Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharoah is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss-loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the "stuttered eloquence" of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly "coughing up light." In this postlapsarian pastoral of the...
Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharoah is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss-loss...
A second collection of autobiographical memory poems by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienced - as a child, a teen, a young man - as well as some future scenes he imagines. Little Richard, Henry James and others all feature.
A second collection of autobiographical memory poems by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienc...
Winner of the Levis Reading Prize "Tell me a story / of speed and tell it to me fast for the light is / gaining and I will wake and with this body / break the barrier between what I dream / and what my dreaming means." Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts. In a rushing, rolling style, poems sweep to the edge of falling apart, take great delight in defying that dissolution, and come upon a thing redemptive and clarifying:...
Winner of the Levis Reading Prize "Tell me a story / of speed and tell it to me fast for the light is / gaining and I will wake and with this body / b...
In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on. Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose-"the change-of-life baby"-after the death of her mother: "The hens had hidden their heads beneath...
In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of...
A feature of English landscape architecture, a ha-ha is a wall at the bottom of a ditch; its purpose is to allow the presence of cows and sheep on one's lawn, but at an agreeable distance and with none of the malodorous unsightliness that proximity would bring. Similarly, The Ha-Ha, the latest offering from poet David Kirby, is both an exploration of the ways in which the mind invites chaos yet keeps it at a distance and an apologia for humor, reflecting Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh's observation that tragedy is merely underdeveloped comedy. Embracing wit, wide-ranging scholarship, and an...
A feature of English landscape architecture, a ha-ha is a wall at the bottom of a ditch; its purpose is to allow the presence of cows and sheep on ...
In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, "We think / we stand in the vivid color of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is - it's our future / that's the off-center, badly focused grayscale." Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected-and admittedly embellished-from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama's morning coffee, young...
In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, "We think / we stand in the vivid color of here and now / and view the past as drab black and w...
In The Infinity Sessions, T. R. Hummer achieves a radical act of translation, creating poems that project the narrative of twentieth-century America implicit in the syncopated rhythms of jazz and blues. Hummer boldly stands up as a poet and rides with some of the obscure greats with whom he feels a deep kinship -- Jimmie Lunceford, Adrian Rollini, Big Maybelle Smith, and Sun Ra -- in a dazzling poetic cycle as melodic, surprising, and improvisational as the finest of jazz music.
Showing readers that the musician's character is tested and formed in the merciless crucible of improvisation,...
In The Infinity Sessions, T. R. Hummer achieves a radical act of translation, creating poems that project the narrative of twentieth-century Americ...
A Woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Advertising.
A Woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a se...
The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring." When anything is possible, Scafidi finds, horror is as likely as delight. In poems both meditative and defiant he mourns the eventual loss of all that we love and finds consolation, wherever possible, in the rhythm of common words and "the sacred...
The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possibl...
Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the...
Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the hea...
