Zip, or Micrology takes a close look at things we often overlook because they are commonplace. Wonderful poetry about the small things in everyday life.

Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, of which this Virginia collection is the first volume, serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how ...

Kelly Cherry, who studied philosophy in graduate school at the University of Virginia, has never lost her deep love of the subject; The Retreats of Thought takes the reader through the philosophical domain. What do we really know of our world? Why is there anything at all? What is time? What is a person? What is mind? What are goodness and beauty? What does the artist seek? These and other problems are shrewdly examined in Cherry’s passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry poems. Che...

In The Wink of an Eye is a modern fable in the form of a novel. Or a romantic satire. Or a social burlesque. Or an ironic fantasy. Or all of the above. Whatever the label, it's a joy to read. This tale is about a revolution—a small, upstart, none-too-promising revolution—that succeeds too well. A band of inept guerrillas in the Bolivain backcountry has modest ambitions to take over the jungle-ridden province of Santa Cruz, a place no one else wants....

The seven stories in The Woman Who take a close and sharp look at the complex relationships between art and reality, between imagination and identity. They offer illuminating glimpses of that old and continuing mystery, the creating mind. Kate, an editor, must stabilize her sense of self after being shaken by the brute fact of Soviet constraint. Lindy, a photographer, is trying to find herself in New York City. Nan, a writer, assembles a self from the materials of her youth in V...

In Observing the Invisible, Kelly Cherry crafts poems that explore the ever-evolving realm of modern physics, confronting the invisibilities and mysteries of the material world. She leverages challenging ideas into a space of contemplative wonder as the book moves from external observation into an increasingly inward space of personal reflection and expression. Throughout, Observing the Invisible remains deliberate in its concentration on what cannot be, almost as if the ...

A newly married young couple-she is a flutist, he is a graduate student-try to reconcile their differing backgrounds and attitudes. This leads to much merriment and a certain amount of sorrow. The book is set in New York City in the late sixties, with love-ins, riots, performance artists, and assassinations. Other characters include the husband’s parents and his father’s girlfriend, a stripper, a teenage blackmailer, and an orchestra conductor.

Winner of the 2013 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry AwardIn her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world and lives.The poet begins with silence and animal sound before taking on literature, public discourse, and the particular art of poetry. The sequence "Welsh Table Talk" considers the ...

“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic BombQuartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry...

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams—the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake—it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs.In the poems of God’s Loud Hand, Cherry conducts—often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends ...

Is there any hope for a hypereducated thirty-year-old med student who would like nothing better than to be taken seriously sexually? That's what Mary "Tennessee" Settleworth, the dislocated heroine of this unsettling and wryly comic first novel, is wondering. Tennessee, a native of Knoxville, is an all-around heretic: a Southerner who's happier up North; a Christian who favors Pelagius and free will over Augustine and original sin; a lady of urgent passions who has had no carnal eng...

Widely regarded as the "rock star" of American poetry, Mary Oliver is a writer whose words have long had the power to move countless readers. Regularly topping the national poetry best-seller list and drawing thousands to her sold-out readings across the coutnry, Oliver is unparalleled in her impact. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, so many "go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration" that it is not surprising Vice President Joe Biden chose to read one of her poems durin...