences of her childhood along the Yangtze river and her adulthood in New York City.

Bob Hicok’s fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill these pages. His fourth book, Insomnia Diary is filled with Hicok’s characteristic edgy, brazen, provocative, and meditative poems.

Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these poems trace the timelines of Kercheval’s life forward and backward, offering a moving examination of the connections that bind us together into families and communities.

In Natural Causes, a collection haunted by death, compassion, and love, the penchants for metaphor and resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever.

Peter Everwine has been a dominant force in American poetry for more than five decades. This volume features a group of new works, as well as selections from four previous collections, which capture the quiet intensity of his calmly dazzling work.

Second book by an acclaimed young poet. This volume features more of Barry’s refined brilliance and delicate lyricism, cast in a more meditative mode.

Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. These fresh and unpredictable prose poems annouce the arrival of an exciting new voice. Every page is filled with unexpected delights.

Winner, 2004 Best Books of Indiana (poetry category)

Winner of the Donald Hall Prize in PoetryBarbara Hamby’s poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers.

In this book Young presents poems of varying tones and styles, emphasizing the nature of simultaneity and the power of wordplay.

Winner of the 2007 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award

Ranging in subject matter from traditional literary matter to Hong Kong action films, the poems in this collection provide unusual perspectives on American society.

In this work the 2004-2005 U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser has selected poems from Sure Signs, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Prize, and the acclaimed One World at a Time.

A commentary on America, this book delves into major aspects of contemporary society and expounds upon the country’s qualities, both positive and negative.

In creating this collection Suarez creatively combines poems from six previous collections with unpublished ones to give compelling expression of what it means to live in exile.