Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> American - General

Daniel Tobin's stunning new collection, Double Life, takes its name from a vision of humanity at once passionately earthbound and spurred by the metaphysical. These poems range from haunting meditations on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch to an astonishing polyphonic sequence based on the life of Father Bartolomeo de Las Casas, who died in 1566 and wrote the first bill of rights in the New World. Between these two longer orchestrations appear works both musically diverse and startling in their formal virtuosity, as attuned to Plato, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, and the natural...

With a storyteller's timing and the emotional range of a singer, Darnell Arnoult in her debut collection offers readers a stirring string of poems about the people of Fieldale, Virginia. A planned community founded in the Virginia foothills by Marshall Fields in the early 1900s to support his textile mill, Fieldale was populated by transplanted Appalachian mountain folk. Arnoult herself grew up there, a third-generation resident and among the first generation to go to college. She took away with her the oral history of her home, and in What Travels With Us she captures in poetic form the...

Following her critically acclaimed first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, Judy Jordan here returns to a time in her life when she was homeless and working as a pizza deliverer at a Greek immigrant-owned restaurant. She absorbs the life experiences and unmet dreams of her coworkers, the parking lot prostitutes, and the other homeless with whom she shares coffee refills and the warmth of the bus station terminal. Their voices, along with Jordan's, come together in a haunting chorus that bears witness to the misery of poverty in the richest country in the world.

Childhood...

Thomas Reiter's new book of poems demonstrates faith in the ability of the human voice to shape memory -- its powers and boundaries, freedoms and limitations -- into enduring form. A variety of speakers and locales flourish on these pages, including invented, historical, contemporary, and familial figures, and settings in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, West Virginia coal mines and Idaho silver mines, prairies, Mississippi River Valley, and islands of the Caribbean. The voices herein, many of them marginalized, passionately define themselves in the face of elemental forces as well as a...

Ranging in form from sonnet to free verse, from meditative to dialog poems, Weathers Permitting explores the themes of friends, family, and faith. Whether contemplating a joyful holiday or a dying friend, a missing child or house repairs, Stephen Sandy follows the twists and turns of the mind, bringing us to unexpected insights and ever-deepening awareness. Religious faith occupies the core of this tightly focused collection, and poems such as "Stable" -- recalling the changes in a family's Christmas ornaments over the years -- reveal a reassuring togetherness in the forbidding environment...

A selection of recent work as well as the best from thirteen volumes of poetry published across four decades, Change of Address highlights the magnitude and scope of David Slavitt's poetic achievement. Meditating on both the quotidian and the sublime and ranging from brilliant satire to tender elegy, this retrospective collection brings into sharp relief Slavitt's intelligence, strength of voice, and ease in varied poetic forms. From the beginning of his career, Slavitt has displayed a rare technical virtuosity, and his verse has long confronted -- with urbanity and poise -- questions of...

In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an "old beige comb from home," the boundlessness of a "three-axled God"), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.

An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a...

A master craftsman who seamlessly combines vision and contemplation, Brendan Galvin is considered among the most powerful naturalist poets today. Habitat, Galvin's fourteenth poetry book, combines eighteen new works with lyric pieces from the past forty years--including two book-length narratives, Wampanoag Traveler and Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boat. In a voice of quiet authority leavened with humor, Galvin intimately conveys his landscapes, birds and animals, people, and weather. By elevating the commonplace to the crucial, he takes his readers very far from the familiar. Habitat...

Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. A cab ride turns into an amazing encounter with the driver, an amateur physicist whose ideas about space and time travel spark the poet's musings on chutzpah and artistic ambition. A trip to Triolet, a Creole village in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, leads the poet to ponder the past and present as she reflects on the ironic complexities of the slave trade and its legacy shared by so many peoples. And in...

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 poems of quiet force, Geri Doran maps the fragility of human connection and the irreducible fact of grief. From the communal ruptures of Chechnya and Rwanda to the personal dislocations that attend great loss, Resin weighs frailty against responsibility, damage against the desires of the heart. For the poet, a factory fire in late-nineteenth-century Portland becomes a tool for precise knowing: "The phases of wood are a means / of dead reckoning: burn what is built / and gauge your passage / by what is lost." Even in so quotidian an act as the planting of potatoes, Doran's sure,...

David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-Francois Millet's sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century and honoring their essential human dignity. Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. He seeks to describe Gruchy -- the small Norman village near Cherbourg where Millet grew up -- and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet."