Whether Jeffrey McDaniel is denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is original and provocative. A noted poet, McDaniel has appeared on ABC’s Nightline and NPR’s Talk of the Nation. "Wild, fierce, irreverent, full of praise and lament, and deeply, intensely human." - Thomas Lux

"Heartbreaking and hilarious simultaneously... " James TateIn Jeffrey McDaniel's second book, it is hard to separate the humor from the pain. Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day in the Office of Dreams'.

Arranged mostly chronologically, Thin Ice Olympics is a poetic dream diary, charting one man's experience isolating with a wife and teenage daughter in New York state during the Covid pandemic.Swerving between dazed loneliness, grief, and dark comedy, the poetic speaker yearns for connection with loved ones, both living and dead.At times profane and brash, at other times tender and sincere, the poems are demotic, and yet energized by explosive meta...

The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque ‘academicisms,’ McDaniel is an intro to a new world.

In his new collection, Jeffrey McDaniel confronts the insular and expansive qualities of loss. With electric language and surrealistic imagery, McDaniel’s poems deliver the quotidian elements of middle-age life while weaving us in & out of childhood and adulthood alongside body and mind. The tragic and life affirming share the same page and the same world, reminding us how close corruption can be to innocence; domesticity to fantasy; aging to youth.JonathanWe...

"Reading Jeffrey McDaniel's gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head."—Major Jackson

A man fights back his sinister urges in the house of a young couple.

More poems about life, love, old age, death, birds, beaches, nature, chemistry, time, guns, and mice. Along with the usual unanswerable questions.

another comebackclimbing back up out of the ooze, out ofthe thick black tar,rising up again, a modernLazarus.you're amazed at your goodfortune.somehow you've had morethan your share of secondchances.hell, accept it.what you have, you have.you walk and look in the bathroommirrorat an idiot's smile.you know your luck.some go down and never climb back up.something is being k...

She thought she’d have more time. Laurie Notaro figured she had at least a few good years left. But no–it’s happened. She has officially lost her marbles. From the kid at the pet-food store checkout line whose coif is so bizarre it makes her seethe “I’m going to kick his hair’s ass!” to the hapless Sears customer-service rep on the receiving end of her Campaign of Terror, no one is safe from Laurie’s wrath. Her cranky side seems to have eaten the rest of her–inner-thigh Chub Rub and all. A...

**The acclaimed second collection of poetry by Patricia Lockwood, Booker Prize finalist author of the novel No One Is Talking About This and the memoir PriestdaddySELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The Strand * Barnes & Noble * BuzzFeed * Flavorwire“A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.” – The New York Times Book Review**Colloquial and ...

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets—117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.Michael Ondaatje has called Sharon Olds’s poetry “pure fire in the hands” and cheered the “roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.” This rich selection exhibits those qualit...