A rich debut collection from a promising new poet -- selected by Campbell McGrath as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competition
For more than twenty-five years, the National Poetry Series has sought out and discovered new voices, helping to launch the careers of such luminaries as the former poet laureate Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.
A rich debut collection from a promising new poet -- selected by Campbell McGrath as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competiti...
In "Michelangelo's Seizure, " Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters--from Caravaggio and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock--to demonstrate how these artists transformed physical, psychological, and political suffering into art. Mirroring the brushstrokes in long, metaphor-laden sentences, Gehrke moves freely through the canvas, into and out of the artists' lives, into the public realm, into history, to capture the way the creative mind can transform even the most violent surroundings--a prison cell,...
Providing poetic entry into the visual arts
In "Michelangelo's Seizure, " Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters...
Trebuchet is the much-anticipated follow-up to Danniel Schoonebeek's debut book of poems, American Barricade, which was named one of 2014's ten best books of poetry by Poets & Writers and hailed as a "groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author's generation" by Boston Review.
The poems in Trebuchet--which takes its name from the catapult used to break down walls and barriers during medieval wars--are at once combative and incendiary, tackling contemporary politics in a more direct, personal way than Schoonebeek ever has before....
Trebuchet is the much-anticipated follow-up to Danniel Schoonebeek's debut book of poems, American Barricade, which was named one of...
"It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake."--Brigit Pegeen Kelly, National Poetry Series judge
A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety of intimate perspectives and using a range of innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture, and circumstance, alive and speaking.
Tyehimba Jess' numerous awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A native of Detroit, he is a proud...
"It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake."--Brigit Pegeen Kell...
Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, "Veil and Burn" illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.
Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, "Veil and Burn" illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, beco...
2009 Massachusetts Book Awards Winner Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan s "Spring" encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy columns of verse brush up against large-scale epics and kinetic text. This collection s point of departure is the paradox of existence as an individual in a political and violent world. All of the formal innovations in this book have in common an urgent need for texture and polyphony, and the poems...
2009 Massachusetts Book Awards Winner Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan s ...
Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin Young The poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift through the myriad meanings of "mixing" to explore and explode ideas of race, skin politics, appropriation, and cultural identity. Whether the focus of the individual poems is musical, digital, or historical, the otherness implicit in being of more than one racial background guides Matejka's work to the inevitable conclusion that all things-no matter how disparate-are parts of the whole.
Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series by Kevin Young The poems in Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology, shapeshift t...
In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:
Dear black bayou, once, by a river
I bit a man's neck. His scent: the raw
teak air husked inside...
In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted ...
Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha Trethewey Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Onate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A...
Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha Trethewey Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history i...