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...
The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings--a park, a pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room--through Garren's eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in "February Snow," the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows of various rooms and reflects how "Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes / then ordinary again-- / . . . that feeling / of air in the midst of burial." In "The...
The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, ...
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...
From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca," Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel. Domestic poems give way to poems of pilgrimage and witness, to poems of literary homage and metaphysical questioning. A mind nurtured in the mid-twentieth-century Deep South drifts north and west and finally abroad, and sometimes into visionary, mysterious pasts. With skeptical reverence, the poems hunger for and dramatize a search for immanence and...
From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca," Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experienc...
In a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening, the poems of GLORY RIVER pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, "to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were." Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon...
In a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening, the poems of GLORY RIVER pit precise observat...
The poems of GLORY RIVER, Huddle's sisteenth book, pit precise observation, extravagant language and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a century when the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. The collection presents a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia where residents are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, "to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were." A second series of poems explore modern life, examining subjects as...
The poems of GLORY RIVER, Huddle's sisteenth book, pit precise observation, extravagant language and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way...
Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems. Scintillating, unusual, passionate, and profound, the poems range from contemporary pieces about a bag lady on a bus, to historical pieces about settlers held hostage and a wartime nurse caring for British wounded, to intensely personal poems about her dislike for her grandmother and worries about her son. The title poem -- a real tour de force -- explores...
Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gather...
