Like Robert Frost's North of Boston, David Yezzi's Birds of the Air intersperses charged lyrics with longer dramatic narratives. His monologues explore the frenetic pressures of urban life, as a number of memorable characters take stage: the guy who is hired to clear out a dying man's apartment; the actor stuck in an inadvertently hilarious production of Macbeth and his estranged girlfriend's tragic end; and the short-order cook who elevates his work to an art form. Like the birds of the air described by St. Matthew, these threadbare denizens of the modern city subsist on the few scraps that...

These poems both celebrate and question the psychological existence we give to the objects that define our lives: the silver spoon from which the speaker sips, during each Epiphany, the sacred Borscht which she later catches her mother, after guests have left, pouring down the drain; the acoustic guitar on which the speaker's father strums his minor-keyed songs from Ukraine; or the granite bust of a national poet that, in the hot sun, fails to inspire. With heart and humor the speaker examines what stays, goes, and how every object, once illuminated by the past, has the ability to take on new...

In Alexandria, Jasmine V. Bailey has written a string of love poems, islands in an archipelago that emerges with each poem's brief story. In a voice at times detached and wistful and sometimes ringing with ardor, these poems keenly remember sexual desire and male beauty, weaving them into observations that are quietly political or fiercely existential.

Pretenders interweaves narrative, lyric, and fable in poems that tell their magical stories with revelatory rhythms and precise diction. Surreal and darkly funny, these powerful poems create a dense world full of pretense, menace, deception, and double truths--in which we are all struggling to love each other enough to survive another day.

From Brazil's Bay of All Saints to Philadelphia, from Florida's brutal humidity to the drought-scorched Cape Verde Islands, Bartram's Garden takes in the pulse and ache of the natural world: the bittern balanced in the swamp, cashew fruit's astringent flesh. With a gardener's eye for color and motif, and a mother's open-hearted sensibility, these poems explore vivid landscapes both intimate and foreign.

Joyce Peseroff's new collection teases the nature of self-knowledge from a world where identity is fluid, character fragmented, landscape overwhelmed, and culture riven. In poems that dramatize politics, eros, myth, and mortality, Peseroff's edgy wit cuts through the classical Greek definition--"You're not an animal/or a god, take the middle path"--to parse our century's slippery dialectics. Playful and complex, Know Thyself distills music from the salt of human experience.