Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry PrizeDrawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, a...

If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

Haunted by starlings in the dark, a young woman spirals into an altered state of consciousness.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Donika Kelly's fierce debut collection, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize*I thought myself lion and serpent. Thoughtmyself body enough for two, for we.Found comfort in never being lonely.What burst from my back, from my bones, what livedalong the ridge from crown to crown, from maneto forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamorwe made in the birthing. What hiss and ...

Wendy Videlock’s The Dark Gnu and Other Poems plays, jokes, teaches, admonishes, yields to the ecstatic, and strays into the shadowy where “If not for the dark, / no / spark.” All of this is heightened by striking full-color illustrations from the author herself. There are stories that come and go in a couple of blinks, and stories that linger and juggle their way from hut to the market, to the fair, on a “swaying dappled mare,” to get to all the good to be had or done. Mother Goose, myth,...

You know they are one of the stinkiest animals on the planet, but what else do you know about skunks? Here are some more things you might not know.Can a skunk aim its spray?How well do skunks see?What happens to a skunk when the weather turns cold?How far away can you smell a skunk spray?Learn the answer to these questions and many more in this 15-Minute Book. Skunks are insect eating mammals with a spray that can send you running, but some things about...

You arrive at my altarwith no ideawhat it means to worship--to adore.You haven't even learned it:ecstasy and sufferingmake the same face.--from "The Offering"May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanista...

Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described...

"These poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce." — PUBLISHERS WEEKLYSelected for the National Poetry Series by Martha Collins, Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse.Here violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow ex...

**A powerful new collection from an award-winning poet.At the heart of Robert Wrigley's new book are the fears that find us at the darkest times and the hopes we rise to each morning. These poems explore that point where the sacred and the profane come together, that place of beauty inside the grotesque and the grotesque inside what is beautiful. The laws of nature, the commandments of capitalism, and the rules of war are transformed into songs of longing, patriotism, and dissent; ...

“Luminous. . . . Each reading reveals the tug of opposites, and in this tension the poet shows her brilliance.”—Library Journal, starred reviewRash yet tender, chastened yet lush, Headwaters is a book of opposites, a book of wild abandon by one of the most formally exacting poets of our time. Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has ac...

A modern dispossessed man climbs a sacred mound that an ancient native civilization builds. They descend. Rise, then Descend, a short story, was first published in Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 18 #1.From Rise, then Descend:"Did the ancients use walking sticks when climbing the mound? He's not sure what kind of man needs a walking stick to walk. You just move your feet one front of the other. An old man might need a walking stick. But he is not old. He is old, compared to how ol...