American Poets Continuum Books

Finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry A landmark collection by National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 includes the four poetry collections that launched Clifton’s career— Good Times, Good News About the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-Headed Woman —as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations. In honor of the 30th anniversary of Lucille Clifton's Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection and memoir, Good Woman is now available for the first time as a deluxe eBook edition. Enhanced with previously unpublished photographs from the Lucille Clifton Estate and a special foreword by Aracelis Girmay, this eBook is a must-have for longtime Clifton fans and newcomers alike.

Finalist, 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. "Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminated her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."-- The Women's Review of Books

Contents I. Furious Versionis II. The Interrogation This Hour And What Is Dead Arise, Go Down My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud For A New Citizen Of These United States With Ruins III. This Room And Everything In It The City In Which I Love You IV. The Waiting A Story Goodnight You Must Sing Here I Am A Final Thing V. The Cleaving

Brilliantly honed language, sharp rhythms and striking syntax empower Lucille Clifton's personal and artistic odyssey. Hers is poetry of birth, death, children, community, history, sexuality and spirituality, and she addresses these themes with passion, humor, anger and spiritual awe.

Finalist, 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Dorianne Laux's poetry is a poetry of risk; it goes to the very edge of extinction to find the hard facts that need to be sung. What We Carry includes poems of survival, poems of healing, poems of affirmation and poems of celebration.

Poet, teacher, essayist, anthologist, songwriter and singer, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the country's most acclaimed writers. Her voice is generous; her vision true; her subjects ordinary people, and ordinary situations which, when rendered through her language, become remarkable. In this, her fourth full collection of poetry, we see with new eyes-a grandmother's scarf, an alarm clock, a man carrying his son on his shoulders. Valentine for Ernest Mann You can’t order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter and say, "I’ll take two" and expect it to handed back to you on a shiny plate. Still, I like you spirit. Anyone who says, "Here’s my address, write me a poem," deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them. Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn’t understand why she was crying. "I thought they had such beautiful eyes." And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them as valentines and they became beautiful. At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet. Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite. And let me know.

The long-awaited tenth collection of poetry from the Shelley Memorial Prize-winning poet Lucille Clifton.

Naomi Shihab Nye focuses on ordinary people and ordinary situations, which, when rendered through the poems in Fuel , become remarkable. The poet imagines the border families of southern Texas, small ferns and forgotten books, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Nye has written, "Lives unlike mine, you save me."

In this new collection by the author of the award-winning The Philosopher's Club, Kim Addonizio takes the grist of the world and transforms it into poems of transcendent beauty. The dual themes of love and loss are pervasive in Addonizio's poems, made poignant by her keen eye and wise observations.

The long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets working today.

Dorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry , a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke , Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted—poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke , as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter’s Wife," a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day: Then I’d open his clothes and take the whole day inside me—the ship’s gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead kissing metal. The clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, and the long drive home. And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures: Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat’s eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe . . . With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh. Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights , Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity. Marketing Plans: o National advertising o National media campaign o National and regional author appearances o Advance reader copies o Course adoption mailing Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose , winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You , which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word , the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.

Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass’s Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child’s birth, a kiss,/ or even me—in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on—thinking of you." Marketing Plans: • National advertising • National media campaign • Advance reader copies • Course adoption mailing Author Tour: • Berkeley • Boston • Minneapolis • San Francisco • Santa Cruz Ellen Bass is co-author (with Laura Davis) of the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 1994), which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Double Take , and Field . In 1980, Ms. Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati. Last year, she won Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, judged by Thomas Lux. She was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, where she has taught creative writing for 25 years. She has also taught writing workshops at many conferences nationally and in Mallorca, Spain.

