BiblioVault - Books about Poetry

Not For Luck

Derek Sheffield

Michigan State University Press, 2021

Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize

In Not For Luck, Derek Sheffield ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. In particular, these poems explore a father’s relationship with his daughters, which is rooted in place and time. There is tenderness and an abiding ecological consciousness, but also loss and heartache, especially about environmental degradation. We are invited to listen to the languages of other beings. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, two bears on a stretch of coast, a river otter, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth.

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Not God

A Play in Verse

Marc J. Straus

Northwestern University Press, 2006

The tread of the nurses leaving the room next door tells the woman her neighbor has died. The language of the hospital is one she has unwillingly, painstakingly learned: the rhythm of machines, the counting of pills, the measuring of words, the shadowy news of an MRI. And in these harrowing, eloquent poems, she opens this world, this language of illness, to us, revealing how deeply these words and rhythms are also the measure of life. The views of her doctor are also evocatively expressed--his anger, struggles, and hopes--as he speaks of the delicate bond he forms with his ill patients. Composed by a distinguished medical oncologist whose literary work has been performed in venues throughout the country, the poems of Not God document one woman's encounter with cancer, a journey through illness whose end, while inevitable, is also unknown. Alternating with the words of her doctor, these poems form a remarkable dialogue of the flesh becoming word, and of the body inventorying--and finally transcending--its limitations.

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The Note She Left

Poems

Susan Hahn

Northwestern University Press, 2008

Hahn’s new collection wrestles with the elemental and enduring challenges of the human condition: What can we use from our spiritual heritage? How should we find relief? How, after it all, do we live? The poems are presented as a letter to the world from a woman preparing to leave it. In four sections—“The Bells,” “The Crosses,” “Widdershins,” and “Afterwor(l)d”—she contrasts the hope against the dark that is embodied by an amulet or cross with the abased resignation of torture, failed prayers, and witchcraft. Though Hahn’s vision is a dark one, its dramatic emotional depth speaks to a human power that, though damaged, can still engage.

from The Crosses (V)

Cross my fingers, cross my heart,

arms extended, legs together, not apart,

I make of myself a cross.

In my pockets bright blue beads,

small clay gods, scarabs,

four-leaf clovers, bejewelled mezuzahs.

In my hat cockleshells

to exorcize the demons,

to keep hidden the seventh chakra,

the tonsure, the bald compulsion.

Cross my fingers, cross my heart,

arms extended, legs together, not apart.

In my ears little bells of confusion,

to frighten away eyes of the evil.

On my breast a foul sachet

to repel the lick of the Devil.

Cross my fingers, cross my heart.

In my window a glass witch ball

to guard against the shatter

from intruders.

Cross my fingers.

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Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler

Juan Felipe Herrera

University of Arizona Press, 2002

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections—a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.

Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists—"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"—that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."

Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue—and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.

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The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Harvard University Press, 2009

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.

Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.

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Nothing but the Blood

Laura Apol

Michigan State University Press, 2018

This collection is made up of poems that explore the evolution of belief, living in the body, daughter-mother and mother-daughter interactions, the celebration and failure of a longterm relationship, and the loss of friends and colleagues. Coming as they do at mid-life, the poems understand, appreciate, and often push back against the weight of both history and expectation.

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Nothingism

Poetry at the End of Print Culture

Jason Schneiderman

University of Michigan Press, 2025

What is the internet doing to poetry? Good question! In Nothingism, Jason Schneiderman grapples with the way that digital culture has begun to reshape America’s poetry landscape, examining this profound shift in the way that poetry is written, read, and taught. He dives into the history of the poetic line and how previous media (oral, manuscript, print) have shaped our understanding of exactly what a poem is. In considering the transformations of poetry in the digital age, he finds that the transition from print to digital culture mirrors the earlier transition from manuscript to print culture.

