“[D]ivulges the spirit of a sensualist and the habits of a contemplative; sometimes vice versa. Colors are separated with the veracity of paint. Shifts in temperature are registered and background noises distinguished, not only for texture’s sake but for their essential contribution to the poems’ substance. Fine foods are sung and individual words lit. For company Sajé summons a curious assortment of lettered forbears including Cotton Mather, Henry Vaughan, Nietzsche, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley. A virtuous and subtly depraved book is Bend.”
—C.D. Wright

“Natasha Sajé’s quicksilver, wideawake poems in The Future Will Call You Something Else never fail to delight and impress me with their at-the-ready empathy, encyclopedic wit, and prismatic range of allusions. With its ‘all systems go’ verve and vigorous attention to the myriad world, this dazzling, exhilarating new book is a treasure and a wonder.”
—Cyrus Cassells

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things — plants or animals — which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé’s new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death. “In Vivarium, Natasha Sajé, one of poetry’s most ludic and encyclopedic essayists, explores language — and the alphabet — in terms both acerbic and lush, exposing the roots of the world’s ills, and its many rooted pleasures. In a word, zowie!” — Mary Ruefle “Resourceful, restless, witty and substantially intelligent — what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits. Their range is marvelously wide in both form and tone… Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted and illuminated and stretched.” —Dean Young, in a citation for the Academy of American Poets’ 2008 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award

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In 2016, Leapfolio published the Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement. The Guide provides an overview of the major problems that retirees face and the simple strategies they can implement to make their retirement financially successful. The Guide fulfilled Cardinal’s expectations and proved to be a success, as they sold or distributed more than 6,000 copies in the past year. But they also learned that the Guide isn’t quite sufficient by itself. So they’ve created this Workbook to offer additional examples of real-life situations, products, and strategies, and guidance to help people prepare to discuss retirement planning with a professional advisor.

This quirky book of essays explores subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, and the afterlife with a light and understanding touch.

Thematically exploring the contrasts and dynamic interplay between solidity and ephemerality, in his first book of poems Harold Schweizer creates great dramatic tension by poising complex, expansive sentences against the strictures of taut margins. While portraying angels as unfettered, Schweizer doesn’t accept the platonic notion that we ever transcend our physical world. Instead, he imagines angels as immanent, everywhere: “they / inhabit all things.” The Book of Stones and Angels attempts to disclose the angelic lightness of stones in the obstinate materiality of angels, amid the lightness and frailty of our existence.

Calendars of Fire is an extended elegy whose grief is political as well as personal. Across barriers of tribe, history, and mortality, these poems carry us home with their music to a dwelling place in our own resonant bodies.

I Will Not Name It Except to Say deals with loves, rituals, deaths, and creations; it does this with terms and names, at first, and then continues past them. The title of Lee Sharkey’s new poetry collection suggests that names are important, but only in service of something else. Some poems in this book kick-off from names of artists and their work-like “Fate of the Animals” or “Kollwitz: The Work”-to spiral and expand into other considerations, about what a country is or what it means to create a character in a painting. Other times, poems cut into what is unnamed altogether: Sharkey writes about “banned…words” or “What the news won’t tell” to see something previously missed. In one poem, “X”, Sharkey completely strips specific terms and names from her description-she uses variables, and sees how the unnamed can affect a reader who’s kept completely uninformed. In this book, names and terms become important because they have to do with memory and history. A city amounts to its personal, cultural history, which needs to be preserved; saving a city consists in collecting and recording its writings, “to keep the people’s memory alive”. In personal family life, keeping a memory-which means keeping names and stories intact-is also a wonderfully, terrifyingly important responsibility. As the speaker realizes for themselves, late in this book: “Soon, I’ll be the only keeper of the memories that made a family. / I don’t trust myself with that much treasure / but here I am, holding out my arms and smiling.”

Walking Backwards examines resistance to violence and repression through evocations of contemporary events and conversations with poets and artists whose voices arise from the Holocaust. Employing a remarkable variety of formal strategies— lyrics, parables, testimony, paratactic narratives and re-castings of Torah stories, inter-leavings with other texts—these poems offer a complex vantage on cultural erasure and persistence. Sharkey conjures a simultaneous present to reclaim a heritage expressed by gaps and silencing. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and the Yiddish language poets Abraham Sutzkever and Peretz Markish become contemporaries, as her words mingle with theirs to bear the weight of the unspoken. “What have we come for,” the poet asks, “to sleep where the dead slept in the bed of our absence?” What redemption she finds is in language.

Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive… I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn… Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.
—Laurie Sheck

Floyd Skloot’s new book gathers sixteen stories that combine unsentimental comedy and forceful emotion. As in his award- winning poetry and memoirs, Skloot’s fiction shows how individual people, families, and communities face the starkest of challenges, including bodily maladies, the most harrowing of which often come with aging. Yet alienating experience can lead to moments of powerful intimacy, as dark times are lit by sudden incursions of love and hope, and a yearning for community summons poignant expression.

