front cover of Salvage
Salvage
Poems
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Northwestern University Press, 2018
How do we transform the wreckage of our identities? Cynthia Dewi Oka’s evocative collection answers this question by brimming with what we salvage from our most deep-seated battles. Reflecting the many dimensions of the poet’s life, Salvage manifests an intermixture of aesthetic forms that encompasses multiple social, political, and cultural contexts—leading readers to Bali, Indonesia, to the Pacific Northwest, and to South Jersey and Philadelphia.

Throughout it insistently interrogates what it means to reach for our humanity through the guises of nation, race, and gender. Oka’s language transports us through the many bodies of fluid poetics that inhabit our migrating senses and permeate across generations into a personal diaspora. Salvage invites us to be without borders.
[more]

front cover of Sand Theory
Sand Theory
Poems
William Olsen
Northwestern University Press, 2011
The poems in Sand Theory, William Olsen’s fifth collection to date, bristle with intellect, sensitivity, and ambition. Engaging poets from William Blake to Theodore Roethke, Olsen takes aim at grand questions of spirituality, the instability of meaning, and the individual’s relationship with the natural world. Yet Olsen’s lithe and sinuous poems wear their metaphysical concerns lightly, shifting easily between the immediate perceptions of a passing moment and observations offered as if from a great distance, outside of time and space. 

The energy of Olsen’s poems is generated by his ability to meld the intellectual and the emotional, the abstract and the concrete, into a seamless whole while maintaining a sense of wit and playfulness. Sand Theory cements Olsen’s standing as one of the most vital poets writing today, an audacious chronicler of “the supremely open moment.”
[more]

front cover of Sappho to Valéry
Sappho to Valéry
Poems in Translation
John Frederick Nims
University of Arkansas Press, 1990

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.

[more]

front cover of The Scarlet Ibis
The Scarlet Ibis
Poems
Susan Hahn
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In The Scarlet Ibis, Susan Hahn has created an intricately structured sequence of interlinked poems centered around the single compelling image of the ibis. The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry.
 
bird trick iv
 
It’s all about disappearance.
 
About a bird in a cage
with a mirror, a simple twist
on the handle at the side
that makes it come and go
 
at the magician’s insistence.
 
It’s all about innocence.
It’s all about acceptance.
It’s all about compliance.
It’s all about deference.
It’s all about silence.
 
It’s all about disappearance.
[more]

front cover of A Scattering of Jades
A Scattering of Jades
Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs
Thelma D. Sullivan
University of Arizona Press, 2003
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.
[more]

front cover of The Sea Is a Continual Miracle
The Sea Is a Continual Miracle
Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
University Press of New England, 2017
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.
[more]

front cover of Second Story
Second Story
Poems
Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem “Terza Irma.” Throughout the book she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyperaware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. She writes odes to her favorite uncle—who was “green” before it was a hashtag—and Mother Nature via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America’s amnesia. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.
[more]

front cover of Secret History
Secret History
Poems
David Barber
Northwestern University Press, 2020

In David Barber’s third collection of poetry, the past makes its presence felt from first to last. Drawing on a wealth of eclectic sources and crafted in an array of nonce forms, these poems range across vast stretches of cultural and natural history in pursuit of the forsaken, long-gone, and unsung. 

Here is the stuff of lost time unearthed from all over: ballyhoo and murder ballad, the lacrimarium and the xylotheque, the Game of Robbers and the Indian Rope Trick, the obsolete o’o, the old-school word hoard, sunshowers and beaters and breaker boys. Here, to mark the twilight of print and type, are gleanings and borrowings from a mixed bag of throwback bound volumes: The Magic Moving Picture Book, Mandeville’s Travels, The Golden Bough, Franklin Arithmetic, The Millennial Laws of the Shakers, A Conjuror’s Confessions

Here too are guiding spirits whose like will not pass this way again: Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club; Henry Walter Bates in darkest Amazon; George Catlin among the Choctaw; Little Nemo in Slumberland; Yogi Berra in all his oracular glory. Reveling in vernacular lingo of every vintage even while brooding on dark ages without end, Secret History chronicles a world of long shadows and distant echoes that bears more than a passing resemblance to our own.

