In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney's poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts "Raven": a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker's fears and angst. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Donald Hall has written the Foreword.

Meg Kearney is the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation. She was the recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and New York Times fellowships and received the Alice M. Sellers...

A bemused, stoop-shouldered figure who is more than a mere speaker--let's call him a protagonist--stalks the poems of Falling to Earth. With candor and an almost grandiose simplicity, Hansen describes the limitations of his middle-aged body and, in so doing, the limitations of his enterprise in mid-life: the gracelessness of survival. Falling to Earth is the journey of a vibrant soul refreshing itself poem by poem.--Molly Peacock, from her foreword

Tom Hansen taught writing and literature for 35 years before retiring to the Black Hills of South Dakota. His...

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of The Boatloads is its overt references to church and Christianity. Dan Albergotti's references are not mere proselytizing, though. In fact, the first poem in the book, "Vestibule," tells the story of the author's teenage experience making love to his girlfriend in a university chapel, saying: "Lord of this other world, let me recall that night. / Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations / near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm / and let me feel how those forgotten words came / from somewhere else and meant something."

Dan...

In her foreword to Awayward, National Book Award-winning poet Jean Valentine writes, "Jennifer Kronovet's poems in Awayward are so surprising and compelling and beautiful, so intelligent and felt. Kronovet uses simple words and works at a mysterious depth, one we can enter with gladness."

Written while Kronovet was living in Beijing, Awayward illuminates the sense of disconnect that travelers experience when their major touchstones of language and geography are altered. These poems wander the world, drifting in and out of conversations that are alternately...

Thomas Lux selected this debut collection as winner of BOA's A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."

Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford...

Some nights I hear my father's long romance
with drugs echoed...

In the Hospital

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical...