In Shaking Music from the Angry Air, Michael Dwayne Smith keeps poems close to their source: mortality, wonder, and an infinite appetite for love. Frank and unpretentious, flinty, even brash, these poems sling us straight into the American southwest world of a boy-to-man quest through cities, coasts, and deserts. Smith's self-revelatory, ravenous, duende-filled personas, saddled by the origin story of an alcoholic home, break loose in escapades riddled with coyotes, deaths, horses...

John Lyon, a wise-cracking, hot shot New York cop has the most amount of kills out of anyone on the force. But one day, he takes down a monstrous voodoo killer and falls victim to a terrible curse: that all the people Lyon has killed until now will come back for vengeance. Can he convince a sexy psychiatrist that he’s not nuts and erase the curse before it’s too late?

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterThe Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America’s most influential and imitated American poet.To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn ou...

Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of American poetry from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture.Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of ordinary life as Charles Bukowski. Resonant with his powerful, perceptive voice, his visceral, hilarious, and transcendent poetry speaks to us as forcefully today as when it was writt...

A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize“The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sh...

"Myles speaks with one of the essential voices in American poetry." — New York TimesA collection of new and selected past work from one of America's most celebrated poetsEileen Myles's poetry and prose are known for their blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral, in which readers can peer into existent places, like the East Village of Myles's iconic Chelsea Girls. But they are also lifted into dreams, th...

Before Maggie Nelson’s name became synonymous with such genre-defying, binary-slaying writing as The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty, this collection of poetry introduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind.These days/the world seems to split up/into those who need to dredge/and those who shrug their shoulders/and say, It’s just something/that happened.

“[A] vulnerable collection about facing the good, the bad and the ugly of our humanity with grace and curiosity.”—USA Today (New Must-Read Poetry)“This is a book that will make you feel simultaneously alive and less alone.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, New York Times bestselling author of There’s Always This Yearfrom somewhere down a hallway of locked doors, a voice asks / What if you aren’t as bad as you suspect you are...

Racing Hummingbirds examines critiques and at times delights in one woman's navigation through the many worlds of manic depression and her struggle to maintain humanity in the process. Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives prayers and conjurings which address gender sex race poverty heartbreak and survival with such stark intimacy you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclai...

This is a collection of 175 previously unpublished works by Bukowski. It contains yarns about his childhood in the Depression and his early literary passions, his apprentice days as a hard-drinking, starving poetic aspirant, and his later years when he looks back at fate with defiance.

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me*The parade for the slain police officergoes past the bakeryand the smell of fresh breadmakes the mourners salivate against their will.*—from "Note to Reality"Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our for...

A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality—here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman.One of the most talked about literary collections of the year is this collection by a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity about her life on the margins. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of Coleman's poems spanning four decades, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Alth...