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Poetry
Now in paperback, a major career retrospective by the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia
So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
--from "Unsaid"
Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. A Cry in the Snow often draws on these two fertile tropes: the beauty of nature and the power and limitations of language. A trilingual poet who has published in French, English, and her native Romanian, Radulescu seeks to harness the elemental aspects of human experience, working between language and the mysterious power of silence. Combining poems from two French-language collections, Un Cri dans la neige (A Cry in the Snow) and a poetic prose sequence, Journal aux yeux fermés (Journal with Closed Eyes), this collection presents the distinctive and powerful French poems of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu to an English-language readership for the first time.
Eeva Kilpi is one of Finland's best-loved writers, and a Nobel Prize nominee. Her work has been published in sixteen languages, but this is her first full-length poetry collection in English.
Kilpi's poems, which encompass everything from bawdy humour to compassionate irony, and from haunting expressions of love and loss to an obvious passion for the natural world, have a shamanistic, shape-shifting quality about them. They explore different ways of being: they serve both as companions on the life-journey and as a representation of the journey itself.
Donald Adamson's translations, produced in collaboration with the author, are a memorable introduction for new readers to the wisdom of this mature, sure-footed poet with her wholly individual voice.
Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. "He is often witty, sometimes bawdy," writes editor David Lehman, "on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything." A compound, in editor David Lehman's words, of "wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality," the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons's tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way "all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding." This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons's career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature. About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.
Aard-vark to Axolotl, an eclectic series of tiny essays, is a collection of prose poems disguised as imaginary definitions, and a collaboration of text + image based on a set of illustrations from an old dictionary. Sometimes sneaky mysterious, sometimes downright weird, these small stories work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities.
An exhalation of love, loss, and heartbreak, Abandoned Breaths is a poetic work of catharsis. From the acclaimed author of I Find You in the Darkness, Alfa's writing is at once deeply personal and universal--resulting in an emotive force that stays with you. This new edition of Abandoned Breaths includes an updated introduction and a brand-new chapter of modern poetry. Find respite, resilience, and rejuvenation from the moving poetry of Abandoned Breaths.
There are wordsthat need to be said.
Buried beneath pride and fear.
Rejection has suffocated
their tenacity to bloom.
So, they stay dormant
and fester.
Dwelling in the darkest
and dusty corners of a crying soul.
Unseen, yet felt.
Not alive, but not dead.
Abandoned breaths.
Words that need to be said.
-Alfa
Stanley Moss is ninety-three years old, still kicking sixty-two-yard field goals through the uprights of American poetry. His Abandoned Poems (Paul Valery wrote, A poem is never finished, only abandoned) consists of 120 pages of new work written since his 2016 prize-winning book, Almost Complete Poems. The truth is Moss has a unique voice in the history of American poetry. He honors the English language. This book is full of invisible life-giving discoveries the reader has almost seen, and you might say Moss has discovered a new continent, a new planet or two--or simply it's fun. There is a final section, Apocrypha and Long Abandoned Poems, which includes early misplaced work never published, and new versions of previously published poems. Bingo.
A Best Book of the Year 2023:
TIMENPR's Best Books
New York Public Library
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Mother JonesThe New York Times bestselling poetry collection with "inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom" (Monica Youn) from Clint Smith, author of #1 bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner How the Word Is Passed. Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up--through the changing world of which we are all a part. Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.
Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.
New from the author of Nervous Systems, winner of the National Poetry Series.
William Stobb has won acclaim for wide-ranging poetry that features tender realism, jazzy dissonance, luminous descriptions, and, in the words of Donald Revell, a "strange and elegantly accomplished serenity of tensions attenuated to their uttermost." The poems in his second collection, Absentia, see the big picture-the sweep of history, the ongoing evolution of consciousness, evidence of geological time in the landscape. Humbled by scales beyond comprehension, Stobb is nonetheless seduced and stricken by the present in its many manifestations. Whether dealing with family, friends, or nature, the poems in Absentia, with their rich emotional palette and vivid, precise language, respond and transform, calling us to attend to the wide skies above and inside us.
Poems that traverse and question the lines between human and animal behavior. Experimenting with time, language, and transgressing boundaries, the poems in absolute animal lean into Nabokov's notion that precision belongs to poetry and intuition to science. Rachel DeWoskin's new collection navigates the chaos of societal and mortal uncertainty. Through formal poetry, DeWoskin finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, between the ancient and the contemporary, and between languages, incorporating translations from poems dating as far back as the Tang dynasty. From sonnet sequences about heart surgeries to examinations of vole romance and climate change, absolute animal investigates and moves across boundaries and invites us to consider what holds life, what lasts, what dies, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human.
In this exquisite book, Alice Walker's first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as "one of the best American writers of today" (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker's Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, "In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind," and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker's Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, "In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind," and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014
An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets
A shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead--very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes.
These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."
The death of a mother alters forever a family's story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth--a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother's life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin's nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called "Arguments," two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn't stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.