In this collection, the essays range from blistering manifesto to deep historical dives to gentle classroom guidance to considerations of the poets of James Merrill and Agha Shahid Ali, moving between the theoretical and the practical. Nothingism is both deeply personal and highly erudite, providing an engaging and scholarly account of reading, writing, and teaching poetry as our world continues its unsupervised lurch toward digital culture.

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Novas

Selected Writings

Haroldo de Campos

Northwestern University Press, 2007

The first full-scale English translation of one of Brazil's-and the world's-most influential avant-garde literary voices

A generous introduction to one of the key literary figures to emerge from Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, this book offers English-speaking readers an ample selection of this prodigious writer's celebrated poetry and widely influential critical work. As a poet and as a cofounder of the renowned group Noigandres, Haroldo de Campos has made a unique and substantial contribution to the theory and practice of experimental writing, particularly the form known as concrete poetry, and to the Latin American avant-garde as a whole. These contributions, acclaimed worldwide by figures such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, can be observed unfolding here, first in poetry selections ranging from de Campos' early work before concretism through his most recent production; then in theoretical texts that trace his evolution as a critic from an early interest in baroque and modernist writers to his development of an innovative model for reading, translating, and writing. This second, critical section of the book includes de Campos' encounters with the tasks of translating and reading some of the most important texts of Eastern and Western culture-from Ecclesiastes to the No play Hagoromo, from Dante to Paz-thus charting a genealogy of modern literature.

Together, these poems and critical writings afford English-speaking readers their first sustained exposure to a unique personality within the international avant-garde, a writer described by Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto as "that wonderful thing: / a poet and a translator who came to literature armed with an enviable / knowledge of the literary phenomenon."

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Now, Now

Jennifer Maier

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

In Now, Now, Jennifer Maier's second poetry collection, time is of the essence.

Moving with quantum ease through the porous membranes of the past, present, and future, the speaker wonders: What is each moment but the swirling confluence (or shy first meeting) of past and future—of what happened, and what-has-not-yet-happened but will?

Such phenomenological questions are sparked by ordinary events: a friend's passion for jigsaw puzzles; an imagined conversation with a neighbor's dog; a meditation on the uses of modern poetry. Here, in language at once elegant and agile, intimate and universal, the author probes beneath the surface of happenstance, moving with depth, humor, and compassion into the heart of our shared predicament: that of loving what we cannot keep.

But if time in these poems is relative, it bends toward grace—even, as the title suggests, towards consolation. Taken together, the poems invite us to raise a glass to the way we're each "held light and golden in Time's mouth," and to savor something of the eternal—distilled, sparkling, already lost—inside every now.

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The Now

Poems

Albert Godbarth

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous "technology culture," even as it's a time when the urge to memorialize the past—to sing elegiacally—seems more important than ever.
Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in time: the ever-shifting "now."

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Now that the audience is assembled

David Grubbs

Duke University Press, 2018

Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music.

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Now We're Getting Somewhere

David Clewell

University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

David Clewell’s graceful, honest lines accumulate and remind us that poems can be as tangible, as substantial, as redemptive as those things the poet will not let go unspoken in the world. His compassionate witness is born out of immersion in doggedly bittersweet particulars: the cockeyed wisdom of 1950s science fiction movies; Do Not Disturb signs; vegetarian physics; the perils of bed-and-breakfast lodging; flying saucer disciples; what to do in case of Rapture; Debbie Fuller, reluctant childhood angel; the theory and practice of Spontaneous Human Combustion. His passionate transformation of that raw data into song—no matter how fragile or raucous—provides irrefutable testimony about the consequences of being nothing less than human, where “every day someone crawls out of his ocean of sleep / and takes those first tottering steps on the planet again, / he’s playing with real fire.” And with Clewell’s insistence on the unlikely grace in that condition, along with the generosity of his unabashed inclusiveness, his poetry is a powerful antidote to the bad medicine we‘re too often asked to swallow.
This is a book of sustenance, of fresh assurances that come to us—ready or not—out of the blue of this spirited poet’s most engaging work yet.

