Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her menage a trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist...

This collection of new poems by one of the most respected poets in the United States uses motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction--in an emotional relation to the known world. Heralded as "one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers" by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of...

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.
Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain--the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens--to push through a tangle...

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems...

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style--its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.