Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America
With "The Imaginary Lover," Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the "New York Times Book Review," aptly describes this book: intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read her poems is to discover not only more of what it means...

In hard-hitting, sophisticated, often lyrical language, Jan Beatty investigates the idea of the body as cultural machine, shelter, mirage, or home. She rescripts the birth scene with girders and industrial pulleys; the womb as inhabited by a young girl architect. Structurally adventurous, the poems in Boneshaker question icons and invoke taboos, connect desire with place and class, walk the tightrope between sex and love.

Winner of the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Runner-up, Society of Midland Authors 2002 Poetry Prize
Gabriel Gudding's poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid.
In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow. Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an...

Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Prize
Selected by Marilyn Nelson
Finalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize

"Imagine Leda black--" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.

In Van Clief-Stefanon's powerful voice, last night's angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits." She remembers a child's innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug...

"Rouge Pulp" explores notions of body and beauty, birth and death, in a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair."

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.

Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing...

There is a proverb in China, "hu kou ba ya," literally pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth, used to describe any extremely difficult task. When Shao Wei first arrived in the United States at age thirty-one, her desire to write poems in English seemed almost impossible. "Pulling a Dragon's Teeth," a first stop on the successful journey toward that goal, is filled with the rhythms and visions of this exciting young poet.
Shuttling between her childhood in a small mountain city on the shores of the Yangtze River (soon to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam Project) and adulthood in Manhattan,...

"Babel" features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable.
In poems such as Six, Sex, Say, she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit in Flesh, Bone, and Red, to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in Ode on My...

Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix's revolutionary bullet time.

Samantha Smith,...