“Behold the door / the lock’s alive,” warns Stan Rice in one of the commanding poems that make up this new volume of verse. From the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras to the private chambers of the imagination, Rice’s work is at times sharp and minimalist and at times over the top in its vivid critique of life and in its regard for the sanctity that lurks in all experience. In these concise, memorable verses, he contemplates the stroller-pushing crowd in the American mall; he maps t...

“There are so many profound and finely constructed poems in Singing Yet (like the Whitmanesque ‘America the Beautiful’ in which the poet pledges allegiance ‘this time to the vivification of our lost Body Politic,/ nerves and follicles and arteries/ ablaze in the suaveness of night’) that it is impossible to cover even a fourth of this collection… As a volume of selected poems… it stands a monument to the trust of the poet’s own life and writings.” Dave Oliphant, Texas Observer...

Stan Rice, who died in December 2002, was a poet of unique, uncompromising vision. Joy and brutality, faith and faithlessness, the beauty of truth and, at times, of untrut--these opposing forces come together one last time in his final book of poetry, a haunting collection of psalms.Beginning with his “Psalm 151”--that is, taking up where the Bible leaves off--Rice calls us to his own kind of prayer and contemplation. “Lord, hear me out,” he begins. “At the point of our need / The ...

In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and na...

"Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines."-The Boston Globe"This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness, and joy."-Los Angeles TimesFall Higher is a major collection by one of America's most inventive and ent...

**Finalist for the 2016 National Book AwardFinalist for the 2017 NAACP Image AwardThree decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language in one unabridged volume.**Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974–2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fre...

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...

Opening with a powerful cycle of elegies for her long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of Blessing the Day." 160 pp.

Chapbooks, musings, poetry, and prose by a folklorist with a "wonderful imagination, eye for detail and command of language" ( Publishers Weekly).While Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, his first and abiding passion is poetry. After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and only reading to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, as well as occ...

"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

W. S. Di Piero, a fresh and powerful voice in American poetry, opens this collection about public and private worlds with poems that revist the deaths of his parents. It is an important adult passage for him, and for them a last chance to leave a message: his father lying in bed, "bemused and contemptuous / of the hell in which he lay"; his mother soon to be laid out in the cheap gold flats "that made her look young and men look twice." Di Piero writes poems of relationships, of ordinary b...

In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death.A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu's poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic facts of life: In the classrooms of tomorrow, starved youth will be asked to imagine a culture that kept thin pamphlets of poetry pinned to ...