· C.D. Wright is one of the country’s “watched” poets · This is C.D.’s first book of prose—unruly and undeniably brilliant. · Title refers to a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. · A bit memoir, a bit poetics, a tad manifesto, and an ongoing argument with books. It is unlike anything out there. · As she writes: “To see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us—which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced.”
– Last season, Ted Kooser co-authored a book with Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, which sold 3500 and got great reviews. – Kooser's recent memoir, Local Wonders, was featured in BookSense 76 and was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book. – Ted Kooser is featured in Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?
Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as «mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry.» (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from «Gathering the Bones Together» A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."–The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr: Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence
"Had Dr. Dolittle fathered a prodigious daughter, she might well be behind the bizarre and entertaining personae found on the pages of Lindsay's first-book bestiary…Lindsay's dark-edged, sometimes creepy poems are also imbued with a buoying sense of respect for the different, the unexpected and the challenging.... In work reminiscent of Amy Clampitt and of Albert Goldbarth, Lindsay weaves informed and moving lyric claims around scientific facts, lamenting extinct species or following local rivers." —Publishers Weekly "Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read....(Sarah Kindsay's) voice…is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters." —Poetry Foundation "With wonder and bemusement, Lindsay writes supple, sparkling poems about life's perpetual coalescence and breaking down....The heart of this mordant yet profoundly compassionate book is a vivid and involving series about the fictional ancient kingdom of Nab. Here Lindsay sifts through the detritus of a civilization, imagines the inner worlds of people long gone, and the layering of tomb upon tomb, city upon city as bone, clay vessels, and the inscribed tablets are all crushed into splinters and shards." —Booklist “Sarah Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for.”—The New York Times Book Review Quirky, macabre, vivid, and fascinating, Sarah Lindsay’s poetry in Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that might just be true: spadefoot toads singing till their throats bleed, an explorer tumbling into an Antarctic crevasse and swinging from his tether like a pendulum. Many of Lindsay’s poems occur in extremis, and the situations are often severe and surreal: the futuristic “Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto” or a bog person discovered in Eske’s Field. These characters often span—in the space of a poem—various times, cultures, and contexts. Lindsay also creates her own fictional kingdom and peoples it with outlandish characters, including jerboas, megalomaniac archaeologists, an adjunct professor, goatherds, farmers, and the god Nummis, who is depicted with a “hawk on his head, fish in one hand, horned ibex at either side.” We prod and whisk and deduce what we canfrom marks in clay, from the trace of a wall.But the way the king tossed and caught his adoring daughters,the foolish songs he improvised for his wife, and his furry voice—these have been safely forgotten. Sarah Lindsay is the author of two previous books of poems. Her debut volume was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.
• A famous love story retold by a respected, well-published poet. • Beautifully packaged, “keepsakey” book. (Dare we say “A perfect Valentine’s Day book.”) • Affordably priced.
• Previous books include American Odalisque, August Zero, (OP) and Memory at these Speeds (CCP). Average sales: 1750 copies. • Other books include Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel (1992, 0472064800, Univ. Of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series) and Black Holes, Black Stockings (Wesleyan Univ. Press, OP) • Recipient of Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the Western States Book Award for Poetry. • Teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. • More accessible than other Jane Miller books • Southwestern feel similar to Arthur Sze
Armored Hearts, combining new poems and a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. «It is refreshing to read a poet who is not obliquely vague, who tells a story cleanly and convincingly, and yet who will not close down mysterious and complicated things about life that simply defy such closure.»–Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."—Harvard Review "One of our finest and most acclaimed poets."—Booklist "Charged with making the darkness visible, Bell's 'Dead Man' sometimes glows with an eerily illuminating light."—Publishers Weekly Marvin Bell is one of America's great poets, and his legacy includes the invention of a startling poetic form called the «Dead Man» poems. The Dead Man is alive and dead at once: not a persona, but an overarching consciousness, embedded in poetics and philosophy. Vertigo is the latest from the Dead Man—a brilliant, enigmatic, wise, and wild book. The dead man stands still, waiting for the boomerang to—you know.He hears the words of philosophers ricochet among chasms and     disappear in the far away.His scent goes forth, his old skin, hair and nails, and he spits, too.He leans forward to look backward, and the ancient world reappears.It is the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new,before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief.Anything he says now are souvenirs of the future… Marvin Bell has published seventeen books of poetry and has received numerous honors, including the Lamont Award and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was the first State Poet of Iowa. He lives in Iowa and Washington.
"A poet to watch."—O Magazine"I tell the truth, but I try to be kind about it."—Camille Rankine in 12 QuestionsNamed «a poet to watch» by O Magazine, Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including «still lifes,» «instructions,» and «symptoms.»From «Symptoms of Aftermath»:…When I am saved, a slim nurseleans out of the white light. I needto hear your voice, sweetheart. I seemy escape. I walk into the water.The sky is blue like the ocean,which is blue like the sky.Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 «Discovery» / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.
Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award One of Publishers Weekly's «Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016» One of Lit Hub's «10 must-read poetry collections for April» “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—The New Yorker "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with…This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."—Buzzfeed's «Most Exciting New Books of 2016» "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level…A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”—2016 Whiting Award citation "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."—LitHub "Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity—all with a tremendous humanity."—Slate“In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into—and culls from—individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, ‘Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.’”—Publishers Weekly "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is."—Li-Young Lee
Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life.& the body is more than a portion of night—sealedwith bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replacedby a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wallinstead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears& you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eyestaring back from the other side— waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.