From Cornelius Eady, one of America's most engaging voices, comes an exciting collection of poetry that at once delineates the arc of the poet's universe and highlights the range of his considerable talents.Cornelius Eady’s poems show him in full control of his considerable talents and displaying a rich maturity as he enters midlife. His poems are sly, unsentimental, and witty, full of truths that are intimate and profound.Hardheaded Weather ranges...

Malin Pereira’s collection of eight interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post–Black Arts Movement generation.This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 198...

Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry PrizeFraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney’s resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves—and is finally receiving—Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemia...

This memoir of a relationship with a self-destructive woman is "as elemental, lyrical and cringe-inducing a love story as they come" ( Kirkus Reviews).Suspenseful, darkly funny, and devastating, this is Eli Hastings's true story of his troubled, decade-long relationship with his friend Serala. At family events, Serala wore saris and ate delicately from plates of curry. But elsewhere, she wore a lip ring, designer shades, and a cowboy hat; would regularly d...

These poems topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibsons work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases us out the other side. 

Idjit Galoot has a problem. He escaped from his master's house for a brief romp around town, seeking out easy targets such as bitches in heat, fresh roadkill and unguarded garbage cans. When he returns to his house, the aged basset hound discovers that his master has packed up their belongings and moved to Florida without him. "Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed" is the story of Idjit Galoot's ne'er do well owner and his efforts to work his way back to the dog that h...

Racing Hummingbirds examines critiques and at times delights in one woman's navigation through the many worlds of manic depression and her struggle to maintain humanity in the process. Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives prayers and conjurings which address gender sex race poverty heartbreak and survival with such stark intimacy you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclai...

A clear voice of her generation, Sierra DeMulder’s writing offers a gritty, sincere perspective on the subtle joys and modern pains of living. Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder’s personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms. DeMulder possesses the most important quality a young writer can h...

How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, and their bodies, to express ourselves?

A young bridge painter is awakened from the hum of daily routine by a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall."The Bridge" is a story from Daniel Orozco's critically acclaimed collection Orientation, which leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an...

**Finalist for the National Book Award in PoetryBrutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America.“A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.”—The Village Voice**This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear...

Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin YoungThe poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of "mixing" to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that...