[more]

front cover of See You in the Dark
See You in the Dark
Poems
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Northwestern University Press, 2012
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.
[more]

front cover of See You Soon
See You Soon
Poems
Laura McKee
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Finalist, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

The poems in See You Soon explore the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity—at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Its message is the invitation of the title. See You Soon is a statement of the complexity of our mutual direction in time, of camaraderie along the way.

[more]

front cover of The Selected Shepherd
The Selected Shepherd
Poems
Reginald Shepherd
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry. 
[more]

front cover of Self-Mythology
Self-Mythology
Poems
Saba Keramati
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.
[more]

front cover of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror
Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror
Poems
Stephen Gibson
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
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.”

[more]

front cover of September
September
Poems
Rachel Jamison Webster
Northwestern University Press, 2013

The poems in Rachel Webster’s debut collection Septem­ber often address a fleeting moment. Like the month, the moment can be a single leaf falling or a season of life. Webster’s pastoral poems address personal physical change in the seasons of life, including childhood, love, motherhood, and death. Together they lead the reader through a lyrical landscape of conversation, meditation, and healing. The work of a poet sensitive to worlds ex­ternal and internal, September speaks to the core of life and the simplicity of human events and the natural world around us.

[more]

front cover of Sex Depression Animals
Sex Depression Animals
Poems
Mag Gabbert
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
 “This bewitching debut delivers everything the title promises and more.” —Electric Literature

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?”
[more]

front cover of The Shapes of Memory Loss
The Shapes of Memory Loss
Stories, Poems and Essays from the University of Michigan Medical School and Health System
nan Barbas
Michigan Publishing Services, 2013
“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.
[more]

front cover of The Shared World
The Shared World
Poems
Vievee Francis
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.”

Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”

[more]

logo for Seagull Books
Shining Sheep
Poems
Ulrike Almut Sandig
Seagull Books, 2024
A collection of vital, melancholic, elemental, and vibrantly contemporary poems.

In the beginning, was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.
[more]

front cover of A Short History of Monsters
A Short History of Monsters
Poems
Jose Padua
University of Arkansas Press, 2019

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.

[more]

front cover of Shorty's Yarns
Shorty's Yarns
Western Stories and Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon
edited by Bill Siems, illustrations by Katherine Field
Utah State University Press, 2004
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."
[more]

front cover of Show Me Your Environment
Show Me Your Environment
Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems
David Baker
University of Michigan Press, 2014

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, he looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, Baker takes joy in reading individual poems—from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.

[more]

front cover of The Sky Watched
The Sky Watched
Poems of Ojibwe Lives
Linda LeGarde Grover
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A collective memoir in poetry of an Ojibwe family and tribal community, from creation myth to this day, updated with new poems
 

Reaching from the moment of creation to the cry of a newborn, The Sky Watched gives poetic voice to Ojibwe family life. In English and Ojibwe, those assembled here—voices of history, of memory and experience, of children and elders, Indian boarding school students, tribal storytellers, and the Manidoog, the unseen beings who surround our lives—come together to create a collective memoir in poetry as expansive and particular as the starry sky.

This world unfolds in the manner of traditional Ojibwe storytelling, shaped by the seasons and the stages of life, marking the significance of the number four in the Ojibwe worldview. Summoning spiritual and natural lore, award-winning poet and scholar Linda LeGarde Grover follows the story of a family, a tribe, and a people through historical ruptures and through intimate troubles and joys—from the sundering of Ojibwe people from their land and culture to singular horrors like the massacre at Wounded Knee to personal trauma suffered at Indian boarding schools. Threaded throughout are the tribal traditions and knowledge that sustain a family and a people through hardship and turmoil, passed from generation to generation, coming together in the manifold power and beauty of the poet’s voice.

[more]

front cover of Solving For X
Solving For X
Poems
Robert B. Shaw
Ohio University Press, 2002

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.”

