Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem "Muse" hears from her "Those words, iron twang of loss," that "cut soft ideas of beauty out." Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness.

Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms -- blank verse, quatrains, sonnets -- the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam...

With A Walk in Victoria's Secret, Kate Daniels crafts a bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without. From the title poem's unapologetic celebration of the breast to a belated apology to the girl who integrated her elementary school, to the awkward juxtaposition of elderly and young women in a gynecologist's office on September 11, 2001,...

Celebrated poet David Kirby says that when he was a boy he wanted to run away and join the circus but never found one he liked, so he invented his own. Many of the poems in his dazzling new collection, Talking about Movies with Jesus, suggest his personal carnival is still a work in progress.

Much like a traveling circus, Kirby's poems are defined equally by their transient nature and by their destination. The poem "The Phantom Empire" -- which features Gene Autry repeatedly having to escape from a fictional city 20,000 feet underground in order to make it back home in time to voice his...

Celebrated poet David Kirby says that when he was a boy he wanted to run away and join the circus but never found one he liked, so he invented his own. Many of the poems in his dazzling new collection, Talking about Movies with Jesus, suggest his personal carnival is still a work in progress.

Much like a traveling circus, Kirby's poems are defined equally by their transient nature and by their destination. The poem "The Phantom Empire" -- which features Gene Autry repeatedly having to escape from a fictional city 20,000 feet underground in order to make it back home in time to voice his...

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.

The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of...

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.

The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of...

David Huddle's latest collection, Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. In "Boy Story," a teenage romantic meeting ends abruptly when the boy's sweetheart realizes they have parked near her grandmother's grave. The poem "Aloft" recalls a widowed mother's indignation after she receives a marriage proposal in a hot air balloon. Haunted by the words on his older sister's tombstone -- "born & died... then / a single date / in November" -- the speaker in one poem struggles to understand a tragic loss: "The...

"Dying never / ends for us. It only slowly rearranges us," writes Steve Scafidi in his poignant new collection. Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker -- defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window -- Scafidi's poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.