Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language. This magical, musical book of poems draws readers into its unforgettable heart, and Carolyn Forché wrties simply "I'm in awe of his gifts."

Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America’s leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.

An inspired and engaging perspective of feminist art-making in a fractured world, Blood Feather reimagines resistance. With the help of three fictive narrators, an actress, a thinker, and a filmmaker create boundless opportunities for relatability. Caught up in a hurricane of identities, the actress wonders where the performance of character stops, saying, “rain has/a way of showing costumes for/what they really are”. The thinker, a so-called muse for her architect husband, searches for her self in a lyric embodying the molting process of a bird. This kind of evolution is central to all narratives, inspiring the reader to reflect on their own passages of growth. Taking its title from a vulnerable new feather of a bird that contains a constant flow of blood, Blood Feather reminds us of the essential yet fragile position of art. Protest and resistance can take that vital place of the blood inside of the feather in order to assert the importance of artful poetry such as this.

America that island off the coast of France hurtles across literary and linguistic borders, toward a lyricism that slows down experience to create a new form of elegiac memoir. Born in France, raised in Florida, Jesse Lee Kercheval now divides her time between the U.S. and Uruguay. Her poems speak to the impossibility of emigration, of ever being the citizen of only one country. Against the backdrops of Paris, Montevideo, and Florida, these poems explore citizenship and homelessness, motherhood and self, family and freedom. As the poems go from one place to another, they also connect places together; they mirror and combine images, imitate other poets and draw out long, original lines of reflecting and describing. Kercheval turns over and over again the very meaning of the word home, as the poems, like the poet, make the fraught journey back and forth between places like France and America. Even though places might be similar, or a poet might connect them, Kercheval still wonders, in her poem “The Red Balloon”: “is leaving / ever painless? Is returning?”

Winner of the Tupelo Press / Crazyhorse First Book Prize

Under the influence of broadcasts such as public radio’s “Marketplace” (a daily roundup of stock reports and business news), Daniel Khalastchi composed a series of character-driven poems whose recurrent narrator is physically and mentally manipulated while the world around him takes little notice. Through their chaos and horror, these poems ask a reader to question the ways in which our careening healthcare system, crumbling financial/housing/job markets, and war on multiple fronts are actually affecting us — both inside and out.

domina Un/blued dislocates the traditional slave narrative, placing the slave’s utterance within the map and chronicle of conquest. Charting a diaspora of the human spirit as well as a diaspora of an individual body, Ruth Ellen Kocher’s award-winning new book reaches beyond the story of historical involuntary servitude to explore enslavements of devotion and desire, which in extremity slide into addiction and carnal bondage.

Praising the power of lyric drama, T. S. Eliot described the use of third voice as a means for characters to address and interrogate one another, and second voice as a way for characters to talk to the audience. In this daring new book, the principal narrator presents as a caricature reflecting the tangible experiences of a disembodied “I” posed against absurd selfhood—a voice imbued by sublime otherness. Within a dismantled minstrel show, Ruth Ellen Kocher frames a female voice splintered and re-figured as “self” and “character.” The incomprehensible nature of the sublime emerges through a cast of other personages including Eartha Kitt, Geordi LaForge, Immanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X. Third Voice asserts lyric beyond personal expression and drama beyond the stage, using the spectacle of minstrelsy as a deformation of mastery in an audaciously conceptual yet visceral performance.

You Can Tell the Horse Anything is a debut collection of prose poems that explores the many manifestations of longing-true love, spiritual redemption, a good night’s sleep, the list is long and varied. Using humor and lyricism, they give voice to an array of animals as well as human characters who inhabit the sometimes rocky terrain between the common place and the absurd. Ultimately, these poems — these tightly packed mini-dramas — are microcosms of our own everyday lives. They challenge our sense of self, our sense of belonging and comfort. They ask us to tread carefully in a world that is easily turned on its side. Yet, ironically, they also encourage us to be hopeful, to realize that solace and small joy can be found talking to a horse or raising worms on a moonlit mountain.

KIM KYUNG JU’s Butterfly Sleep is a historical drama based in the early period of the Joseon dynasty. He relies on a mixture of absurdism, magic realism, and dark humor in order to tell an existentialist allegory of Korea’s rapid development. In this sense, Butterfly Sleep is a story about the fractured soul of the nation. Even more so, it is a lesson in consolation. As Butterfly Sleep unfolds, we drift in and out of song, as music is made in order to comfort the characters in the play. With lyricism and grace, Kim suggests that the only way the ghosts of the nation can be consoled is through direct confrontation. Confront them first, then sing them a lullaby.