"The Star-Spangled Banner, " Denise Duhamel's sixth book of poems, is about falling in love, American-style, with someone who is not American.

In the title poem, a small American girl mishears the first line of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as "Jose, can you see?," which leads her to imagine a foreign lover of an American woman dressed in a star-spangled gown. The misunderstandings caused by language recur throughout the book: contemplating what "yes" means in different cultures; watching Nickelodeon's "Nick at Nite" with a husband who grew up in the Philippines and never saw "The Patty...

"Winter Amnesties" is a book of origins and endings, griefs and reconciliations. Each poem addresses the dilemma posed by G. K. Chesterton: One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it. The poems revisit the past, assess the present, and stare hard into the future. At middle age, Glaser remembers his youth in Louisiana and settles into the long stretch of his adult years in Ohio; he makes his peace with the life that allows. As son, as father, as poet, he looks to his legacy, whatever dim remnant of himself might continue after all flesh falls back to salt and...

Marilene Phipps s poetry invites the reader to share sharp slices of Caribbean experience: Haiti is both stage and backdrop for people who move in various strata of the social scheme and through the three stages of life, in lieu of answers to the Sphinx s riddle. Through voices, nostalgic and tender, denouncing and shrill, we journey to a mythologizing Caribbean land populated with people whose dramatic intensity and fights for life are turned into sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting, and always richly evocative, palpable poetry.

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In her second collection of poems, J. Allyn Rosser explores the human condition in all its gloriously valiant pathos. "Misery Prefigured" dwells on our continual reinventions of self and world and the restless dynamic that vibrates between them.Whether contemplating a failed marriage, a visit from God, or a pearl dropped into a bottle of Prell shampoo, Rosser's wry yet impassioned eye looks hard for a habitable and abiding truth. Alternating between deadpan and dead serious, these poems are often darkly funny, exposing the contradictions inherent in every desire. "Misery Prefigured" is...

"Muse, " the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and ordinary people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand what love is in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While there is no other world than this one for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill...

In "Fabulae, "Joy Katz interrogates the physical world, constructing a sensual and striking autobiography. She turns to the familiarity and strangeness of the female body, its surfaces and inner workings, often, although her subjects range from Thomas Jefferson to an Adam and Eve plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder to the streets of New York s diamond district. The poems, by turns funny and philosophical, point to how we suffer from desire: the danger, she writes, is that we might love the world like heaven and be lost. But they come back to delight in a flawed world especially the...

In "White Summer, " Joelle Biele investigates the problems of personal and cultural memory. Rich with images of flight and displacement, Biele s poems show a love for words, their music and physicality. In lyric addresses, historical meditations, and autobiographical narratives, she takes readers on a journey that includes stops at a dinner party in ancient Rome, a market square in Germany, an Italian feast in the Bronx, and the main concourse of Manhattan s Grand Central Station. She shows a sharp eye for the telling detail whether she is studying the migrations of birds or sketching...