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Near Miss

Near Miss considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, gratitude and hopefulness. … When the Emergency Broadcast System proclaims this is only a test, you leave the TV on because you’ve gotten used to the sound. You keep waiting for the heat to come on, for the regular broadcast to resume, for a new sensation to quicken inside you like the sight of that fleet of ghost-planes lifted from the desert, reanimated, hovering over your house as if everything is fine. – “Decommissioned Planes”

What Your Hands Have Done

Chris Bailey

What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields. Bailey examines the world around him from the inside, observing the minute to account for the vast. These poems are laid bare and free of ornament, revealing the hard-won wisdom just below the surface: She was there, cooked for you. Helped clean the mess you’d become from decades spent on your father’s ocean hauling lobsters from its depths, gulping down the sea air. Even when the booze was too much, she knew you were more than the vomit caked to your shirt. Less than confessions made beneath the red summer moon.

The Broken Face

Russell Thornton

The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familiar relationships he ushers in a connection with something transcendent: “A man has come floundering late in the night / to stand alone at the shore of a sleeping infant’s face.” The poems capture life at the periphery, whether describing homelessness or incarceration, or even the universal experiences of aging and mortality, love and fear of love, all of which bring the speaker into a detached yet energized state of watching and waiting: “the door that was my grandfather into our passing lives / will arrive at a house where each of us is his own door / that opens on our first selves, fundamental together.” With intense lyricism, Thornton displays a mastery of craft so complete as to be nearly invisible. While stunningly beautiful, his imagery is also in such complete service to the deeper emotional resonance of each poem that it feels inevitable, and contributes to making the collection deeply moving.

44 poems for you

Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s first book of poetry, 44 Poems for You, offers poems that form a subtle, personal meditation on family, motherhood, and loss. With a finely tuned ear for language, Ruhl’s poetry sings with a humbling honesty about what it means to share our lives with others and with those who form our hollows: a miscarriage, a close friend lost to cancer, and the sublimity of nature. She delves into womanhood through the physical reality of the everyday, and shows us life through her hands—making terrariums or jam with her husband, holding a child, grasping the counter as she bleeds. Succinct and contemplative, generous and wise, Sarah Ruhl—one of the greatest contemporary playwrights working today—addresses these poems to you.

Solar Perplexus

Dean Young

In Solar Perplexus, Dean Young uses the surreal as the thread which weaves in and out of complications of existence. The result is a textured, honest work that grapples with what it means to love, lose, and hang in the afterward. Suddenly the boundaries of our everyday are shaken—and yet instead of being thrown off balance, our understanding is cracked open. Young holds us between un/reality, tracing the circle of life and death, and exposing the true closeness between extremes. It is this true intimacy that both unsettles and comforts. Solar Perplexus turns identity on its head as it questions self (against) control, with each eerily familiar moment of humor punctuated with an inevitable doubt.

Railsplitter

Maurice Manning

Railsplitter , the seventh collection from Pulitzer Prize Finalist and Guggenheim Fellow Maurice Manning, envisions the role of poetry in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Manning, who writes each piece in Lincoln’s persona, provides a lasting reflection on how poetry guided and shaped the President’s mind while leading a divided nation. Equal parts prophetic and rich in both rural folklore and literary allusions—from Shakespeare, to Whitman, to Poe, to the comedic— Railsplitter transcends the darkness of Lincoln’s time, to imagine a new lore entirely—one comprised of buzzard feather quills, horse treats in a top hat, and finally, a fateful bullet. Lincoln, who was born nearby to Maurice Manning’s childhood home in Kentucky, is alive again, in new form.

The Hardy Tree

Linda Bierds

Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, The Hardy Tree examines power, oppression and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication—the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. The book is arranged in four sections. The first visits Vladimir Nabokov as a child with alphabet blocks, Alan Turing at eleven writing home from boarding school with a “pen of his own making,” Virginia Woolf as a teenager practicing her penmanship, and Wilfred Owen trying to draw a musical note from a blade of grass on a battlefield on the Somme. The second section focuses more deeply on various types of encoding; the third erases the Magna Carta; the fourth offers a provisional peace. These sections lean against one another the way that history leans upon itself. Backed by Bierds’ intensive research and woven with scientific evidence, she pushes us to consider our futures in direct conversation with the past.

Father's Day

Matthew Zapruder

"As seen in the The New York Times Book Review

""In characteristically short lines and pithy, slippery language like predictive text from a lucid dream, Zapruder’s fifth collection grapples with fatherhood as well as larger questions of influence and inheritance and obligation."" —The New York Times


“[Zapruder] presents powerfully nuanced and vivid verse about the limitations of poetry to enact meaningful change in a world spiraling into callousness; yet despite poetry’s supposed constraints, Zapruder’s verse offers solace and an invaluable blueprint for empathy.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review


“Zapruder’s new book, Father’s Day, is firmly situated in its (and our) political moment, and is anchored by a compelling gravity and urgency.” ―The Washington Post


The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father’s Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward."

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

Keith S. Wilson

"“Wilson’s collection is romantic yet world-weary, bereaved yet fortified―a kindred reflection of the heart in the modern world.” ―Publishers Weekly

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur—the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again."

So Far So Good

Урсула Ле Гуин

"Ursula K. Le Guin, loved by millions for her fantasy and science-fiction novels, ponders life, death and the vast beyond in So Far So Good, an astute, charming collection finished weeks before her death in January, 2018. Fans will recognize some of the motifs here—cats, wind, strong women – as well as her exploration of the intersection between soul and body, the knowable and the unknown. The writing is clear, artful and reverent as Le Guin looks back at key memories and concerns and looks forward to what is next: 'Spirit, rehearse the journey of the body/ that are to come, the motions/ of the matter that held you.'"―Washington Post "Le Guin’s farewell poetry collection, contains all that created her reputation for fiction—sharp insight, restless imagination, humor that is both mordant and humane, and, above all else, that connection to all creation, that 'immense what is'."—New York Journal of Books“It’s hard to think of another living author who has written so well for so long in so many styles as Ursula K. Le Guin.” —Salon“She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is.” —Margaret Atwood“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin’s.” —Grace PaleyLegendary author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her ground- breaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet, and wrote across genres for her entire career. In this clarifying and sublime collection—completed shortly before her death in 2018—Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mor- tality, and full of wonder for the mysteries beyond. Redolent of the lush natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with rich sounds playfully echoing myth and nursery rhyme, Le Guin bookends a long, daring, and prolific career.From “How it Seems to Me”:In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingles with mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be. Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul, till soul can loose its hold of self . . .Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over sixty novels, short fiction works, translations, and volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her books continue to sell millions of copies worldwide. Le Guin died in 2018 in her home in Portland, Oregon.