Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives." Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The...
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John When Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Le...
Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.
Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement wi...
Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.
Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this ...
The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times-his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness. Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventeenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.
The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times-his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, ...
Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.
Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emot...
Death haunts the pages of Natural Causes, but so does compassion and love. There is little darkness here, and less despair, despite the abundance of cemeteries, loss, and ghosts--both real and imagined. Mark Cox's youthful bravado has given way in these poems to an assured sense of understatement. The weight of fatherhood, the loss of a grandmother, the fear of loneliness--these are the details around which Cox plumbs the depths of mortality and memory. Fully comfortable with the domestic tableau from which he writes, this is a poet never complacent. The penchants for...
Death haunts the pages of Natural Causes, but so does compassion and love. There is little darkness here, and less despair, despite the abundan...
From the Meadow features selections from four previous collections, along with a group of new works. The poems, which include Everwine's deft translations from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl, vibrate with the intensity of small truths distilled to their very essences.
From the Meadow features selections from four previous collections, along with a group of new works. The poems, which include Everwine's deft translat...
Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, "probably a steakhouse." The ability of dogs to smell the uncool. Hitler's barber imagines what might have been if only he'd leaned his weight into the razor. An oblivious Coronado narrowly avoids an ambush on the American plains. Freud lecherously lifts the skirt of a Mexican housekeeper who has far too much work to be bothered by "a pillar of modern thought. Or just some dirty old man." In lesser hands such disparate elements might fly wildly out of...
Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, "probably a stea...
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline."
In taking up...
In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Val...
"The Contracted World" includes representative poems from four of Peter Meinke's previous collections. In poems that show us what it is like to grow up in America, love, nature, cities, sports, war, and peace are filtered through the imagination and verbal skills of one of our brightest poets.
The new poems experiment with form, and address a life that is shrinking in specific ways: the poet is aging, the world is getting smaller, our post-9/11 freedoms are eroding, and our choices seem fewer and less attractive. Despite feelings of anger and loneliness, the narrator speaks to us in a...
"The Contracted World" includes representative poems from four of Peter Meinke's previous collections. In poems that show us what it is like to gro...
