In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels--New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac's birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico--observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story--or travelogue--appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate,...

One of his generation's most accomplished poets, Robert Wrigley is renowned for his ironic, powerful, and lucid style as well as his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Earthly Meditations features nineteen original poems alongside a collection of sixty-one poems chosen from his first six books.

Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras's poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what's cherished to what's lost, from culture to nature.

An unconventional new collection from a National Poetry Series award winner
Mark Yakich 's acclaimed debut collection, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, examined the blessing and curse of romantic love in its multiplicities. The poems in his new collection approach questions of suffering and atrocity (e.g., war, genocide, fallen souffles) with discerning humor and unconventional comedy. These poems show how humor can be taken as seriously as straight-ahead solemnity and how we can re-envision solemnity in terms other than lamentation, protest, and...

A sensuous and musical new collection from acclaimed poet Phillis Levin
May Day is a work of a visionary imagination. In tones playful and celebratory, in gestures both intimate and international, Levin s poems explore how tenderness and violence change our lives. From a flood overtaking the Prague zoo to the joy of a maypole dance, from a mural of the Trojan War in a Greek diner in New York to the noiseless explosions of time in the opening of a flower, these poems are rhapsodies of the senses and the intellect, disclosing new thresholds of meaning."

A surreal new collection from an acclaimed poet
Hallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and archaeology texts, these darkly imaginative poems probe what it means to be a sentient, temporary, flesh-and-blood beast,...

A third collection from a poet whose "beautiful sentences weave the miraculous and mundane into a single, luminous tapestry" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Barbara has won acclaim for fluid and graceful poems that touch on the small occurrences and mysteries of daily life in the hopes of finding the secret meaning beneath them. Both intimate and wide ranging, her work is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, and sometimes comedic. Her third collection, The Last Skin, extends and develops these qualities, offering landscapes and characters both domestic and...

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry
In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative...

New from a poet whose "intensity makes the world visible" (Linda Gregg)
"Everywhere, a forceful, scrupulous intelligence is active- a luminous diction, a range of cadences." So has Mark Strand written of the work of Joanna Klink, who has won acclaim for elegant, sensual, and musical poems that "remain alert to the reparations of beauty and song" (Dean Young). The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.