|9780822963042|As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast…

|9780822963172| Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments—mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification; they want to join themselves into one whole sentient being, into “a mansion steering itself.” The poems in Best Bones also explore the experience…

|9780822963196|The Dottery is a tale of dotters before they are born. In this series of prose poems you meet their would-be-mutters, the buoys they will know, their inner warden, and the mutterers who cannot have them. The Dottery itself is a sort-of pre-purgatory, a finishing school for the fetal feminine. The five sections correspond to the conceptual set-ups interrogated within. In “wound,” The Dottery is described, as are its inhabitants and their difficulties. In “Dual,” a gender binary is introduced and (hopefully) eviscerated. “Triage” establishes the issues that plague both the dotters and those who would bring them out into…

|9780822963257| Winner of the 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award (poetry category) This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and…

|9780822963349|The poems in Immigrant Model explore issues of individual and communal identity in the face of conflict, conflicting “truths” or histories, and uprootedness. They explore the notion of homeland as it relates to one’s roots, adopted space, psychological terrain, gendered body. If the book reads as a collage of voices or shards rather than as a book with an identifiable arc, it’s because that’s the only way the poet has managed to answer, so far, the question, “What is it like to be of this world and this world and this world, while also of the elsewhere skirting these worlds?”|…