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The Folded Heart

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood—commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own—a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing «the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true.»Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted «in the faces of old regrets.» But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue «beating loud.» The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.

In Defense of Nothing

Peter Gizzi

Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader's companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.

Selected Poems

James Tate

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1992) Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1992)The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

Trans

Hilda Raz

Edge Effect

Sandra McPherson

Mr. West

Sarah Blake

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

Scarecrow

Robert Fernandez

Taking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness: «Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?» It also charts the insistence of time's passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the disaster? How will we rebuild? To whom will we address ourselves and with what voice? Also a love poem, one of desire and hope, Scarecrow aligns a tragic sensibility with a faith in the other and in the redemptive power of forgiveness. Within the beauty and strangeness of this work rests an imperative that captures the directive of poetry at its best: «Present yourself / in the full radiance of captivation.» In its mystery and defiance, Robert Fernandez's collection does precisely this. An online reader's companion will be available at robertfernandezsite.wesleyan.edu.

The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Aimé Césaire

Aim&#233; C&#233;saire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of C&#233;saire's quest for n&#233;gritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on C&#233;saire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that C&#233;saire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Live from the Homesick Jamboree

Adrian Blevins

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, «when everything was always so awash» that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her «full-to-bursting motherliness,» aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or «the cockamamie lovingness» of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, «this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang.»

The Trailhead

Kerri Webster

Song of the Husbands for Henry All winter the kind husbands hover like mortgaged angels. One smells gasoline in his sleep, would be my lover. They want me to be well. Specimen, they say, and mean endearment. I row into the flood. The vodka turns the lemon to crystal, the carp turn the pond to shit and hunger, the lingerie turns the trunkful of lingerie into a special trunk. And the husbands, the husbandsIf asked they will install a water feature. I tend my minor art, I push my sorrow cart, the women sing to the women o'er the prison walls: Daughters of Elysium!: as I elysium myself to sleep and, waking, wear a poppy cast from silver around my neck. I grow ashamed of my teeth, I pawn, redeem, pawn, redeem, shoo deer from the poison hedge. Oh leanmost season. Speak, husbands; speak, cocked honeys; speak!"I'm learning to allow for visions," the primary speaker of The Trailhead announces, setting out through a landscape populated by swan-killers, war torturers, and kings. Much of the book takes place in the contemporary American West, and these poems reckon with the violence inherent in that place. A «conversion narrative» of sorts, the book examines the self as a «burned-over district,» individual and cultural pain as a crucible in which the book's sibyls and spinsters are remade, transfigured. «Sacralization/is when things become holy, also/when vertebrae fuse,» the book tells us, pulling at the tensions between secular and sacred embodiment, exposing the essential difficulty of being a speaking woman. The collection arrives at a taut, gendered calling—a firm faith in the power and worth of the female voice—and a broader faith in poetry not as a vehicle of atonement or expiation, but as bulwark against our frailties and failings.