Subject: Poetry / General

Subject: Poetry / General

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Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing

|9780822967187|Poems| Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein. Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, poems, and paragraphs. It explores and centers on the possibilities and limitations of art in the face of disappearances of many kinds, including the disappearance that is most personal—the poet’s own. —PLAGUE’S MONOLOGUE I erased the world so nothing can find it, snuffed out the roses, red and hot as…

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Trailer Park Psalms

|9780822967125|Poems|Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s…

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Auction

|9780822967170|Poems|In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how…

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Take Me to Stavanger

|9780822967163|Poems| Translated by Andrew Wachtel Amid the din of Russia’s patriotic sentiments and Instagram instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger declare a wholehearted “Yes.” This bilingual Russian-English volume makes a refuge for the poet and her readers, plumbing the depths of contemporary melancholy and ennui. Beautifully crafted idiosyncratic dissections of a strong individual who refuses to go along with the currents of popular culture or political jingoism invite readers to slow down and pay…

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Rock That Is Not a Rabbit, The

|9780822967156|Poems|Change arises as something both desired and mourned in poems that reckon with a world where perspectives blur, names drift “billowing, unattached,” and language yields a broken music. A statue of Lenin topples in a Georgian square only to be raised again in a Dallas backyard. Antlers sprout from Actaeon’s head, rendering him unrecognizable to the dogs he loves. Ungainly piano notes pour from a window and wake unexpected wonder in a lost walker. A forest grows inside a box that once held a father’s new pair of shoes. Skylab slips from its watchful orbit and careens toward Earth. A…

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