Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran’s poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into the atavistic tropics of desire breaks this barren matrix. The exotic landscape sparks resurgent passion, which leads to a dramatic and healing tu...

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...

John O'Donohue won hundreds of thousands of admirers with his now classic work on Celtic spirituality, Anam Cara. Just as To Bless the Space Between Us was being published, he died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. His powerfully wise and lyrical voice is profoundly missed, but his many readers are now given a special opportunity to revisit John in his first book, a collection of poetry.O'Donohue's readers know him as both a spiritual guide and a poet. In the same ...

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the ac...

From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead.Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers.

In his debut chapbook of poetry, Saeed Jones walks on the periphery of the South, those places on the outskirts of town, in bars after midnight, and on dangerous backroads where most people keep their heads down or look the other way. Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames. D. A. Powell says of Saeed's work, "Like Aeneas carrying hi...

A dream of desolation and death. A nightmare vision of a looming end, surrounded by hidden enemies and desperate strangers.His love taken. His hope lost. His life forfeit because of his failures, his inadequacies.How can this end be a beginning? And how can a dream seem so real?

The human body is a world. How it contains all that it does, how it is altered, and how it is transformed after death are the concerns of Quick, a new collection of poetry from one of Canada’s most exciting poets. From the shock of a near-fatal car accident to a meditation on the body as one world within other, larger worlds, the book becomes an anatomy in itself.

A major new collection of poems about women's lives and the closing circle of nature, from a bestselling poet. These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

From a stone to fireflies, from childhood to growing old, Brian Swann’s poems contemplate the moments and individual objects that create a whole life and our relationship to them.There is a clearing by a certain stonewhere images flow and are worth stopping for.I have stayed there almost all day in silenceuntil night remembered what belonged to itand its shadows started to take back its own.I’ve found it hard to walk away as starl...

"Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic." —ADA LIMÓNA woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. "Your humor is deft and cutting / my fing...

The mostly free-verse poetry in this collection relates to life's journey and the stops we make along the way. It contains poetry regarding the age-old subject of love in its many forms, desire, death is touched upon, appreciation for life's various adventures and some general story-telling. It is the telling of these moments through the author's very particular positioning and perspective, and it is that perspective that makes each piece within the collection special, interesting, and exc...