Known for his superrealism and magical images born of the imagery of the Chicano/South Western culture, Ray Gonzalez gives new imagery and intensity to the mystery and common miracles of that culture, the passionate reclamation of identity. Ray Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and editor born in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of five books of poetry, including The Heat of Arrivals (BOA 1996), which won the 1997 Josephine Miles Book Award for Excellence in Literature, and Cabato Sentora (BOA 1999). He is the editor of twelve anthologies and serves as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review . Also available by Ray Gonzalez: The Heat of Arrivals TP $12.50, 1-880238-39-X o CUSA Cabato Sentora TP $12.50, 1-880238-70-5 o CUSA

In Love Song with Motor Vehicles , Alan Michael Parker marshals a penetrating wit and sharp irony that mirrors that of Charles Simic and John Berryman. Parker’s robust imagination explores the music in places poetry doesn’t usually travel. His poems find their epiphanies early on, and, most strikingly, do not close at their endings but, rather, open. Alan Michael Parker is the author of two books of poetry, and co-editor of two scholarly works, The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and Who’s Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge Books). In 2000, his poems were included in all three major volumes of "younger American poets" (Carnegie Mellon University Press, University of Southern Illinois Press, and University of New England Press).

Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover’s quarrel with the world. "Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."—Seamus Heaney Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review , the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse. Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award , and To the Place of Trumpets , selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

For decades, Russell Edson has been producing a body of work unique in perspective and singular in approach. Here are contorted Darwinian narratives of apes and monkeys exhibiting absurdly human behavior, along with elephants, horses, chickens, mermaids and mice. "Russell Edson is one of the most important and unique poets in the later part of the 20th century. Since the early 1960s, Edson has dazzled readers with his eerie logic, (ir)rational narrative gymnastics, and comic wisdom. He is certainly one of the preeminent writers of the prose poem in America today." -- Mark Tursi

Postcards from the Interior is a collection of postcard poems written from different geographical locations and varied states of heart and mind. The first section, “Postcards from Vermont,” is composed of poems about Vermont towns and historical landmarks. The second section, “Postcards from the Interior,” stretches to include poems from far-flung places, real and imagined. Adroit at juxtaposing the exterior weather of landscapes and the interior weather of the human condition, Cooper writes poetry with the heft of a Romantic meditation and the breezy ease of contemporary song lyrics. Wyn Cooper has published three previous poetry collections. A poem from his first book was turned into lyrics for Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He lives in Battleboro, Vermont.

In You and Yours , Naomi Shihab Nye continues her conversation with ordinary people whose lives become, through her empathetic use of poetic language, extraordinary. Nye writes of local life in her inner-city Texas neighborhood, about rural schools and urban communities she’s visited in this country, as well as the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians who live in the war-torn Middle East. The Day I missed the day on which it was said others should not have certain weapons, but we could. Not only could, but should, and do. I missed that day. Was I sleeping? I might have been digging in the yard, doing something small and slow as usual. Or maybe I wasn’t born yet. What about all the other people who aren’t born? Who will tell them? Balancing direct language with a suggestive “aslantness,” Nye probes the fragile connection between language and meaning. She never shies from the challenge of trying to name the mysterious logic of childhood or speak truth to power in the face of the horrors of war. She understands our lives are marked by tragedy, inequity, and misunderstanding, and that our best chance of surviving our losses and shortcomings is to maintain a heightened awareness of the sacred in all things. Naomi Shihab Nye , poet, editor, anthologist, is a recipient of writing fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations. Nye’s work has been featured on PBS poetry specials including NOW with Bill Moyers , The Language of Life with Bill Moyers , and The United States of Poetry . She has traveled abroad as a visiting writer on three Arts America tours sponsored by the United States Information Agency. In 2001 she received a presidential appointment to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

With both ardor and sensuality, Darling Vulgarity challenges us to embrace humanity’s imperfections while urging us toward new spiritual realities. And then, sometimes, the poems are just plain sexy. Or, as Nat Hardy wrote, “Waters’ meditative and confessional forays into the sexual sublime are both disturbing and artfully passionate.” Darling Vulgarity also includes poems based on Waters’ true literary experiences with such notables as Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell.

Until the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle , along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections. from “Nocturnes” Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone. W. D. Snodgrass , born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetr y (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

Slope of the Child Everlasting sustains the lyric and imagistic sensibility of Laurie Kutchins’ previous poetry collection, The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997), while expanding on its exploration of the archetypes that anchor the heart and mind of her poetry. The characters in these poems evoke chaos and regression, as well as song, wonder, and the tenacity of the imagination. Laurie Kutchins is an associate professor of English at James Madison University in Virginia. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and spends her summers along the Wyoming-Idaho border. The Night Path won the 1997 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions.

