In "The Horse Fair," Robin Becker asks questions about citizenship and participation in the marketplaces of bodies, of ideas, of objects in which we function. She investigates how individuals marginalized by gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits, each within a framework of social history and a poetics of partiality she speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, child of...

In Peter Meinke s eleventh collection, he writes poems of humor and sadness. His poems speak truth with the self-assurance of a man willing to laugh at himself and, by extension, he invites us to laugh at ourselves as well."

Kathleen Norris has touched readers throughout America with her thoughtful and provocative memoirs of faith: Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. She is equally admired for her poetry of engagement with the spiritual world and its landscapes. Journey includes poems from three previous books spanning thirty years, along with a generous selection of new work that continues her radically individual celebration of the sacredness of life.

A selection of poetry by Denise Duhamel, in which she suffers postmodernist angst when using the therapeutic I. The volume features poems from Duhamel's five previous collections, which include Smile , The Star-Spangled Banner and Girl Soldier.

This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

Joanie Mackowski s debut collection of poetry is meditative, vivid, sometimes weird. Turning an idiosyncratic eye to the inhabitants of zoos and fish tanks, cafes and cemeteries, she illuminates details that make the familiar seem strange. An egret stands "still as a glass of milk"; iceberg lettuce is a "vegetable leviathan" that "extends beneath the dinner table / an unseen, monstrous green"; a bald eagle may "love a jet? / or worship them all, or mock them, rigid / freaks that never linger."
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Cathy Song's fourth collection of poetry unveils glimpses of the elusive but ever-present power of wisdom and compassion. Recognizing that we have the ability to create our own misery as well as our own bliss, she finds the unexpected in broken lives, despair, and even seemingly joyous occasions. Song's poems are often, like a handful of water, "cold and impossibly / clear, unlike anything / you've ever held before."

Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner's "Meep Meep " to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young's poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.

Working in the narrative tradtion of Robinson, Frost and Jeffers, McDowell is part of the expansive peotry movement. His narrative poems deliver the depth and complexity of a novel with a cinematic swiftness. They are spiritual without pretensions, inhabited by characters tethered to the world.

A poet with an artist's eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp's terribly surreal life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover's - or a mother's - secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy. from The Power Outage Visible from an upstairs window, the cloud-caught glow of an end-of-summer carnival goes suddenly black as all else....