Poetry. Sheila Murphy is "one of the strongest, clearest, and most distinctive voices writing in English today"--John M. Bennett. CONCENTRICITY is a daring and distinctive book, yet its playfulness never fails to shine through. "Sheila Murphy's poetry operates in mercurial registers that demonstrate an aliveness to risk and experimentation.Murphy is argus-eyed, and her invigilation invokes a kind of spiritual exercise. She performs her poetic work as a meditative attention to the "tone com...

"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email, pulsing jazz-like variations and haunting r...

The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry.Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). ...

Through 40 eloquent prayers and small simple photographs that mirror and interpret the text, Being Home is a celebration of mindfulness. As M. Scott Peck put it, "This is simply the best book I know on the subject of the sacrament of the present moment, and a great work of devotional literature." 43 duotone photographs..

This is a collection of 30 Poems of the style of French Poetry. The themes are diverse and the tools of modern and classical poetry are included. Each poem has 8 to 12 Stanzas of 4 Verses each, except for a minority that obeys to a slightly different style. At the end of each poem is illustrated a representative image.May this Enchanted Poetry transport you to a world of De...

First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry's fifth volume of poetry. What he calls "an expansive metaphor" is "a farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation." "Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God a...

"If McHugh is serious, she's anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering, and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics."-The New York Times Book Review"Her poems are open, resilient, invisibly twisted: part safety net, part trampoline."-Voice Literary SupplementThis fast-paced, verbally dexterous book-honored as a "Book of the Year" by Publishers Weekly-"boils up and boils over" ...

Winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001, and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.In this groundbreaking collection, Alice Fulton weds her celebrated linguistic freshness to a fierce emotional depth. Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the pas...

Highlights from each of Alice Fulton's groundbreaking, prize-winning poetry books.Over the past twenty years, Alice Fulton has emerged as one of the most brilliant and honored poets of her generation. She is also among the most thrillingly inventive, compassionate, and necessary. Cascade Experiment charts the evolution of a poetics that revises the limits of language, emotion, and thought.

HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. She regularly teaches at the low residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan 1999). In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. She has translated the work of Jean Follain, and with her husband Nikolai Popov...

"Glare is a high-energy, relentlessly self-aware collision with the whole of life."—Albert Mobilio, SalonA superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise—and always unmistakably his own.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the "vague cadence" of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilit...