Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, the poems in Tender Machines swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance. Mapping the lives of women and the lives they inhabit, poems such as “Small Essays on Disappearance,”—which channel the aftermath of motherhood and 9-11—collide with aubades describing mornings in a ruined city: “buying food at the bodegas…nectarines and skin-tight plums.” The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. This is an intersectional portrait of womanhood with all its losses, departures and wonders.

A radiant, bravely reflective new book by a poet loved for poems that sing like psalms as they confront the challenges of persisting through time. Following her award-winning volume Duties of the Spirit (also available from Tupelo Press), the recently retired Poet Laureate of New Hampshire reaches further and delves deeper than ever in Then, Something.

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.

One of America’s most acclaimed younger poets entwines original and scavenged texts, lyric fragment and lyric song, to make a new form—this book—from wild metaphor. A passerine is a bird of the taxonomic order Passeriformes, often called “songbirds” or “perching birds.” The passerines are among the most diverse of terrestrial vertebrates, and in his book-length canticle—both aria and elegy—the poet sings like a modern-day St. Francis to the wonder of creation in its splendor and peril.

Journalist and armchair thrill-seeker Jan Richman gets a freelance assignment to write about the nation’s old-fashioned wooden roller coasters. Jan takes off across the U.S. to report on a fanatical sub-culture. This picaresque research junket dovetails with the wedding of her Tourette’s-riddled father, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Brazen and stingingly funny, Thrill-Bent zooms from Coney Island to New Orleans to the San Fernando Valley as our heroine learns how to be truly impulsive in a buttoned-down world.

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

Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.

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.