[more]

front cover of Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone
Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone
Poems
Thiahera Nurse
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Thiahera Nurse’s Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of Nurse’s poetry functions equally as underworld and imagined heaven.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone sees Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Korrynn Gaines, and others not as ornamental nor does the book attempt to canonize the dead women as saints. The poems see them as they are: play-cousins, home-girls, the mirror. Line to line, there is an obsession with keeping all of the women in the poems safe and perhaps resurrectable. The black girl who is alive here lives to switch her waistline to a reggae beat. She is in the middle of the dance floor with a suicide note in her purse as a means of warding off bad juju. Always, she is chasing joy head-on, at warp speed.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is a celebration that the black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother’s funeral repast—she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.
[more]

front cover of Some Glad Morning
Some Glad Morning
Poems
Barbara Crooker
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Longlist, 2019 Julie Suk Prize for best poetry book published by a literary press

Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, Darryl Dawkins (late NBA star), saltine crackers.  While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.
[more]

front cover of Sound Fury
Sound Fury
Poems
Mark Levine
University of Iowa Press, 2022
Throughout Sound Fury, poems by metaphysician Robert Herrick are refashioned into phantasmagorical oddities of likeness and difference. Figures from the fringes of popular imagination—Zane Grey, Robinson Crusoe, Porfirio Díaz—surface as cobbled-together avatars on the theme of identity. Brilliantly asserting the necessity of humane and resistant modes of speech against the vapid sounds and enforced silences of orthodoxy, Sound Fury finds the poet “Now, in our former state/ In our current one/ In stately procession,” venturing forth in a world “where things of questionable being go.”
[more]

front cover of Soundless Roar
Soundless Roar
Stories, Poems, and Drawings
Ava Kadishson Schieber
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Soundless Roar introduces a distinctive new voice to Holocaust literature. Ava Kadishson Schieber, author, poet, and artist, spent her teenage years hiding from the Nazis on a Serbian farm. Her cultured speech and city-bred body language could have betrayed her, so she was forced into near isolation. Schieber began drawing while in hiding, and she continues to express herself today with the same urgency. The drawings and writings in Soundless Roar are the culmination of many years of artistry. In her work, she shares her memories of loved ones killed in the Holocaust: they are "friendly ghosts" that will always be a part of her.

Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another. Her experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes Schieber's stories. In her preface, Phyllis Lassner writes: "The timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."
[more]

front cover of South × South
South × South
Poems from Antarctica
Charles Hood
Ohio University Press, 2013

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.

[more]

front cover of Spilled and Gone
Spilled and Gone
Poems
Jessica Greenbaum
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."
At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture. 
[more]

front cover of Sprawl
Sprawl
Poems
Andrew Collard
Ohio University Press, 2023
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.
[more]

front cover of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)
Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)
Poems
Judy Halebsky
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

[more]

front cover of Standing around the Heart
Standing around the Heart
Poems
Gary Fincke
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
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.”
[more]

front cover of Stars at Noon
Stars at Noon
Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
Enid Shomer
University of Arkansas Press, 2001

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.

[more]

front cover of Starship Tahiti
Starship Tahiti
Poems
Brandon Dean Lamson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
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."
[more]

front cover of Start with the Trouble
Start with the Trouble
Poems
Daniel Donaghy
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
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.
[more]

front cover of Stateside
Stateside
Poems
Jehanne Dubrow
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Winner, 2012 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America
Winner, Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council
First Prize, Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience (for three poems from her manuscript-in-progress, "The Arranged Marriage")

Although the poems in Stateside are concerned with a husband's deployment to the war in Iraq, Jehanne Dubrow's riveting collection is driven more by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration than by any overt political agenda. The speaker in these poems attempts to understand her situation within the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder – Penelope is a model, but also a source of mystery. These poems are dazzling in their use of form, their sensual imagery, and their learnedness, and possess a level of subtlety and control rarely found in the work of a young poet. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war, but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress.

