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Poetry
The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t'adore. Behind every famous man is a great woman--and from the quick-tongued Mrs. Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart's shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection. Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, this is Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best.
A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry
A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry
A Bustle Best Book of 2020
A Refinery29 Best New Book of Fall 2020
"Some girls are not made," torrin a. greathouse writes, "but spring from the dirt." Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound--selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates "buckteeth & ulcer." She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.
These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse's poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. "I'm still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral."
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse--elegant, vicious, "a one-girl armageddon" draped in crushed velvet--teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
Additional recognition:
A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry Collection"
An NBC Out "Best LGBTQ Book to Gift This Holiday Season"
A Book Marks "Most Anticipated Poetry Collection of Fall/Winter 2020"
A Lambda "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book of December 2020"
A Chicago Review of Books "Must-Read Book of December 2020"
National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky pens an incandescent indictment of capitalism's moral decay.
In Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. But pulsing amid Borzutzky's outrage over our era's tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice. Borzutzky's strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.
Tom Crawford's words paint familiar landscapes--Seattle's coastline, New York's public spaces, rural China, and Western mobile homes--in a new light.
In poems as humorous as they are revelatory, sea birds careen off cliff walls Then back/to the water to consider/where they went wrong, nudes are spontaneously drawn in urban coffee shops, and the Bhagavad Gita sits on a shelf in a trailer home, holding up deodorant. Crawford's Eastern spirituality, tempered by working-class pragmatism, transforms these narrative poems into memorable portraits of the everyday.
A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.
Jennifer Kronovet's poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language--sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation--and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.
In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.
In x, Dan Chelotti conjures voices that wander, pause, analyze, articulate, attempt to enlighten, fail to enlighten, and then answer that failure with laughter. The wildly inventive imagery in these cinematic pieces lodges them somewhere between the surreal and the pure symbol, colorful and smooth like the lyrics of John Ashbery or Linda Pastan. In Chelotti's poems, diamonds talk and sheriffs balance frogs on the tips of pens.
The rain says, Listen to Debussy,go ahead, Debussy will fix you.
?From ?Migraine Cure" The secret to including everything
is to intricately divide your mind
and then, all of a sudden,
undivide it.
?From ?Still Life on a Scrolling Background"
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.
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.
