"Doubles" is at once tough-minded and urbane, veering from lyricism to street slang, oscillating with the beat of the American city. As his title suggests, Polito's world is one of doubling, simulation, impersonation, and mimicry a shrewd vision of urban life.
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In "Cairo Traffic," his third book of poems, Lloyd Schwartz asks the Sphinx to explain the riddle "about, you know, / Time and Power and Families-the one you think you / have the answer to. Tell me your answer! / "No" . . . don't." The search for answers takes the poet to some surprising, often phantasmagoric places, and back again to the self, to dreams, to home, and even to the nursing home where his mother-sphinxlike herself-becomes the person asking the dark questions and providing some unexpected answers. These extraordinary narratives-funny and frightening, seductive and profoundly...

In this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. "The Courtesy" is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history.
""The Courtesy" is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats." Michael...

Respected poet, teacher, and critic Alan Shapiro continues his much-acclaimed explorations of childhood, family, and marriage in "Mixed Company." Revealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, and with equal attention to historical detail and the poetics of everyday life, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, Shapiro charts the many ways our social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered, and, for good or ill, preserved. Deeply felt and ambitious, "Mixed Company" is an extraordinary book by one of the leading poets writing...

One of our most gifted poets, Sleigh reveals with vigor and delicacy the connections forged between the dead and the living. "Waking" is a moving narrative of the creation of the self.
." . . . it takes a book like Tom Sleigh's "Waking" to remind us of all that was most innately stirring and necessary about the confessional insurrection. . . . in "Waking" Sleigh proves himself worthy of spinning gold thread from the straw of sincerity, elevating his so-called confessions from the merely revealing to the durably revelatory." David Barber, "Poetry"
" Sleigh] is a consummate stylist...

"After One" and "Waking" established Tom Sleigh as one of the most original and accomplished poets in contemporary America. In "The Chain," Sleigh explores the nature of memory its uncanny ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegies, portraits, and love poems, he movingly dramatizes the ambiguous nature of truth and the...

"The Other Lover" is a collection of bittersweet American love poems. Writing with jazz-like verbal panache, Bruce Smith reaches for the paradoxical pulls between sweetness and bitterness. With carefully crafted rhyming stanzas and unpredictable free verse rhythms, these poems bristle and pop like the riffs of a virtuoso horn player. The book is a personal, passionate, disturbing collection that places the reader both inside and outside of the poet's life. Deftly filtering personal experiences through improvisatory structures and a wide range of idioms, Smith communicates the want, the lack,...

Son of a Holocaust survivor, Jason Sommer writes of troubles that unfold at the intersection of history made and personality in making, of self and other, of wakefulness and sleep. His world is post-Holocaust, and the poetic voice in this book is one which emerges from that calamity, telling the stories of those who have finally begun to speak to him, and now through him. As a survivor's child, Sommer must consider how to live in the wake of history, among those who are indelibly marked by it.

In Columbarium, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses.

From nursery rhymes to riddles to prose poems, this collection intertwines the literary and the personal, the elevated and the slang, and the sacred and the profane.