Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interla...

Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop.In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness.In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces....

Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ec...

this collection of poems is residue from my encounters during the 20 years from (1964-1985). ok, 21.people, places, events seen sometimes wryly, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes playfully and sometimes darkly.

"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."--Booklist, starred reviewIn this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thic...

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...

The highly anticipated second collection from the Irish-Canadian poet whose work has garnered international attention.Poems of stringent aesthetic demands and volcanic emotional release make up Stevie Howell's wondrous I left nothing inside on purpose. These poems--bewildering in their linguistic beauty--verge on prayer in their intense plea to be truly seen by another, a sort of devotional sequence addressing the psychological construct of attachment. Can...

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape. Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean. Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse i...

Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something — Paul Vermeersch’s fifth collection of poetry — is, as its title suggests, a lyrical meditation on written language and the end of civilization. It combines centos, glosas, erasures, text collage, and other forms to imagine a post-apocalyptic literature built, or rebuilt, from the rubble of the texts that came before.

Will you step intoMy web? You will like it here.No one ever leavesThere are some who believe that the honor of a samurai is reserved for men. But they are wrong.A daughter of a samurai picks up her father's sword and becomes a legend. Each stroke of the sword is as precise as the stroke of a brush.The haikus herein are spread across the eight-book epic saga Warrior Woman of the Samurai, but collected here for your enjoyment.

The Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” translates into English as, "He Speaks to It." This is a collection of free-verse poetry by Indigenous poet and artist John McDonald. Written in two parts, these poems chronicle John’s life and experiences as an urban Indigenous youth during the 1980s. The second half of the book is a look into the inspirations and events, that shaped John’s career as an internationally known spoken word artist, beat poet, monologist and performance artist.

The poetry within this book was derived from the hopes, dreams, and opinions of the poet who so madly scribbles on the minds of society.