Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolition...

National Poetry Series WinnerA collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. SmithThe poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious i...

What is this World? What kind of place is it?“The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off . . . The kind w...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed...

Poetry that explores how accidental voyeurism can force reconsideration and reconciliationWhite⋅out: n. a surface condition … in which no object casts a shadow, the horizon cannot be seen, and only dark objects are discernible …Whiteout: when the heavy weather of daily life establishes the measure of the measureless; when the predatory nature of the accidental conjures cowboys and the comatose; when the sickly sweet pop of life underfoot contrasts the televised ima...

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle AwardWith an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s award-winning second collection of poetry brings...

Songs of Exotic Birds contains poems written over a span of sixty years, forming an arc of life and capturing moments the writers memory stubbornly cannot lose. Merle Fischlowitz also writes in the voices of others that his psychologists ear has caught at special moments or rites of passage, where irony imbues the experiences. From childhood memories to todays cyber-news, these poems invite you into a garden where the exotic and prosaic, domestic and feral, all show the writers deep faith ...

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the walls of Eden.” These poems brim with deep longing, remorse, the beauty of the natural world, an abiding thirst for the truth, and finally, acceptan...

Of Plan B, an interim volume that included several of the poems in Maggot, Robert McCrum recently said in the London Observer that "Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection." In his eleventh full-length book, Muldoon reminds us that he is a traditional poet who is steadfastly at odds with tradition. If the poetic sequence is the main mode of Maggot, it certainly isn't your father's ...

“The poems of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars mark the ripening of a new current in Bly’s career: Now in his mid-70s, he is writing with tremendous energy and clarity and force, and producing some of the best work of his long career.” — The NationA volume of poetry with an emphasis on spirituality from the National Book Award winner.Drawing on the profound influence that Islamic poetry, such as Rumi's, has had on his work, Robert Bly transmutes the remarkable ghazal f...

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.A critically acclaimed literary treasure, Practical Gods is a captivating poetry collection that transcends conventional perspectives.Many of the poems in this eighth collection by Carl Dennis involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth i...

These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman’s passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as “Boat” to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own “brilliant, trivial unmooring.” As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in ...