|9780822958758| Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's “Imagine” to wrestle with the world as it is: “no hell below us, / above us only sky.” It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and…

|9780822958802|Selected And New Poems| Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry. “Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns,” Suárez writes in “River Fable,” and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Suárez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan,…

|9780822958895| Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryThe Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America. He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and…

|9780822958888| Winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeBlue on Blue Ground is about the body, desire, anxiety, and obsession—how what we want redeems and isolates us (and is sometimes used against us). These poems are artful yet accessible, lyrical yet direct, strange but recognizable.Smith’s relentless self-examination, fear, sense of humor, and vulnerability are all laid to bare in crisp, precise language. From lonely observations, bizarre medical fascinations, emotion, loss, and honesty, Blue on Blue Ground constructs its internal and external worlds. The metaphorical city is also a “body,” a place of exile and restoration, a symbol of hope,…

|9780822958932| Winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry PrizeThe poems in Eye of Water are derived from the narrator’s experiences in what she calls her “waking.” She traces inspiration to “the beginning of myth, to Eve in the Garden of Eden” and states: “We could spend our lives unraveling the mistake and discover that life was one great big ‘chore,’ and inescapable. And the path is full of missteps and accidents because we cannot (or prefer not to) remember all that got us to that moment. My body seems to be a symptom of the past, so no matter who…