Nin Andrews starts from the premise that life on Earth is suffering, and that a large part of daily life and art is a search for an escape from this essential truth. Much of her writing is about the wish for an escape. In her previous collection, The Book of Orgasms, the voices are like those of angels, who look down from above and wonder: what is the problem with the human race? Why are they so troubled? The prose poems in her new collection, Sleeping with Houdini, are more personal. Andrews begins by speaking as a little girl who wishes she could vanish at will or become invisible to the outer world, just as Houdini did. As she grows up, so does her imagination. Houdini becomes a personal icon of a magical being, a muse, and ultimate lover, or that which one can long for but never possess or become. Sleeping with Houdini is a kind of "inscape" of a girl's life, an inside look at her fantasies and fears, her wishes and dreams, a collection in which Houdini becomes a metaphor for her longing. "Though her prose poems read as plausible narrative, Andrews fluently infiltrates the logical with the surreal. Her unique and playful vision presents a world off-kilter and disjointed where the reader strangely feels right at home." –Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics

From the Bible to the Quaraan, the fortieth day symbolizes the last moment before deliverance, a moment in time when a supplicant or prophet or stormbeaten passenger knows there is no state “after,” but finally accepts the present state as a permanent one. In The Fortieth Day , Kazim Ali follows the fractured narratives and moving lyrics of his debut collection, The Far Mosque , with a deeply spiritual and meditative book exploring the rhetoric of prayer. Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and raised in an Islamic household. He holds degrees from the University at Albany and New York University. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Elephants & Butterflies combines the imaginative forays of The Vandals with the more meditative approach of Love Song with Motor Vehicles . Both wild and calm, boisterous and quiet, the poems in Elephants & Butterflies use surprise, song, and startling metaphor while allowing the ideas to simmer just below the surface of the lyric. The poems manage the difficult task of being highly readable and accessible, while still containing complex philosophical and personal knowledge. Alan Michael Parker (www.amparker.com) teaches at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He also teaches at Queens University, where he is core faculty in the low-residency MFA program.

In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious American poetry awards and one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Clifton has also won the National Book Award in poetry for Blessing the Boats (BOA Editions, 2000), and is the only author ever to have two collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA Editions, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1987), named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year. In Voices , Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life’s many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton’s ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box. “cream of wheat” sometimes at night we stroll the market aisles ben and jemima and me they walk in front humming this and that i lag behind trying to remove my chef’s cap wondering what ever pictured me then left me personless rastus i read in an old paper that i was called rastus but no mother ever gave that to her son toward dawn we head back to our shelves our boxes ben and jemima and me we pose and smile i simmer to myself what is my name BOA Editions is thrilled to present the newest poetry collection by the one and only Lucille Clifton.

Through Michael Blumenthal’s eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Blumenthal uses the conjunction to unify this collection and create a chanting, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises. Michael Blumenthal holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His other books include the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), and the poetry collection Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1999), for which he was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Blumenthal’s new collection of poems, titled “And,” is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it, there’s a time to laugh and cry, scatter stones and gather them up, and all the rest. There’s no point, though, in toil and hope beyond that. After reading these poems, which are designed with a cosmic sweep, you get the feeling that Blumenthal’s plan is, as in Dylan Thomas’s poem, eventually just to go gentle into that good night: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” be damned. -- THE JEWISH DAILY FORWARD Michael Blumenthal’s stunning new book, And, is an Eliotic celebration of life in the world as continuum and progress. He achieves this through a simple and seductive meditation upon the conjunction, “and,” and the way it enriches the complexity of language as it shapes lived experience. --The Montserrat Review

Her traveling poetrics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift. --Sacramento News & Review These poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery, grief, and joy. Poems from this collection were selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Cecilia Woloch was named 2004 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her last collection, Late (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003). She is founding director of the Summer Poetry Workshop in Idyllwild, California. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California, and travels extensively in Europe. From Devils Lake Journal: “Celia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succombs to loss, where “fat bees [fall] into the wine” and the ghost swans have “wings of death.” The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I’ve seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up to be more peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful.” From The Cosmopolitan Review: “One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry is that it so beautifully and skilfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness...Underneath it all, there lies a clear conviction that each of us could have been somebody else, could have been born and lived somewhere else, and yet “We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world.”

