Poetry

**Featuring 107 poets, from A to Z--Julia Alvarez to Matthew Zapruder--with work in between by Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Jeffrey Yang**

As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality.

In these pages, we find poets grieving for relatives they are separated from or recovering from illness themselves, attending to suddenly complicated household tasks or turning to literature for strength, considering the bravery of medical workers or working their own shifts at the hospital, and, as the Black Lives Matter movement has swept the globe, reflecting on the inequities in our society that amplify sorrow and demand our engagement.

From fierce and resilient to wistful, darkly humorous, and emblematically reverent about the earth and the vulnerability of human beings in frightening times, the poems in this collection find the words to describe what can feel unspeakably difficult and strange, providing wisdom, companionship, and depths of feeling that enliven our spirits.

A portion of the advance for this book was generously donated by Alice Quinn and the poets to Chefs for America, an organization helping feed communities in need across the country during the pandemic.

Explosive language, rough sensuousness, and an unflinching eye -- here is a poet who doesn't look away and is committed to poetry's first purpose: to bring song. Tombo is a book of lyrics fueled in equal parts by realism and big-fish storytelling, a book of wanderers, foghorns, summer rain, feral cats, and city jazz. Built on heartbreak particulars, these poems are raw, mysterious dilations of the moments of existence. Di Piero's work has been praised by luminaries of the poetry world like Philip Levine, John Ashbery, Christian Wiman, the editor of POETRY, and also by The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Peter Coyote's first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

"Gregory Pardlo . . . wants to explore the druidic function of art, the works of jazz musicians, painters, poets, and others who live imaginatively, expand reality, and make imagination free."--Brenda Hillman, from the introduction

Totem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is the debut of a poet who has been listening for decades. In his youth, Gregory Pardlo heard stories of factory hours and picket lines from his father; in the bars, clubs, and on the radio he listens to jazz and blues, the rhythms, beats, and aspirations of which all of which seep into his poems.

A former Cave Canem fellow, Pardlo creates work that is deeply autobiographical, drifting between childhood and adult life. He speaks a language simultaneously urban and highbrow, seamlessly switching from art analysis to sneakers hung over the telephone lines. Deeply rooted in a blue-collar world, he produces snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.

From "Vincent's Shoes"

On the wall above my desk: a pen
and ink affair which I copied
from a print hanging in the sushi
bar down the block:
inflected necks of pedestrians on a bridge
in the rain and here I hung
the hightops from a power line.
It was in me to do. I felt it in my gut
the way Vincent might have felt
the wheat fields and the smoking socket
of the sun rattling, tweezed days
late into the ear of an aluminum bowl

Gregory Pardlo teaches at Medgar Evers College, The City University of New York, and lives in Brooklyn.

At the center of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home--all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and "a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life" (Tony Hoagland).