Good Bones, the collection that took the internet by storm in 2017, is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. “There is a light,” she tells us, “and the light is good.” Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.” These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Selected by Kimiko Hahn as a winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize, Maggie Smith’s poems question whether the realms of imagination and story can possibly be safe.This house at the end of the street isn’t all that it appears to be, as Smith’s verses design a dark mythical landscape hidden between the picket fences. In “The List of Dangers”, she writes, “The sun was a saw blade,/a yellow circle with teeth. Terrible birds with plumage/of fire scorched whatever they touched: The black/mailbox opened its mouth to the black street”. This is a world unwelcome to the children that play in it, whether they know it or not. The vivid imagery and colors of any old neighborhood fill the pages with life, giving Smith’s work an ominous relatability. Her stories leave us grasping at who said what and, more importantly, where the line between fairy tale and horror story really lies.

Winner of the Tupelo Press / Crazyhorse First Book Prize

The Forest of Sure Things is a layered sequence of poems set in a remote, historic village at the tip of a peninsula on the Northwest Coast, near where Lewis and Clark encountered the Pacific. A pair of newlywed drifters has arrived and settled there, starting the town’s first new family in a hundred years. When their second child is stillborn, the bereft family unravels and un-roots themselves. Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems reveal — like the shoreline exposed by a neap tide — an emotional landscape pressed upon and buckling under the complications of grief and the difficulties of language.

With hypnotic, incantatory phrasing and imagery and an innovative approach to chronology, Snyder-Camp tells the story of the grieving couple, then dramatizes the impact of this enigmatic story on her imagination, her artistic practice, and her own new beginnings in married life and parenthood.

Based in part upon a brief, true story she was told, Snyder-Camp’s mysterious yet uncommonly compelling poetic sequence will draw the reader as if along a current pulling through the book. Acknowledging the importance of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Snyder-Camp has spoken of her fascination with where language frays, as we try and use “story” to create what we remember and see where we are. What happens in a place, or a family, or a body, when time catches, or stops?

A handwritten court record offers a forgotten name, a baby cries in the archive: In Wintering, her second collection of poems, Megan Snyder-Camp composes a disruptive, archive-sourced poetry of witness that challenges the given story of the “Indian vocabularies,” indigenous language records Lewis and Clark gathered during their 1804-6 journey. Exploring whiteness, memory and language, Wintering is a book about the mark our hunger makes.

Babel’s Moon eulogizes an immigrant grandfather, and in doing so explores boundaries that are at once geographic, historical, and cosmological. Brandon Som’s first book moves between vigorously detailed descriptive poems and austere, atmospheric lyrics as he finds new ways of reaching for (and even crossing) the horizons.

At the heart of What Could Be Saved is the culture of the violin world—its beauty, myth-making, magic, romance and deceit, as well as its history and ethos of perfection at any cost. In stories and novellas matched end-to-end like the twinned or “bookmatched” pieces of tonewood that separately comprise a violin, What Could Be Saved winds its way through the hopes and dreams of builders, dealers and players caught up in the violin trade, a trade that is so unlike any other in the world. From the story of a young man who refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps as a violin builder, to the magical realism of the story told in the point of view of forgotten, abused and ordinary violins, What Could Be Saved transports you into the world of the violin, compelling you to witness its most tragic, comic and thoroughly human dramas. Blending viewpoints and storytelling techniques, including magical and psychological realism, moving from novella to story and back again, there is a sustained musicality that thrums through these beautiful, almost dream-like tales. Spatz’s language is precise and powerful, his fiction elegantly wrought. A book that echoes long after its music ends.

Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the “heretical” Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.

Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone’s two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at “Pineland,” a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. Kill Class is an arresting ethnography of American military culture, one that allows readers to circle at length through the cloverleaf interchanges where warfare nestles into even the most mundane corners of everyday life.

Rewild is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that, having been ravaged by war and environmental plunder, have since been abandoned to regenerate and restore. At this moment where we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the poems hover between ruin and restoration. They open ways we can ask transformative questions and turn ourselves into these questions that begin to tunnel through difficulty and despair into “another spreadsheet than human … chromosomal and intricate.” To begin to unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives.

A buffeting sequence of dramatic monologues that provoke and disturb, Larissa Szporluk’s Traffic with Macbeth evokes a dark world linked to the black magic of Shakespeare’s tortured Scottish assassin, usurper of kings. Baroque in their sweep of high style and low slang, melody and dissonance, these poems use shifting animate and inanimate speakers and surrealist leaps to convey human brutality, the vulnerability of women and children, madness, and the struggle to escape the limitations of this world.