Henrik Nordbrandt's poems pour out as cold, clear, and mineral-tanged as spring water. . . . Nordbrandt is a master, masterfully reborn in English. This is a book of signal beauty and mystery.--Rosanna Warren
Although most of his life has been spent abroad in countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, Henrik Nordbrandt has simultaneously and undeniably emerged, next to Inger Christensen, as one of Denmark's very best contemporary poets. If it was Paul Celan who first claimed that poetry was a message in a bottle, sent out in the--not always greatly hopeful--belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps, it is nevertheless Nordbrandt's unusually intimate poems that enact this unforgettably, as well as his persistent subjects: the joys and strangeness of travel, the tragicomic absurdity of our attempts to make sense of the world, and above all, the sweetness and ache of human love. Highlighting his entire career, the poems in When We Leave Each Other include a generous selection of recent and never-before-translated work into English that is certain to establish Nordbrandt as an essential contemporary lyric poet for American readers.
Henrik Nordbrandt, one of Denmark's foremost poets, has published over 30 books, including poetry, essays, translations, a novel, and a cookbook. In 2000, he was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Living alternately in Turkey, Italy, and Greece, his writing has gained a unique perspective.
Patrick Phillips is a poet, professor, and translator. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Sjöberg Prize and the Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He teaches writing at Drew University.
Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward "the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest," toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.
A panoply of voices are at play--the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say--and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very "place / hope lives, in the breaking."
Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. "When we were birds," Wilkins begins, "we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped-- / it's true, we flew."
Winner, 2017 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards
Where Are the Snows takes its title from the famous refrain of François Villon's 15th Century poem "Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past." Like that poem, the book functions, among other things, as an ubi sunt, Latin for "Where are they?" as in "Where are the ones who came before us?"--the beautiful, the strong, the virtuous, all of them? In keeping with that long tradition, these poems offer a way to think about life's transience--its beauty, its absurdity, and of course its mortality. Allusive and associative, anti-capitalist and unapologetically political, aligned somewhere between comedy and anger, this poetry juxtaposes the triumphs and tragedies (mostly tragedies) of our current age with those of history, and--by wondering "Where are they?"--explores the questions of where we are now and where we might be going.
Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Where Are the Trees Going? brings together some of the latest work of the poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata in a manner that showcases her central concerns in a wholly novel and provocative format. Renowned translator Marilyn Hacker interleaves a full translation of Khoury-Ghata's volume of poetry Où vont les arbres.with prose from La maison aux orties. The resulting interplay illuminates the poet's contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.Khoury-Ghata takes on perennial themes of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict. Characters take root in her memory as weathered trees and garden plants, lending grit and body to the imaginative collection. As bracing as the turn of seasons, Where Are the Trees Going? highlights a writer who has approached her most recent work with renewed urgency and maturity.
and laid them carefully on the kitchen table.
Then began the slow but rewarding task
of fixing everything that needed more love. Nikita Gill shares a collection of poems crafted as the world went into lockdown, tackles themes such as mental health and loneliness, and the precarity of hope. Through the life cycle of a star, she invites the reader to feel connected to the universe, taking us on a journey through the five stages of grief to the five stages of hope. This collection includes the phenomenal "Love in the Time of Coronavirus," which was shared across social media over 20,000 times, as well as Gill's poems of strength and hope, "How to Be Strong" and "Silver Linings." Where Hope Comes From is fully illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the author. All because everything is forbidden now,
I want to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower
and sing at the top of my lungs.
"Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power." --Publishers Weekly
"Every poem is exquisitely crafted, with crisp, clean lines and imagery that dazzles."--The Washington Post
"For Kasischke... poetry is a kind of revenge on the existential limits that it describes"--Los Angeles Review of Books
Laura Kasischke's long-awaited selected poems presents the breadth of her probing vision that subverts the so-called "normal." A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke showcases her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday--whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family. As literary critic Stephen Burt wrote in Boston Review, "The future will not see us by one poet alone....If there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose."
This incandescent volume makes the case that Laura Kasischke is one of America's great poets, and her presence is secure.
From Dear Water:
I am your lost daughter and, as always, you
are listening & fish. Though
I sift you for sunlight, it
runs from me in glistening pins, vanishes
in the wavering map
of your ungraspable heart. When I
reach in, you
swallow my cold hands again, swallow
the joy they'd hold. . .
Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
A masterful collection from "the grand old man of American poetry" (New York Times)
You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.
--from "The New Higher"
Winner of Poetry Magazine's Levinson Prize, an illuminating collection from the middle of his career, Raymond Carver's poems "function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
Incisively capturing the oddities of our logic and the whimsies of our reason, the poems in Whereas show there is always another side to a story. With graceful rhythm and equal parts humor and seriousness, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn examines the difficulties of telling the truth, and the fictions with which we choose to live. Finding beauty in the ordinary, this collection considers the superstition and sophistry embedded in everyday life, allowing room for more rethinking, reflection, revision, prayer, and magic in the world.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.