Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler's new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler's abiding interests--in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic--are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler's...

One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.

A beautiful new collection from an acclaimed poet
The poems in Joanna Klink's new collection Circadian take as their guiding vision circadian clocks. Moved by the presence and withdrawal of light, these internal clocks influence rhythms of sleeping and waking: the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, the migratory cycles of birds. With love poems and prayers, Joanna Klink offers us patterns of glowing alertness and shared life, patterns that speak to the flickering circuit between inner and outer landscapes, that bind each beating heart...

A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poets
Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while...

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell
Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of "Backwards Days" are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell's poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes startling poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of "Backwards Days" are most particularly about the movement of time,...

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic...

With an economy of line and focus on nature that has deep roots in the New England traditions of Thoreau and Robert Frost, Philip Booth writes poetry that evokes crystalline images of sea, woods, and fields and explores the timeless themes of love, uncertainty, and responsibility. With many of Booth's early works now out of print, Lifelines presents a unique opportunity to become reacquainted with one of the major voices in contemporary American poetry.