"Heartbreaking and hilarious simultaneously... " James TateIn Jeffrey McDaniel's second book, it is hard to separate the humor from the pain. Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day in the Office of Dreams'.

Arranged mostly chronologically, Thin Ice Olympics is a poetic dream diary, charting one man's experience isolating with a wife and teenage daughter in New York state during the Covid pandemic.Swerving between dazed loneliness, grief, and dark comedy, the poetic speaker yearns for connection with loved ones, both living and dead.At times profane and brash, at other times tender and sincere, the poems are demotic, and yet energized by explosive meta...

Whether Jeffrey McDaniel is denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is original and provocative. A noted poet, McDaniel has appeared on ABC’s Nightline and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. "Wild, fierce, irreverent, full of praise and lament, and deeply, intensely human." - Thomas Lux

The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque ‘academicisms,’ McDaniel is an intro to a new world.

In his new collection, Jeffrey McDaniel confronts the insular and expansive qualities of loss. With electric language and surrealistic imagery, McDaniel’s poems deliver the quotidian elements of middle-age life while weaving us in & out of childhood and adulthood alongside body and mind. The tragic and life affirming share the same page and the same world, reminding us how close corruption can be to innocence; domesticity to fantasy; aging to youth.JonathanWe...

"Reading Jeffrey McDaniel's gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head."—Major Jackson

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...

Poetry from the author of Tell Me, a finalist for the National Book Award.A chestnut with a white blaze is scorching across the turf towards the finishing post.

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu's poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic facts of life: In the classrooms of tomorrow, starved youth will be asked to imagine a culture that kept thin pamphlets of poetry pinned to ...

America’s Kim Addonizio has been called ‘one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets’. Her poetry is renowned both for its gritty, street-wise narrators and for a wicked sense of wit. With passion, precision and irreverent honesty, her poems explore life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, joy and suffering, exposing raw emotions often only visible when truly confronting ourselves - jealousy, self-pity, fear, lust. ‘Like any good nighthawk, Addonizio finds Eros and loss i...

Dive into a New York that might be.Drunk fairies, chain smoking mermaids, and wise bartenders are just some of the characters you'll find in this collection of strange tales of New York City.Time stops, windows open into other worlds, and on occasion, people transform in marvelous ways. The collection is sometimes gritty, often funny, and occasionally scandalous.But most importantly each story will draw you into a secret world most of us never see. Seductive and hil...

"To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." —BOB HICOKIn his follow-up to Fancy Beasts, a book that "slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter" (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. ...