|9780822966050|Poems| Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man’s land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a ghost in a garden. Coyotes cry out on the hill, and lovers find themselves kissing, “bee-stung, drunk” in the middle of road. Here, the dust is holy, as is the dark, unknown. These are poems that praise the impossible, wild world, finding beauty in its wake. Excerpt from “Bonfire Opera”In those days, there was…

Read Smarter is a reading challenge designed by University of Pittsburgh Press, Manchester University Press, MIT Press, Northwestern University Press, Syracuse University Press, University of Virginia Press, and Princeton University Press. Each month we will highlight one of the challenge prompts and provide suggested titles to help fulfill the prompts. The fourth prompt for Read Smarter is “Read a collection of poems.” This can be a collection by a single author or an anthology, a book of haiku or a book of complex free verse, as long as it’s published by a university press! You can download the full checklist here: Read…