Poetry

The Tradition explores cultural threats on black bodies, resistance, and the interplay of desire and privilege in a dangerous era.

We emerge from these poems, scathed and awakened.--Poetry

An excellent choice for any collection looking to expand poetry beyond the obvious.--Library Journal, starred review

Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from beloved and award-winning poet Mary Ruefle. Full of the peculiarity and wit characteristic of Ruefle's work, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts--its paradoxes, failures, and loss--and help us to better appreciate its redeeming strangeness.

From Goodnight Irene:

I think the tree is very much turned on
I can feel its sticky sap rising in my eyes
Its sticky sap is in my eyes
I do not think the tree wishes it were dead
I think the baby is very much turned on
Look baby a birdie in the tree
Say bye-bye birdie now go out and get a job
My job is writing poems and reading them to a cloud

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was named a finalist for the National Books Critic Circle award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

Cameron Awkward Rich's Transit, runner-up for the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, takes the reader on a constantly surprising journey through gender and identity in contemporary America. Awkward-Rich's academic prowess shines throughout, as does his remarkable ability to condense an essay's worth of thought and theory into a few poignant lines. A book to be read anywhere and everywhere: in a classroom, on the subway, under blankets on a cold winter night.

Translations from the Flesh, Elton Glaser's seventh full-length collection of poetry, is driven by the powerful engines of love and desire. In poems long and brief, playful and intense, Glaser evokes what it feels like "to fall into / Love and its infinite mistakes." In a style that might be described as "flamboyant stoicism" (a phrase from Simon Callow, ) he explores our human urgencies and weaknesses, following wherever our appetites lead us, whether hormonal or spiritual, cravings that we struggle to understand. The voice that says "Apprentice me to mysteries of the flesh" speaks for everyone intent on making sense of the body's restless yearning for fulfillment. These poems, with their witty brio and passionate precision of language, agree with Gerald Stern that "the brain / is the best organ for love." At the same time, they are not afraid to get down in the dirt, among the more primitive pleasures. Whatever their bent, from moony aspirations to "rare positions only the wicked know," the poems express Glaser's mission to give voice to those deep pressures that move us, body and soul: "I put my native tongue / To work, open to / The dark instincts of ecstasy."

These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman's passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as "Boat" to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own "brilliant, trivial unmooring." As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in her life with an appreciation for the incidental scraps of beauty she chances upon.

Throughout these luminous poems-which touch movingly on the illness and loss of her husband-Digges marvels at the brio with which we fling ourselves daringly into the night:

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.

Poetry. In THE TREES THE TREES, the follow-up to Heather Christle's acclaimed first collection, THE DIFFICULT FARM, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.

You get the impression of the oracle at Delphi trying her hand at stand-up or jamming the broadcast of the nightly news: Christle's gift for welding surreal visions to living speech rhythms keeps unlocking new surprises, page after page. At least once per poem, you feel like the triple-bars just lined up in the slot-machine window, and you laugh or cry out.--John Darnielle

The 2013 National Poetry Series selection, chosen by poet and novelist Charlie Smith.

Established in 1978 by legendary editor Dan Halpern, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio D. Martinez.

Trespass, the winner of the National Poetry Series open competition, showcases a powerful poetic talent who explores the darker side of domestic life with unique and startling vision.

The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and--especially in the United States--reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal's three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It's only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself--and a turn to its affirmation of life.