Poetry

If long-dead poet E.A. Robinson and Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell had collaborated to depict a contemporary Midwestern woman in verse, they just might have come up with Wynona Stone, Caki Wilkinson's sort-of heroine, who is stuck in the hometown she always meant to leave, faced with a life that seems desperately mediocre. Wilkinson follows in the footsteps of Eliot and Berryman, giving us, in winsome poems, a figure at odds with herself and her surroundings.

In X Marks the Dress, Guess & Darling weave a narrative of love and identity that unpacks itself again and again. Like beautifully wrought Matryoshka dolls, these poems explore the depth and wonder of language as well as its inability to truly define any one thing. Lines and images reappear in new and surprising ways--footnotes, appendices, definitions--that stunningly illustrate exactly how slippery love can be.

--Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of The Naming of Strays

Pulitzer Prize finalist

A poetic history of the twentieth century from one of our most beloved, popular, and highly lauded poets--a stirring, strikingly original, intensely imagined recreation of the most potent voices and searing moments that have shaped our collective experience.

XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath's astonishing sequence of one hundred poems--one per year--written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presley. Based on years of historical research and cultural investigation, XX turns poetry into an archival inquiry and a choral documentary. Hollywood and Hiroshima, Modernism and propaganda, Bob Dylan and Walter Benjamin--its range of interest encompasses the entire century of art and culture, invention and struggle.

Elegiac and celebratory, deeply tragic and wickedly funny, XX is a unique collection from this acknowledged master of historical poetry, and his most ambitious book yet.

Debut poetry by Brian Russell, winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize

* Named a Best Book of the Year by Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation *

The year of what now
Are we the pure products and what
Does that even mean pure isn't it
Obvious we are each our own culture
Alive with the virus that's waiting
To unmake us.
--from The Year of What Now

The Year of What Now is not a book of poems about cancer. It's not a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. It doesn't parade the autobiographical in your face, though the conventions seem at first to be autobiography. It's not a cry in extremis, de profundis, etc. It's more casual, more canny, more casually well-made, more philosophically oriented . . . This book seems to me to represent a way forward for other young poets in its wide engagement with the world, in its unabashed embrace of the personal, and its equally galvanizing skepticism about the limits of subjective speech. At its deepest level, it embodies the desire to establish true sequences of pain from the cellular level to the most abstract operations of culture, technology, and possible worlds of the spirit. --Tom Sleigh, Bakeless Prize judge, from the introduction

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the most beloved poets of the twentieth century. He has influenced generations of writers with his classic Letters to a Young Poet, and his reflections on the divine and our place in the universe are strikingly profound.

Now readers can enjoy a daily selection of Rilke's work, in an entirely new translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. A Year with Rilke includes selections from his poetry, prose, and intimate letters and journals. Amidst the bustle of daily life, Rilke can provide a welcome refuge as he reflects on such themes as impermanence, the beauty of creation, the voice of God, and the importance of solitude.

Anita Barrows, a prize-winning poet and clinical psychologist, is the author of four books of poetry. She has received an NEA grant as well as the Quarterly Review of Literature's Contemporary Poetry Award. She has been a professional translator for more than thirty years.

Joanna Macy, whose books include World as Lover, World as Self, is a scholar of systems theory and Buddhist thought. With Anita Barrows, she is translator of Rilke's Book of Hours.

In You and Yours, Naomi Shihab Nye continues her conversation with ordinary people whose lives become, through her empathetic use of poetic language, extraordinary. Nye writes of local life in her inner-city Texas neighborhood, about rural schools and urban communities she's visited in this country, as well as the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians who live in the war-torn Middle East.

The Day

I missed the day
on which it was said
others should not have
certain weapons, but we could.
Not only could, but should,
and do.
I missed that day.
Was I sleeping?
I might have been digging
in the yard,
doing something small and slow
as usual.
Or maybe I wasn't born yet.
What about all the other people
who aren't born?
Who will tell them?

Balancing direct language with a suggestive "aslantness," Nye probes the fragile connection between language and meaning. She never shies from the challenge of trying to name the mysterious logic of childhood or speak truth to power in the face of the horrors of war. She understands our lives are marked by tragedy, inequity, and misunderstanding, and that our best chance of surviving our losses and shortcomings is to maintain a heightened awareness of the sacred in all things.

Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, editor, anthologist, is a recipient of writing fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations. Nye's work has been featured on PBS poetry specials including NOW with Bill Moyers, The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and The United States of Poetry. She has traveled abroad as a visiting writer on three Arts America tours sponsored by the United States Information Agency. In 2001 she received a presidential appointment to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Poetry. Winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. A collection of prose poems that might be described as Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo going out for a date at Coney Island. The book reflects what happens when you drop an American history textbook, an issue of People, and a short history of dreams into a blender.