"Pieta
"

This time the migraine came with a vision
bathed in night sweat:
I was sitting on the Eames chair,
your man s body on my lap, legs
and arms white as casein draped over
mine, spilling onto the cassock, new sores
on your legs, dried blood
on your feet and hands,
from your chalk mouth
the words "forgive me,
"from mine, the impossible
"no
"

"Hard Bread," ""Peg Boyers s debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and its...

"Song"

""

" "for Thom Gunn

There is no east or west

in the wood you fear and seek,

stumbling past a gate of moss

and what you would not take.

And what you thought you had

(the Here that is no rest)

you make from it an aid

to form no east, no west.

No east. No west. No need

for given map or bell,

vehicle, screen, or speed.

Forget the house, forget the hill.

Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, "From the Book of Giants" retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman...

Or ski-jumping--headlong soaring,
ski-tips piercing clouds,
crystal revelations astonishing my goggles?

. . . . Skittery flicker of a glare-weary lizard
startled into the sheltering wings of a leaf,

rusting freighter with a brimming hold
shimmering onto a crimson edge. . . .

Sad rower pushed from shore,
I'll disappear like circles summoned
by an oar's dip.

However I burn through to the next...

Aubade

Those who lack a talent for love have come

to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end

of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls

like lies on the surface; the slow red

of a pilot's boat; the groan

of a fisherman hacking a small shark--

and our speech like the icy water, a poor

translation that will not carry us across.

What brought us west, anyway? A hunger.

But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed

only on scenery, the safest form

of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray

deepening into gray,...

"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing even lurid hallucination. From the "Baltimore Catechism" to the great noir films of the last century to today s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing...

"Big Avalanche Ravine"

Just the warning light on a blue crane.

Just mountains. Just the mist that skimmed

them both and bled to silver rain

lashing the condominiums.

But there it sank on me. This urge

to carve a life from the long expanse.

To hold some ground against the surge

of sheer material. It was a tense

and persistent and metallic shiver.

And it stayed, that tremor, small and stark

as the noise of the hidden river

fluming its edge against the dark.

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about...

from "Bagatelles"

Bagatelles,

mere gestures

in dry air,

each pluck a dot,

strokes marked on silence

reaching into the dark.

Beauty is strict,

it passes:

an echo, a wedge

of harmony, sudden,

broken "Who goes there?"

"An Algebra" is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream,...