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Sam’s Book

When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam's Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam's lifetime. «How should I mourn?» David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam's first bath, a «holy/Rite»; tying the shoelaces of the «little man»; traveling to Greece, where Sam is «the first&#8230;/to see the holy moon.» With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son's blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a «love nest.» Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam's Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.

Erasures

Donald Revell

"When history proves useless and consensus chimerical," Donald Revell has written, «the poet's necessity is invention, and this does a lot to explain our century's preference for revision over mimesis.» For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: «The consolations of history are furtive,/ then fugitive, then forgotten.» Invoking such contemporary events as the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, he seeks to integrate the political with the personal in a search for new paradigms of value and honor.

Versed

Rae Armantrout

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010) Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: «Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience.» Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. A reader's companion is available at http://versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Divine Honors

Hilda Raz

Winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry (2002)This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy, from denial to humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and evil, health, blame, personal boundaries – in short, a new sense of self. These poems remain intimately bound to the world and of the senses, becoming documents of transformation.

Address

Elizabeth Willis

Winner of the Laurence L. &amp; Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award (2012)Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees—beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis's poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: «so begins our legislation.» Check for the online reader's companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.

Collected Poems

Joseph Ceravolo

Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo's aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo's poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo's later work reveals him to be «one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.» Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem «The Hellgate,» are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.

the new black

Evie Shockley

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012) Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley’s the new black integrates powerful ideas about “blackness,” past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago—for example, the election of an African American president—will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades—changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to “laugh to keep from crying.” They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Check for the online reader’s companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.

There Are Three

Donald Revell

Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. «Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul.» These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.

Loose Sugar

Brenda Hillman

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised – love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar – are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as «space / time» or «time / work») in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native – and feminine – language.

Sky Ward

Kazim Ali

Winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry (2014)Drunk on the sun and the sea, Kazim Ali's new poems swoop linguistically but ground themselves vividly in the daily and real. Both imprisoned by endlessness and dependent on it for nurturing and care, in Sky Ward Ali goes further than ever before in sounding out the spaces between music and silence, between sky and ocean, between human and eternal. «Daily I wish stitched here to live,» moans his Prometheus, wondering what release from familiar bondage might actually portend. «So long liberation,» his Icarus sings as he plummets from the sky with desperation and grace, ready to unfeather and plunge into the everything-new. Whether in the extended poem-prayer to Alice Coltrane or in the «deleted scenes» and «alternate endings» to his critically acclaimed volume Bright Felon, or in the spirit-infused and multi-faceted lyrics he has become known for, Ali once again reinvents possibilities for the personal lyric and narrative.