Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call "the worst weed in the world," a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that it is illegal to sell or possess in the United States. Chang explores this image of vitality and evil in three thematically grouped sections focusing on corporate greed, infidelity and desire, and historical atrocities, including the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China and the massacre of Chinese people in Nanking by Japanese troops in World War II.
This edgy, fierce subject matter becomes engaging and fresh as Chang applies her...
Victoria Chang's collection takes its title from what many call "the worst weed in the world," a plant so rapidly and uncontrollably invasive that ...
Set against the bleak backdrop of the Yukon and the historical moment of the 1897 Klondike gold rush, this chronologically arranged series of sonnets is grounded in the lived experience of Finnish immigrants Anna and Abe Malm. Anna hauls her Anthony Wayne Washer into the wilderness and sets up a laundry business while Abe seeks his fortune. Anna and Abe share a unique history, revealed in the book's epigraph: Anna, nineteen years her husband's senior, had first raised him and then married him.
Genoways's graceful formalism makes percussive music of a story marked by isolation and brutal...
Set against the bleak backdrop of the Yukon and the historical moment of the 1897 Klondike gold rush, this chronologically arranged series of sonne...
The poems in this collection revolve around physical work, the Appalachian landscape, and family relationships. Casteen, for ten years a designer and builder of custom furniture, ranges from the farm to the shop floor, and from the rivers of the Piedmont to the wooded shoulders of the Blue Ridge.
The poems in this collection revolve around physical work, the Appalachian landscape, and family relationships. Casteen, for ten years a designer and ...
In this book-length series, poems with titles such as Illustrating the theory of interference and Illustrating the construction of railroads are paired with nineteenth-century engravings depicting phenomena from geology to astronomy to mechanics. Yet the poems relate to the images in an oblique rather than a direct way. Poteat uses this framework to construct a mysterious and engaging book that inhabits many worlds at once, bridging the real and the imagined, the traditional and the experimental, the surreal and the ordinary.
As each diagram and scene gives rise to a poem that...
In this book-length series, poems with titles such as Illustrating the theory of interference and Illustrating the construction of railroads are pa...
Raised on a family farm in the Pacific Northwest, Allen Braden has deep connections to rural life. Even at its most lyrical, his language evokes the local dialect of the West, his West. These poems, balancing elegy and affirmation, measure human and animal relationships with "brute geometry" in order to calculate the damage we require of ourselves.
Returning to variations of a sonnet titled "Taboo against the Word Beauty," Braden relentlessly pursues the possibility of naming the beautiful without ignoring what has so often and so widely been destroyed by human hands.
Raised on a family farm in the Pacific Northwest, Allen Braden has deep connections to rural life. Even at its most lyrical, his language evokes th...
Caplan's lyrics seek to understand the world in its fullness, both the suffering that history imposes on individual experience and the sacredness that underpins it. This is a meditation on love and faith built out of language as spare and direct as prayer. Some poems deal with issues of statehood and Jewish identity; increasingly the poems grapple with the demands of traditional Jewish practice, moving from a Christianized American landscape to a sequence set in Jerusalem.
Equally attuned to contemporary life and Biblical exigency, "In the World He Created According to His Will" vividly...
Caplan's lyrics seek to understand the world in its fullness, both the suffering that history imposes on individual experience and the sacredness t...
Daniel Groves presents a debut collection of tightly rhymed poems that, through adherence to form, unlock a power in language to surprise and illuminate--a power too often dormant in writing that eschews these conventions. Enchanted by the wit and distance of his canonical predecessors, Groves rhymes "Diet Pepsi" with "catalepsy" and "Guido" with "credo," and takes this work from irony to introspection in the course of a few lines.
Framed as meditations that playfully depart from acts of photocopying, or shelving journals in a library, or interstate travel by bus, these poems represent...
Daniel Groves presents a debut collection of tightly rhymed poems that, through adherence to form, unlock a power in language to surprise and illum...
Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mElange of voices--individuals passed on the street, journalists, philosophers, movie and cartoon characters, hip-hop emcees, and fellow poets--all of which build to a self-diagnosed logorrhea dementia. Dargan's voice channels an America mentally fatigued from a decade of foreign conflict yet cautiously hopeful about the promise of the country's renewed introspection.
In these poems, rife with the anxieties of the aughts, Dargan seeks to destabilize...
Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mElange o...
In his second collection, Casteen moves inward from the physical labor and vernacular culture that shaped his first book, "Free Union," yet continues to focus on landscape and human relationships. With poems arranged in the order in which they were completed (which in large part reflects the order in which they were first written), Casteen presents a poetic record of the experiences of solitude, marriage, fatherhood, loss, and recovery. The Carolina chickadee can be heard in this work, but so can Emmylou Harris singing with Gram Parsons; these poems dwell in the music of language, the hard...
In his second collection, Casteen moves inward from the physical labor and vernacular culture that shaped his first book, "Free Union," yet continues ...
In this debut collection, Dave Lucas turns and returns to Cleveland, where he was raised. The weather of these poems arises from both the lush light of the natural world and the hard rain of industry. Poem by poem, the book surveys the majesty and ruin of landscape and lakefront, paying tribute to the shifting seasons of a city, of a terrain, and of those who dwell there.
In this debut collection, Dave Lucas turns and returns to Cleveland, where he was raised. The weather of these poems arises from both the lush light o...
