Revised and enlarged, the second edition of Sappho to Valéry includes both the originals and translations of ninety-eight poems from nine different languages. Nims offers new and lively interpretations of a number of poems that have been translated and others available in no other English translation.

A former editor of Poetry, John Frederick Nims has published several volumes of his own poetry, poetry in translation, and essays on the form.

Long before Europeans came to America, the Aztecs created a unique culture based on myth and a love of language. Myths and poems were an important part of their culture, and a successful speech by a royal orator was pronounced "a great scattering of jades." A Scattering of Jades is an anthology of the best of Aztec literature, compiled by a noted anthropologist and a skilled translator of Nahuatl. It is a storehouse of myths, narratives, poems, and proverbs—as well as prayers and songs to the Aztec gods that provide insight into how these people's perception of the cosmos drove their military machine. Featuring a translation of the Mexicayotl—a work as important today for Mexico's concept of nationhood and ideology as it was at the time of the Conquest—these selections eloquently depict the everyday life of this ancient people and their unique worldview. A Scattering of Jades is an unsurpassed window on ancient Mesoamerican civilization and an essential companion for anyone studying Aztec history, religion, or culture.

From his earliest days on Long Island and in New York City to his last years in Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman lived close to the sea he knew and loved. The “liquid-flowing syllables” of Whitman’s poetry and prose tell specific stories of particular voyages and known shores, as well as vivid flights of imagination and keening paeans to wild winds, dark water, stormy and quiet airs. The land, for Whitman, is both immutable and still, while the sea is a realm of dynamic change, mercurial temper, and the ebb and flow of cosmic uncertainty. From “Mannahatta” to “Poem of Joys” to the magisterial ode to the slain President Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” Whitman wove the strands of nautical lexicon and powerful imagery into the tapestry of our national literature. In The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, poet and editor Jeffrey Yang has compiled an invaluable resource for readers, students, and scholars of Whitman, and demonstrates how seeing him through sea glass shows America’s best-loved poet in a new light.

An acclaimed novelist, essayist, memoirist, and translator, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has written that she began writing "before [she] knew about the strictures of literary genres: poem, story, essay." What she wrote as a child was "poetic speculation . . . partaking of all the genres and bounded by none." It is not surprising, then, that her facility with, and love of, language and speculation are on display in her new collection of poetry, See You in the Dark. 

Despite her indifference to genre, Schwartz takes a profound delight in poetic forms, appropriating the sonnet, the prose poem, and the envoi. She brings an easygoing musicality to her work, which ranges from parodic translations of Verlaine to instructions for making the perfect soup to a meditation on an Ecstasy trip. No artificial line between high and low culture divides Schwartz's world: she is equally intrigued by the metaphor of gardening, the work of artist Jenny Holzer, the bandits Frank and Jesse James (maybe distant relatives of Henry and William?), and the unintentional poetry of Craigslist's "missed connection" section. 

Filled with wisdom, humor, and deep insight, See You in the Dark is poetry for readers not bounded by genre.

Winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

“Shows this exceptional poet at his rhyming best.”

—Billy Collins

Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror presents the mirror that reflects not always what is, but what is desired, or not desired. In the opening poem, the speaker, Diane Arbus, looks at her very early pregnant self and asks, “Why would I bring you into this world?” This book answers that question, or tries to: the world is what it is as we try to live as our best selves in that world. But that knowledge of the world is hard and has consequences, and not in the abstract, as Gibson’s poetry dynamically shows.

Employing new formalism, Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror examines historical, familial, and personal pasts as those pasts continue into the present, reminding us, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS,Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity—one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, “What’s the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil’s image?”

“Shapes of Memory Loss” is a collection of poetry, fiction, and narrative written by and about people with cognitive impairment or dementia. The authors, all affiliated with the University of Michigan Health System, come forward to share their personal experience as they “navigate this unknown territory”. These pieces offer the reader a view into the often isolated and not fully understood journey that those with memory loss and cognitive impairment are on. The book serves as an educational and support tool for anyone who has been touched by dementia, memory loss, and other related disorders. Healthcare professionals will gain information and insight about these disorders presented from the perspective of patients and families affected by them.

Winner, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

“We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness . . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
—Billy Collins

Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

In the world of cowboy poetry, no poet is better known or more widely appreciated than Bruce Kiskaddon. Though he died in 1950 his poems have been at the forefront of the cowboy poetry revival that began in the 1980s and have been reprinted frequently in published collections and anthologies. What is less known is that Kiskaddon during his lifetime also published stories. These humorous, realistic prose sketches of cowboy life were almost lost, but they are in their own right gems of literary Americana on a par with the poems. Originally published in the Western Livestock Journal between 1932 and 1939, the short stories drew on Kiskaddon's own experience of ranching in the Southwest and Australia to portray real life on the range. Bill Siems has recovered these stories and compiled and introduced them in this new collection, to which he has added a selection of Kiskaddon's poems and the original drawings that accompanied them, by Katherine Field, a fine, underappreciated western artist.

