The Vital System is the first published book by a poet already setting off sparks among readers across the globe. In these poems, the body is always at stake — vulnerable — and the poet dares to try and illuminate what she has called “the protective capability of violence.” Burroughs’s compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.

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

Juliet Rodeman creates a visionary world in which the here and now—each remembered place, historical or mythical landscape, and moment alive with casual gesture—is redeemed by intimacy. Whimsical and sometimes shocking, these poems are filled with the heartbreak of what happens to our bodies. In a series of “anticipatory elegies” the poet journeys to the Underworld, moving through incantations and harmonies, hypnogogic terrors and quiet conversations under the stars, transforming individual grief with tenderness.