[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
Still City
Poems
Oksana Maksymchuk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
tk
[more]

front cover of Stop Lying
Stop Lying
Poems
Aaron Smith
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of Smith’s mother and how the poet, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. How does one grieve when a relationship will forever remain unresolved? What does it mean to both regret and not regret one’s decisions? What if survival doesn’t look like what we're told it should? This is the story of a poet pushing through present-day grief and the shame of the past to find the buried truths, the ones that are hardest to tell.  
[more]

front cover of The Story They Told Us of Light
The Story They Told Us of Light
Poems
Rodney Jones
University of Alabama Press, 1980
Jones has a lyrical mind and meanders through memory and imagination in his poems, fusing them and making them work to surprise the reader with intriguing and challenging images. The collection builds beautifully, each section nurturing the others, and all of it displays Jones’s fine talent—keenly intelligent, human, and compassionate. His quick, splendid sense of humor surprises the reader, playing one image off another that is seemingly unrelated to the first, yet achieving a sense of rightness in poem after poem.
[more]

front cover of Strangers
Strangers
A Book of Poems
David Ferry
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"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
[more]

front cover of Stranger's Notebook
Stranger's Notebook
Poems
Nomi Stone
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa. According to their story of origin, a handful of exiles arrived on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, in 586 B.C., carrying a single stone from the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Drawing from this cosmology, the poems follow a stranger who arrives into an ancient community that is both at home and deeply estranged on the island. Its people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. The poems are about the daily lives and deeper cosmos of the Jews of Djerba as well as the Muslims next door. In her exploration, Stone sees vivid recurring images of keys, stones, homes, the laughter of girls, the eyes of men, the color blue, and the force of blood or bombs. With this journey of faith, doubt, longing, and home, Stone has brought readers a rare look into a story that resonates powerfully with questions of cultural preservation and coexistence.

[more]

front cover of Strip
Strip
Poems
Jessica Abughattas
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, Jessica Abughattas’s Strip is a captivating debut about desire and dispossession and that tireless poetic metaphor—the body. Audacious and clear-eyed, plainspoken and brassy, Abughattas’s poems are songs that break free from confinement as they span the globe from Hollywood to Palestine.

“The mystery that Abughattas composes is always moving toward an impossible freeing of the self from its numerous frames. Yet frame by frame . . . she suspends our disbelief, catalogs those potentialities in an America always ready to shoot, direct, and produce the film of itself. Strip is ‘in love with possibility,’ ‘in praise of here I am, here I’ve been,’ USA style. Strip celebrates the body—its rise and fall, ebb and flow, in a carnival of parties—restlessly, shamelessly, searching for a way out…. Even as Abughattas claims that ‘I can’t believe sometimes I have a body,’ her poems teem with an awareness of the body’s unavoidable centrality in our lives—in how we view our lives, and how others view them; in how they progress, and how they end; in how they become meaningful, and how they are stripped of meaning. And no stripping escapes memory. Whether in terms of dispossession or sexuality, admiration or pity, Abughattas renders her treatment of the body with candor and poignancy. . . . The most startling moments in Abughattas’s poems, however, depend not on shocking or intimate details—but on the ‘I’ pulling away from the self, abandoning the ego, and gazing outward. She tries to see something else, to escape the body’s restraints.”
—Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, from the Preface
[more]

front cover of A Sunday in God-Years
A Sunday in God-Years
Poems
Michelle Boisseau
University of Arkansas Press, 2009

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.

[more]

front cover of The Surface of the Lit World
The Surface of the Lit World
Poems
Shane Seely
Ohio University Press, 2015

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.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sur’s Ocean
Poems from the Early Tradition
Surdas
Harvard University Press, 2015

Surdas has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Old Hindi religious poetry from the end of the sixteenth century, when he lived, to the present day. His fame rests upon his remarkable refashioning of the widely known narrative of the cowherd deity Krishna and his lover Radha into lyrics that are at once elegant and approachable. Surdas’s popularity led to the proliferation, through an energetic oral tradition, of poems ascribed to him, known as the Sūrsāgar.

Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition presents a dramatically new edition in Devanagari script and a lyrical English translation. This remarkable volume reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas’s verse—the 433 poems that were known to the singers of Surdas’s own time as his. Here Surdas stands out with a clarity never before achieved.

The Murty Classical Library of India makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia in the most authoritative and accessible formats on offer anywhere.