Set in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, the stories are a loosely tied string of old timer's yarns with a continuing cast of engaging characters, whom Kiskaddon avoids reducing to cowboy stereotypes. They include, as Siems describes them, "Kiskaddon himself as the character Shorty. As a common waddy with a small man's feistiness and a young man's mischief, Shorty encounters the wicked world with a succession of companions: Bill, high-headed and a bit of an outlaw; Rildy Briggs, untamable and unstoppable young cowgirl; and Ike, an old-fashioned dandy and 'a very fortunate person.' More or less in the background is the Boss-actually a series of Bosses-generally affectionately respected as long as he remains democratic in his dealings with the waddies. Buffoonery is provided by a succession of pompous characters, from townspeople who look down their noses on wild, unwashed waddies to professors from the East who have read books on how ranches should be run."

In Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the “environment” of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, Baker looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, he takes joy in reading individual poems—from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.

In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order. Throughout, Shaw ponders the human frailties and strengths that continue to characterize us, with glances at the stresses of these millennial times that now test our mettle and jar our complacency. Often touched with humor, his perceptions are grounded in devoted observation of the changing world.

As in his previous collections, Shaw in these poems unites conversational vigor with finely crafted metrical lines. Final judge Rachel Hadas says it best: “Solving for X is droll and puzzled, elegiac and satirical in equal measure. Shaw’s attention alights on a variety of more and less tangible things—a seed catalog, a shirt, a bad book, a request for a letter of recommendation, an irritating colleagues’s death—which his masterfully packed lines then proceed to light up with deliberate and unforgettable authority.”

A vivid and insightful look at the culture and terrain of Antarctica, as well as the people who choose to live and work there, South × South celebrates and explores life at the extreme edge of our planet. Blending travel narrative, historical research, and the surprises of magical realism, Hood presents life in Antarctica and the history of polar aviation as both a miracle of achievement yet also as a way to understand humanity’s longing to be creatures of the heavens as well as the earth. South × South is poetry at its most inventive and surprising, insisting that the world is stranger and more glorious than we ever might have guessed.

These lyrical poems about growing up and becoming a parent in Detroit reflect deeply felt connections to places and experiences that inevitably fall victim to irrevocable change. Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard’s attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile. Here, a mansion may contrast with a burned-out home just up the street. How does one construct a sense of place in such a landscape, where once-familiar neighborhoods turn to strip malls or empty lots and the relationships that root us dissolve? Sprawl suggests that there is solace in recognizing that when we ask this question, we are never alone in asking. Within the larger geographical space of the metropolis are the in-between places of personal significance: the gas stations, burger joints, malls, and parking lots where many of the defining moments of ordinary lives occur. These poems take deep inspiration from such places, insisting on the value of the people found there, along with their experiences. What might be considered high and low culture are as inextricably linked in the formal cues of the poems as they are in the Michigan landscape, influenced by pop music, midcentury modern aesthetics, comic books, and cars. While the sprawl of the title refers to the seemingly endless succession of businesses and neighborhoods extending north from Detroit (“a sprawl this extensive breeds / empty pockets”), it also invokes the sprawl of history through poems that move between the past and present. One sequence of poems built on old newspaper clippings draws attention to a Chrysler plant that once constructed Redstone missiles. Elsewhere, two poems refer to the Detroit newspaper strike of the 1990s, a local controversy with lasting implications for the community. Sprawl ultimately illuminates the relationship of one place to other places, contextualizing its characters and locales within a wider societal frame.

Gary Fincke’s new collection is a poetry grounded in memorable places and characters. He wants readers to remember the voices they hear in the poems, the work the characters do, the families they have, the things they believe in and strive to live up to. There is also a sense of the larger world layered into nearly every poem—history, politics, science, culture. Here too are poems about the mysteries of adolescence, capturing moments of youthful dreaming and wishing. Told in a confiding tone, these are very accessible and inviting poems about the way we redeem ourselves daily, a poetry that, as distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch put it, “memorializes the past and honors the life lived.”

These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as “a passage from sawdust to stardust.” Yet after her death she has barely been remembered.

Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer’s consummate formal control and stunning lyricism.