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Now You're the Enemy

Poems

James Allen Hall

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

2009 Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award; Finalist for the 2008 Independent Booksellers’ Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award; co-winner in the gay poetry category from Lambda Book Awards.

A family in the aftermath of violence These raw and powerful poems have at their heart the charged, archetypal figure of the mother. Conflicted by the twin desires of self-destruction and self-preservation, this mother is both terrible and beautiful. This compassionate, nervy collection of poems shows a family in the aftermath of violence. James Allen Hall explores themes of loss, the intersection of grief and desire, and the ways in which history, art, and politics shape the self. We meet the speaker's mother in many guises-she is the rogue Republic of Texas, the titular character of Rosemary's Baby, a nineteenth century artist's model, a fake entry in an encyclopedia, the lost queen of King Lear. With clarity, wit, and compassion, the speaker discovers the facets of his mother-her own abuse, her years of adultery, her struggle to remain independent-so that he may come to terms with his own sexuality. By seeing his mother in these guises, the speaker understands identity as it develops along and is reclaimed from the most repressive of social margins. Hall's poems twine the autobiographical impulse with a deeper emotional, somewhat surreal, temperament. This is a book as much about the way we tell our stories as it is about the stories we tell. Now You're the Enemy negotiates narrative in order to refashion the self-as a way to survive, to learn the redemptive power of love.

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Nowhere to Arrive

Poems

Jenny Xie, foreword by Chris Abani

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as illusory. They look plainly at the startling strangeness of varied landscapes and mindscapes, and interrogate a state of unrootedness—one thrown into relief by the speaker's years abroad in Southeast Asia.

At the chapbook's center are two long poems, titled "Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season" and "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season," that examine the escapist narratives that draw tourists and expatriates to Cambodia, and the speaker’s own privileged positioning.

On a formal level, the poems in Nowhere to Arrive make room for the unsaid and that which cannot be articulated. Here, we have a vocabulary of silence alongside stark imagistic juxtapositions, poems that celebrate compression and the force of paratactic constructions. Attentiveness and concentration emerge as virtues, as the speaker surveys the vast territory of the present with a wakeful gaze.

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Nowhere Was a Lake

Margaret Draft

Four Way Books, 2024

Captivated by the simultaneously routine and disruptive nature of violence and desire, Nowhere Was a Lake marks a luminous debut from poet Margaret Draft. “What do you do when a horse dies? / You hollow out the land, // you try to make enough space, / and when you think you have enough, // keep digging.” In these poems, our own tenderness endangers us, and yet — when faced with the enormity of our hunger, an appetite that proclaims both the bounty of nourishment and our capacity for loss — Draft keeps digging. “He said this because // he himself had to enter the hole / with the horse and shovel, // shift the legs, reposition the head.” The speaker here has an unflinching pragmatism, a characteristic that paradoxically makes her emotions all the more tangible. This is how you prospect a grave, she seems to say, but you’ll be in it, too. You with your body among the other bodies. Draft rejects simple binaries, insisting that oblivion can be a place, that fidelity and betrayal can coexist in our most intimate relationships, that to live as a human animal means embodying both hunter and prey. Deft in its exploration of female sexuality, the emotional complexity of polyamory, and the distinction between freedom and abandonment, Nowhere Was a Lake mesmerizes with its erotic pastorals and frank prose poems. “Edge” interrogates “the dialectic of trust” structuring romantic relationships and negotiated through sexual physics: “It is not a question of whether you will / harm me, but whether you will / stick around long enough / to hold me when I am harmed.” The risk and reward of such exploration is uncertainty: anything could happen, but anything could happen. “In no place, going someplace, I know. / There are so few things I can say I know definitively. // But this must be the definition of plenty. / The sun slowly setting over the valley.” And, yes, love may wend through the field as we thresh it. And, yes, we are in the light as it goes down.

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Nude Descending an Empire

Sam Taylor

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.

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