Weaving narratives of ancient and contemporary Egypt while exploring ecological shifts of the Nile Valley, Matthew Shenoda is a voice at the crossroads of the African continent and its diasporas. Amiri Baraka says, “Matthew Shenoda’s poetry will open your mind to another world that exists inside and outside of your own.” Winner of the 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection, Somewhere Else , Shenoda is a younger poet with his eyes set on the larger issues of history, politics, and culture. Matthew Shenoda lives in Los Angeles, California. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at Goddard College.

Sharon Bryan’s fourth poetry collection blends such disparate subjects as biology, astronomy, sports, philosophy, and music to probe humankind’s desire for spiritual, even physical, transcendence. From Charles Mingus to Charles Barkley, from Buddy Holly to Bishop Berkeley, no reference is squandered in Bryan’s prodigious imagination. Sharon Bryan ’s awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Prize from The Nation , and two NEA fellowships. She has published three poetry collections and edited Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life and Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition. She is a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Chaos is the New Calm expands the parameters of the sonnet form, putting rhymes in unusual places, inventing new stanza structures, and addressing a variety of subject matter ranging from travelogue to inner monologue, from social commentary to solitary musing. These poems are alive with sound, rhythm, and lyric insights into the world. Wyn Cooper ’s poem “Fun” was adapted by Sheryl Crow for her hit song “All I Wanna Do.” He collaborates on music and spoken word with novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Cooper is co-organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. He consults for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.

“Peter Makuck sees through the detritus of daily life to what matters. . . . It’s that essence that lives deep down in things, looked for in people, sea- and landscapes, and creatures, that lifts the quotidian toward the marvelous, and animates this selection of poems from four decades.”—Brendan Galvin From "Long Lens": Folding laundry, I can see our clothesline waving its patches of color like the flag of a foreign country where I had happily lived in a small clapboard house surrounded by pines. I can hear my mother in her strong accent saying she didn’t want a dryer even when we could finally afford one— Our sheets won’t smell of trees and sunlight anymore. Long Lens represents forty years of Peter Makuck’s work, including twenty-five new poems. With precise language, Makuck’s imagery evokes spiritual longing, love, loss, violence, and transcendence. His subjects include the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; scuba diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a small plane; rescuing a boy caught in a riptide; and lucid observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, and a pelican tangled in a fishing line. Peter Makuck taught at East Carolina University from 1976 to 2006, where he founded Tar River Poetry. He was 2008 Lee Smith Chair in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. Winner of the Brockman Award and the Charity Randall Citation, he lives on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.

Burning of the Three Fires shows Jeanne Marie Beaumont using her characteristic variety of techniques: dramatic monologues, lists, prose poems, object poems, and ekphrasis, to which she adds biography, elegy, and rites. This book takes a multifaceted look at womanhood: there are dolls, historic and modern girlhoods, mythic retellings of characters from Goldilocks to the Bride of Frankenstein, emotionally charged domestic trinkets, and even a conversation with Sylvia Plath conducted via a Magic 8- Ball. Jeanne Marie Beaumont is the author of Curious Conduct (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004) and the National Poetry Series–winning book Placebo Effects . She lives in New York City.

Tagalog is a language spoken by twenty-two million people in the Philippines. Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning "muse." Diwata is also a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and who human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world. In her book Diwata , Barbara Jane Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes' voice is grounded in her community's traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation. From "Estuary 2": She was born with fins and fishtail, A quick blade slicing water. She was her father's mermaid child, A river demon, elders said. She mimicked her cetaceous brothers, Abalone diving bluest depths. She polished smooth her brothers' masks, Inlaid nacre half moon eyes. She lit oak pyres and bade the wind A whispered requiem. Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco , which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco. From National Book Critics Circle: “Diwata as a mythological invocation takes teh reader back to pre-colonial Philippines when the belief in these god and goddesses shaped the everyday lives on the Southeast Asian archipelago. They have now become your muses as you reach toward this cultural legacy to shape a distinct postmodern poetics in which yo u don’t simply erase colonial history- you build with that narrative as well."

