The aspen tree sends out its branches – grown by days and years. Limbs are the expandable balance of life. Each branch fills with twigs and leaves. Our lives are similar to trees. Time and events nourish us, and weather us. Branches often are both cultivated to display wonder and menaced to show wear. Each year the Aspen’s splendor reaches into the sky and presents its magnificent show of color. From green, to gold, to crimson – the spectacular display amazes. Autumn’s intensity is celebra...

"A heady, infectious celebration."-The New Yorker"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."-Harvard ReviewBrenda Shaughnessy's heartrending third collection explores dark subjects-trauma, childbirth, loss of faith-and stark questions: What is the use of pain and grief? Is there another dimension in which our suffering might be transformed? Can we change ourselves? Yearning for new gods, new worlds, and new...

The world is spiraling out of control and one man is caught in the spin, swirling around and down into the eternally violent maelstrom.His job was outmoded and downsized out of existence. His house destroyed in a bomb blast.Now his only remaining joy, the love and attentions of the fairer sex, has taken a hard left down a dark terrifying alley dropping him at a dead end. What next, death?There was always that standing invitation to join the brotherhood of clandestine m...

One of Ashbery's most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligenceThe poems in John Ashbery's award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide...

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AS IF" is a poetry collection that describes ideas that may not correspond with reality but help us to interact with reality better. Fiction writers often say that they tell a higher truth but poets like to pretend that what they write is sincere direct truth-telling. However poems are also fictions and deal with what might be. Poets behave "as if" the world matches their models. The poems in this collection play on tension between desire and disillusion between actualit...

For those who have discovered life, in illness, difficulty and despair, I wish that on your wings you'll fly, to diamonds, stars and dizzying flare. -- Ekaterina D. Bojilova.

Jack Kerouac immortalized her in his novel Big Sur. A student of Zen, she hung out with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and was a speaker at San Francisco’s Human Be-In. But Lenore Kandel was no muse or hanger-on; she was a brilliant lyric poet, often unabashedly erotic, and that’s where her legacy lies.Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel contains 80 examples of her art, from the “holy erotica” of her early years to later, more contemplative works. Many of the poems h...

"Brimming with intolerable rapture, I almost killed myself many, many times. I wasn’t trying to; my love for life just kept spilling me over boundaries into places from which some people don’t come back. Hardly restricted by social convention, I hurt myself by being so rambunctious and romantic."How much of our past does our face betray? What future fortune can you read in the lines and skin? What trace is left by other lips and fingers and fists? In this beautiful...

"Coal: Continuum Average", the second of three books in the "Coal" series, is a collection of thoughts, ideas, fantasies, experiences and points of view that define experiences in the city. These are attributed to various voices, from which characters are drawn that begin to outline a more vast, city wide experience, revealing perceived truth, chaos, beauty, and mystery.

A surreal new collection from an acclaimed poetHallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler’s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and a...

In Nostos and Algos a mature poet tells a simple story and yet underlying it all is a tension formed by intense, glaring, cutting, gripping and captivating images. This collection, Manolis' best so far, is subtle and unexpected, and you are left to imagine what may occur. You feel this sense of expectation in many of the poems, and this keeps them from feeling dry or overwrought. Most fascinating is how Manolis captures a sense of motion just before it begins to take place, almost an antic...

Gloria Ausubel (1948- ) is a baby boomer who has tasted the palatable and unpalatable fare served up in the culture of the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's. Her poetry becomes a way of identification with the generation of alienation. In terms of skittish dabbling, vicarious participation, and prophetic yearning she takes a poetic stance to that generation. Her poems emanate from a specific time and place but have levels of meaning that can strike listeners from different generations. Her poems ...