The work of Michael Burkard has a rich interior quality different from that of any other voice in American poetry. He captures a sense of the mind revising and revealing itself, altering its perceptions.
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Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

The poems in "Keeper" explore, and long for, intimacy: with nature, with others, with the unknown. They delve into purely dark spaces (the insides of birdhouses and mailboxes, caves of prehistoric paintings) and in-between places, searching out, as Paul Eluard put it, the other world inside this one, pointing to the pervasive sensuality that connects all beings, and to the fact that essential goodness and sorrow often walk hand in hand.

What a rich array of music lies within Listening Long and Late. With refreshing authenticity, Everwine weds playfulness to practice, lyricism to narrative, pathos to the ordinary. Indeed, he has listened long and late to the music of such venerable masters as Tu Fu, the hidden genius on the street, and the anonymous Aztec poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everwine writes with the same deified heart that divines the mystery of his quotidian subjects in a language that is at once plain and poetic. His own work seamlessly segues into his translations from the Hebrew and...

-Reading Jeffrey McDaniel's gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.-

--Major Jackson

In Now, Now, Jennifer Maier's second poetry collection, time is of the essence.

Moving with quantum ease through the porous membranes of the past, present, and future, the speaker wonders: What is each moment but the swirling confluence (or shy first meeting) of past and future--of what happened, and what-has-not-yet-happened but will?

Such phenomenological questions are sparked by ordinary events: a friend's passion for jigsaw puzzles; an imagined conversation with a neighbor's dog; a meditation on the uses of modern poetry. Here, in language at once elegant and agile,...

These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don t know when I ve enjoyed reading a book so much. David Budbill
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In Imperial, George Bilgere's sixth collection of poetry, he continues his exploration of the beauties, mysteries, and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in mid-America. In poems that range from the Cold War anxieties of the 1950s to the perils and predicaments of an aging Boomer in a post-9/11 world, Bilgere's rueful humor and slippery syntax become a trapdoor that at any moment can plunge the reader into the abyss. In Bilgere's world a yo-yo morphs into an emblem for the atomic bomb. A spot of cancer flames into the Vietnam War. And the death of a baseball...

Sound of the Ax brings together for the first time over four hundred aphorisms and twenty-six aphoristic poems by one of America s most essential poets of the twentieth century. Many readers are familiar with the trenchant nature of William Stafford s poems, with lines such as Justice will take us millions of intricate moves and Your job is to find what the world is trying to be, but have never had the opportunity to read a sustained selection from the thousands of wise, witty, and penetrating statements he created in over forty years of daily writing in his journal. In keeping with...

Perhaps Paul Kareem Taylor said it best in his piece called On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby's American Odyssey "Reading Barbara Hamby's poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the...