The poems in Brandon Dean Lamson's first volume, Starship Tahiti, explore imprisoned bodies and the tension between captivity and imagination. Beginning on Rikers Island, the book traces a creation myth in reverse, moving from prison to the spacious arches of Grand Central Station to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

Lamson examines themes of violence, gender, and identity in various real and imagined settings where inmates read Antigone, Howlin' Wolf sings in a black barbershop, and Metallica records burn on a Viking altar. Throughout these shifts, the poems construct fractured narratives that subvert linear storytelling. The layering of voice and imagery in this collection transgresses boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and between the communal and the personal. As the speaker of "Portland Bardo" says, "The fragile, in between state of larvae hatching / is no less desirable than full bloom in a city of roses, if such a city can ever be found."

In his second collection of poems, Daniel Donaghy uses the power of poetry to connect the Kensington section of Philadelphia he knew as a boy––a place replete with crime, poverty, fractured families, and various other kinds of darkness––to upstate New York’s woods, rural Connecticut’s town greens and small churches, Vancouver’s back alleys, the killing ground of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Kiowa County, Colorado, and the shores of ancient Greece. In doing so, he examines the relationship between memory and identity and strives to give voice to those who might otherwise be forgotten by history. Start with the Trouble is the place of fist fights and first kisses, where we sit beside the dying and where we sing to those not yet born. It is where Michelangelo’s Pieta recreates itself on a Kensington sidewalk, where a mother watches helplessly as two older boys dangle her son from the roof of a building, where a prostitute writes poems between tricks before she disappears without a trace. It is where Bruce Springsteen goes back in time to woo Circe and the Sirens, where a father returns from the dead in the voice of Babe Ruth, where a mother’s spirit rises from the shadows of spruce trees, where Santa forsakes his reindeer and slides into town behind sled dogs. It is where simple gestures such as opening a car trunk or loading a wheelbarrow become portals into faraway, nightmarish worlds in which the young are forced to bear too much witness to the world. Start with the Trouble is a place where beauty exists amidst every kind of ugliness, and where that beauty is made even more precious because of the depths from which it rises.

"David Ferry must have had something up his sleeve when he called his book "Strangers," because his is a poetry of intimacy and familiarity. More than that, Mr. Ferry's short, sparse lyrics are as perfectly and simply composed as Japanese haiku—a rare accomplishment in poetry written in English."—Andy Brumer, New York Times Book Review

"Strangers is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way."—Boston Globe

"The poems of David Ferry's Strangers are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is the same austere and poignant voice throughout, asking the unanswerable things, speaking of all that is withheld from us, confronting the unknownness that dwells even in the familiar and dear. Painful and touching, the book offers a distinctive vision which is at the same time inescapably true."—Richard Wilbur

A Sunday in God-Years takes its title from the notion that if we consider ourselves inside the long stretch of geologic time, human history happens in the blink of God’s eye as he rolls over during a Sunday nap. The book is centered around the long poem “A Reckoning” made up of fifteen shorter poems/sections (some sections are documents like wills and runaway slave notices). This long poem tries to reckon and recognize the sticky webs that bind the heirs of those who were slave holders (like the Boisseaus) and of those who were held as slaves.

“A Reckoning” builds the context for the rest of the book which, among other things, looks through the metaphors from geology to confront the historic and personal: Boisseau’s paternal ancestors fled religious persecution in France in 1685 and soon after their arrival in Virginia became entangled in slave ownership. When one looks on human history through the lens of geologic time, when one shifts the scale from the now and near to the distant, and takes a sky-perch, like God, some fascinating things begins to happens. Looking down on us from a satellite, from a conjectural place in deeper spaces from which our cameras have never looked, or from a moment long before humans ventured from trees, human history is thrillingly diminished and immediate human compassion becomes essential as air.

In The Surface of the Lit World, Shane Seely draws on a wide range of sources—from personal memory to biblical narrative—to explore the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ways in which we make meaning of our lives. Seely delves into the ways in which family and environment shape us. Poems ranging from terse, meditative lyrics to more direct narratives examine the relationship between what lies visible on the lit surface and what lies just beneath.

In addition to first-person autobiographical narratives, there are ekphrastic poems; poems that explore narratives from mythology and religion; and poems based on news reports, radio stories, and audio recordings. Regardless of the approach, the central questions are the same: How do we sense the world we live in? What do the institutions to which we turn for meaning—family, religion, art, literature, science—offer us, and in what ways do they fail us? The answers may depend on where we dare to look.

This powerful companion to 2021’s Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is truly a survivor’s notebook, using the tools of memoir to evoke the ways in which disaster can constellate our past, present, and future.

In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O’Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, “how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be.” In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, revisiting Ireland, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems, as he awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love.

Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere” now.

"This music of Place, with all its varied and subtle emotional range, is what this book so marvelously captures. . . ." --Linda Pastan