The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed elegy,” all while examining the various ways that self-destruction can turn into self-preservation.
Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Krygowski’s poems—often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous—are lovingly grounded in the ordinary. They are thinking poems—tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it.
These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss—the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time—and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy.
Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.Angela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.
After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter—the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America—as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.
The Floating Bridge, David Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, transports its readers over the chasm between the mundane and the enchanted. We traverse one bridge and find ourselves eavesdropping on Gertrude Stein and her gardener. We take the night bus to Gomorrah to have a look around. Halfway across, each bridge vanishes beneath our feet. Our world shifts. The commonplace begins to glow. We turn the page. Another bridge awaits.
In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the “romantic” “and the “brutal” and how they exist within us and between us.
The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque ‘academicisms,’ McDaniel is an intro to a new world.
For a Limited Time Only explores issues of aging, illness, and mortality, and the philosophical and theological speculations that arise from personal tragedy, and invokes humor, hope, and consolation in the face of death and loss.
Winner of the 2008 Posner Book-Length Poetry Award.
Winner of the 2009 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award.
Prose poems that profile the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking deeply into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity.
Winner of the 2007 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Bob Hicok
Burn and Dodge is a collection of poems that “burns” with contemporary vices such as: Guilt, Envy, Regret, and Indecision while also “dodging” such concerns with formal playfulness.
Love on the Streets is a selection of poems from four of Doubiago’s books of poetry, two of which are book-length poems, plus new poetry. It is the culmination of thirty years of writing “on the road.”
