The first comprehensive analysis of a strategically located ceremonial center on the island of Puerto RicoThe prehistoric civic-ceremonial center of Tibes is located on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, just north of the modern coastal city of Ponce. Protected on two sides by a river, and on the other two sides by hills, this approximately 10.5-acre site remains as fertile and productive today as when first occupied over 2,000 years ago. Such a rich regio...

Margaret Millington is a wealthy, cynical, midfifties alcoholic, suffering from depression. Peter Kearns is a thirty-one-year-old Catholic priest with a burn-scarred face he mysteriously suffered as a young child. Fate brings the two together, and they develop an unlikely friendship that allows Margaret to witness the hope that the remarkable young man offers to people in a variety of seemingly hopeless situations, ultimately giving Margaret herself a new purpose in life. When the charisma...

These poems speak an odd nostalgia for what turns on, in, and alongside the world. A tragedy of loss, a miracle of eroticism, or a comedy of road kill, Odd Bloom Seen from Space looks at the self amid the ashes of fleeting exultation and uncertainty. The speaker tells stories with wild candor on matters of heroic inadequacy while searching through his obsessive questions for greater meaning.But it’s in the act of discovery, through the hero’s immediate ancestry that Welch’...

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...

 If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?           Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a...

For thirty years now the Phoenix Poets series has been publishing the best poets working in English, from young poets publishing their first books to renowned masters at the peak of storied careers. This sample presents some of the best poets and poems from those three decades—it’s sure to whet your appetite and get you coming back for more!

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...

Unable to decide where to go next on his journey, Orphen is still staying in Nashwater. One day, Claiomh gets drawn into a dispute between two sword dojos. The subject of the dispute is a sword, Freak Diamond, left behind by the late hero Beedo Crewbstar. Through the conflict, Claiomh comes to know an instructor at one of the dojos and the current owner of the sword, Lottecia Crewbstar. As Orphen finds himself investigating the two dojos, a red dragon assassin appears before him!

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper'sJohn D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscuri...

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.

“Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.”—Rain Taxi Dan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet imagery. In his seventh book of poems, he writes of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California’s central coast, ...