[more]

front cover of Survivor's Notebook
Survivor's Notebook
Poems
Dan O'Brien
Acre Books, 2023
A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors.

Dan O’Brien’s powerful companion to 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 a true survivor’s notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how 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, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O’Brien 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.

With text and image, Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere” now.
[more]

front cover of Survivor's Notebook
Survivor's Notebook
Poems
Dan O’Brien
Acre Books, 2023
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.
[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
The Sweating Sickness
Poems
Rebecca Lehmann
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
a new collection of poetry from the author of the AWP Donald Hall Prize winning Ringer.
[more]

front cover of Sweet Home, Saturday Night
Sweet Home, Saturday Night
Poems
David Baker
University of Arkansas Press, 1991
"This music of Place, with all its varied and subtle emotional range, is what this book so marvelously captures. . . ." --Linda Pastan
[more]

front cover of Sweet Spot
Sweet Spot
Poems
J.T. Barbarese
Northwestern University Press, 2012

Classical deities and down-and-out junkies, high school sweethearts and the inner life of JFK—these are the coordinates of J.T. Barbarese’s terrain. The poems in Sweet Spot set up shop where average lived experience meets American history. Masterfully evokes both the specific land- and cityscapes of his poems as well the psychological types of the varied characters that populate them, Sweet Spot confirms Barbarese’s preeminence as a chronicler of the heroic everyday, the telling detail, the subtle reminders of the human predicament hidden in habit and memory.

[more]

front cover of A Sybil Society
A Sybil Society
Poems
Katherine Factor
University of Nevada Press, 2022
With fearless and playful language, Katherine Factor’s debut collection reveals agony, humor, and the necessary voices of the female oracle through time. The oracle’s message is apparent—she is not dead. Her words are cryptic but contemporary, offering caution along with guidance to a society interested only in using prophecy for profit. 

In a time when only a select few are prosperous, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth. The collection is fearless in the face of convention and gives readers a sense of devastating sorrow in a world gone mad.
[more]

front cover of Synthetic Jungle
Synthetic Jungle
Poems
Michael Chang
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A new poetry collection from award-winning author Michael Chang
 
A vital breath of life arrives in American poetry with Synthetic Jungle, the latest collection from acclaimed poet Michael Chang. With poems in a register both hilarious and scathing, Synthetic Jungle effortlessly bashes convention while simultaneously rebuilding the language we use to communicate our fears and joys.
 
Synthetic Jungle is a collection written by a brilliant jester who winks at you as you catch their every reference before sharing a laugh at your own self-satisfaction. Themes of identity, sexuality, and literacy play out in a dizzying rhythm of microtheaters. Readers will find themselves giggling, snorting, and guffawing their way through this work: whether at a repudiation of the literary landscape or a critique of a failing justice system, to laugh along with Chang is to recognize your mistakes and, ultimately, grow from them.
 
Fractal and kinetic in the quick-witted spirit of John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, Chang’s tender poems dance around, between, and through the personal and philosophical. Synthetic Jungle is as sweet as it is grand, and beneath its sarcastic grin reverberates an immense, open heart.
 
[more]

front cover of Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing
Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing
Poems and Stories
Luci Tapahonso
University of Arizona Press, 1993
In this cycle of poetry and stories, Navajo writer Luci Tapahonso shares memories of her home in Shiprock, New Mexico, and of the places and people there. Through these celebrations of birth, partings, and reunions, this gifted writer displays both her love of the Navajo world and her resonant use of language. Blending memoir and fiction in the storytelling style common to many Indian traditions, Tapahonso's writing shows that life and death are intertwined, and that the Navajo people live with the knowledge that identity is formed by knowing about the people to whom one belongs. The use of both English and Navajo in her work creates an interplay that may also give readers a new way of understanding their connectedness to their own inner lives and to other people.

Luci Tapahonso shows how the details of everyday life—whether the tragedy of losing a loved one or the joy of raising children, or simply drinking coffee with her uncle—bear evidence of cultural endurance and continuity. Through her work, readers may come to better appreciate the different perceptions that come from women's lives.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter