|9780822968344|Poems|Desire Path is a sweeping exploration of nationhood and small communities across cultural landscapes and national boundaries. In praise of community, these poems are invested in examining everyday life through personal narratives, oral tradition, and collective memory. In this collection, individual and communal disquiet opens to eros, spirituality, and haunting joy. At once an elegy, ode, and fable, this collection pleats numerous lives: a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, omens, widows, dreamers, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, as well as glimpses of music by icons such as Bi Kidude and Kanda Bongo…

|9780822968351|Poems|retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry Kramer and Gaeton Dugas, others operate as ekphrasis against the creative artwork of ACT UP’s direct actions. Combining reinterpretations of formal elements such as the concrete poem, the abecedarian, and the villanelle, post-confessional poems converse with a docupoetic history through an arc that examines what it meant to grow up Queer as a child in rural Pennsylvania in…

|9780822968375|Poems|Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can’t help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations, and her growing dis-ease reveals that she has been trying (and failing) to heal by remaining where she is harmed….

|9780822968368|Poems| The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth. This unraveling of a predicament by playing it…

|9780822968382|Poems|In her first collection in a decade, Beckian Fritz Goldberg returns with The Blue Eye of Earth, her tour de force of luminous, meditative poems that measure a secret distance between person and cosmos, memory and desire, beauty and grief. Whether standing at her neighbor’s fence of desert oleander, or birdwatching with her mother, or flipping through late-night TV, or going out to watch the moon again, Fritz Goldberg never fails to attend the romance of a world we are sure to lose. This is a lyricist unafraid of the ordinary predicament of the night sky, a place where historical…