"These soul-infused, deftly crafted stanzas pulse with the rhythms of a poet who lives his life out loud. Sean Thomas Dougherty has always shunned convention in favor of his fresher landscapes—and this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon."—Patricia Smith Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be. The author of ten previous poetry collections, Sean Thomas Dougherty teaches poetry at Case Western University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth. Aracelis Girmay 's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own. The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time. G.C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater's Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor , and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University. John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls , The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World . His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review , GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.

"Singular and deeply pleasurable. Christopher Kennedy's prosetry is a lonely anarchic nation-state unto itself, half vacation funspot, half eerie purgatorial layover."—Dave Eggers The poems in Ennui Prophet , Christopher Kennedy's fourth collection, range from deeply personal explorations of relationships with family and friends, to examinations of the political climate in the first decade of the millennium. Whether personal or public, Kennedy gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us. Christopher Kennedy 's previous book, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He directs Syracuse University's MFA program in creative writing.

"In the current literary scene, one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."— William Stafford Dusk where is the name no one answered to gone off to live by itself beneath the pine trees separating the houses without a friend or a bed without a father to tell it stories how hard was the path it walked on all those years belonging to none of our struggles drifting under the calendar page elusive as residue when someone said how have you been it was strangely that name that tried to answer Naomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity. Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

"Waters's elegant language suggests that there is grace to be found in facing and speaking of our sorrows. . . . His use of humor creates a tension between the profane and the sublime."— Arts & Letters Among the survivors of the Donner Party—idiom's black sense of humor— Who developed a secret taste for flesh Flaked between the fluted bones of the wrist? In his tenth poetry collection, Michael Waters tackles the dual (and dueling) natures of our humanity: sin and transgression, isolation and atrocity, love and darkness, and the desire for a language that can illuminate such ordinary yet disturbing spaces.

As people live longer, we face the challenges that come with caring for, and living as, an aging population. This collection focuses on the sad, funny, mundane reality of life in a nursing home. In her own words, Janice N. Harrington worked her way through college as a nurses' aide and wrote The Hands of Strangers because she "cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven't forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned." Janic N. Harrington 's debut Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone earned teh 2007 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and an NEA fellowship for poetry.

"Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation."–Gerald Stern The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical, honest, and empathic in a style that is both gritty and urbane. With wry humor, Ira Sadoff's latest collection addresses family, faith, and the quiet joys of aging. Ira Sadoff currently teaches in the MFA program at Drew University and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts professor of English at Colby College in Maine.

A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter's latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." Sutter's poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground. Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in Minnesota and Iowa. He retired from the University of Wisconsin–Superior in 2011 and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

To Keep Love Blurry is about the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people: husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, tracing how a son becomes a husband and then a father. Robert Lowell is a constant figure throughout the book, which borrows its four-part structure from that poet's seminal Life Studies . Craig Morgan Teicher won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He is poetry reviews editor for Publishers Weekly magazine and served as vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry " The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."-- Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."-- Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."-- The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days ): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

Theophobia is the latest volume in Bruce Beasley's ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim's Deviations" and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley seeks the Biblical Kingdom of God among Dolly the cloned sheep, the wonders and horrors of extremophilic creatures living in astonishing intensities of temperature, robotic phone operators, and Wikipedia's explanation of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit. Bruce Beasley is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007). He has won fellowships from the NEA and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes.

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award The Book of Goodbyes speaks to a certain deranged love that throws into question sex, legality, gender-politics, disability, and the end of an affair. The book shifts between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction, and is organized like a play with Act I, Intermission, Act II, and Curtain Call.

No Need of Sympathy is an exceptionally wide-ranging poetry collection, touching on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and the natures of poetry and reality. These poems, the eighth collection by Fleda Brown, ask huge questions; they zero in like a microscope on what’s here, at hand. They are spoken with humility, great humor, curiosity, and a deep love of living.

Deeply cross cultural, humanitarian, political and global poems about how humans deal with suffering across the world. These are poems about cultures rubbing up against each other, war, refugees, child soldiers, spiritual refugees trying to find a home, and a mother who is witnessing these firsthand. Rare ethnographic poetry by a world traveling cultural anthropologist and human rights activist.