John Zedolik has come to organize his poetry based upon three primary sources of inspiration: observation, recollection, and rumination. This collection includes approximately ninety lyric poems ordered by these themes. These poems demonstrate the importance of paying attention to aspects of one's mental, emotional, and physical life--even apparently minor aspects--as every moment is sui generis and a source of inspiration for not only the composition of poetry but the continuing appreciat...

Lovers' Progress consists of ninety poems written over a span of seventeen years--from 2004 to 2021--from the inception of the relationship to COVID-19 times. Not only does it explore the development of the romantic relationship as the partners move from dating, to living together, to marrying, but it documents the development of the poet's work over this time as lines become longer, poems divide into regular stanzas, and feelings/perspectives expressed become broader, less obvious, and mo...

This collection consists of thirty-five poems expressing the grieving process for the death of the author's mother. It is organized into five chronological sections: "The Days," "The Weeks," "The Months," "The Year," and "Beyond." This organization reflects the effects that time has had upon the author's grieving process. Some of the poems explicitly concern the death of the mother, while others focus upon the emotional effects of her death upon the author. Though the poems contain philoso...

In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer ...

In Good Bones, first published in 1992, Margaret Atwood has fashioned an enthralling collection of parable, monologue, mini-romance and mini-biography, speculative fiction, prose lyric, outrageous recipe and reconfigured fairy tale, demonstrating yet again the play of an unerring wit overseen by a panoramic intelligence. Good Bones is a cornucopia of good things—precise, witty, wise, and sometimes offbeat Atwood writing, with the funny and the sidelong view of the world w...

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the ac...

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

A vibrant collection from one of America's most talented award-winning poets and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.Rarely has a book of poetry so borne the stamp of necessity as Christian Wiman's Every Riven Thing. Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startl...

Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American PoetsSam Sax's bury it, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What's at stake is survival itself and the arc...

Emerging in the era of tweets and text-messages comes a new poetic form: textu. The u” in textu echoes the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule: be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form, and style are wide opened, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.

At once casting aside and reinventing the confessional mode, Liar is a booklength monument to love found, betrayed, renounced, and ultimately accepted as transformative. The white-hot immediacy of detail and scorching emotional honesty of Liar make for a compelling tour through one lover's accounting for her own actions and those of her beloved. From the delusion of ownership to the pain of estrangement, Crosbie's surgical intelligence exposes what romantics so often refuse to ack...

Different poems, most of them from a prose poetry perspective, even when they have short lines. The rambling stories of a middle-aged woman about life, love, death or immortality. The self of the poet merging with the environment, the pain of being alone, the modus vivendi of getting older are translucent through these filigree of thoughts and images.