Results by title

This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial, Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of a girl whose prince is a deadbeat dad and whose escape into a fantasy world is also an escape into language, beauty, and the surreal.

Grabbing the Beast by the Throat is a gripping volume of historical fiction in poetry that follows the life of Pavel Svoboda, a Czechoslovakian man whose life turns upside down when Nazi Germany invades Czechoslovakia and brings Europe to the brink of World War II. Readers witness Pavel’s evolution from a carefree college student with a close-knit family into a resistance fighter who opposes Hitler’s brutal regime. When other college students are slaughtered for protesting the occupation and his Jewish girlfriend is taken to Terezín (Theresienstadt) Concentration Camp, Pavel joins the Czech resistance to protect the people he loves, undermine those in power, and help regain his country’s freedom.

In America and around the world, the clear rise of fascism makes it vitally important that we continue to learn from the past. Grounded in history, this book is a powerful—and unmistakably timely—reminder that there are times when we must fight for freedom.

Christina Pugh’s Grains of the Voice exhibits a pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations. The hu­man voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds—all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occa­sion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems are eclectic in their al­lusiveness, filled with echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of songs both popular and obscure, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. But Pugh always wears her learn­ing lightly. Beneath the jewellike surfaces of her poems is a strenuous investigation of the nature of and need for communication and a celebration of the endless variety of its forms. 

Moving tenderly across memory, continents, and literary forms, Jacob Shores-Argüello’s tightly woven cross-genre collection evolves a private family bereavement into an exploration of collective ecological grief. Following the death of his mother, the speaker navigates between his Costa Rican heritage and his Oklahoma upbringing, eventually arriving at something like healing on the banks of New Zealand’s Whanganui River—the first river in the world granted legal personhood. 

Structured around a Spanish nursery rhyme, Grief for the Green That Was finds solace in the prospect of citizenship for a more-than-human world, a possibility it approaches through perspectival shifts and innovative forms—including footnoted poems, hybrid fiction, and an experimental choose-your-own-adventure sequence—that overturn lyric and storytelling conventions. 

A book about what we inherit and what we leave behind, both in families and in landscapes, Grief for the Green That Was examines how climate change affects not just the physical world but also our emotional and spiritual relationships to place. Here Shores-Argüello creates a new language for twenty-first-century grief that refuses to separate the personal from the planetary.

Inception and implosion, Chicago’s grit and grandiosity all come together in the finite poetic power of the original Slam igniter, renowned poet Marc Kelly Smith and his retrospect denotation, Ground Zero. 

A cultural, community, and adversarial figure, Smith has challenged the status quo and raised new questions about an environment in a state of continuous calamity. Smith’s power and influence have inspired celebrated figures who cut their teeth on both the stage and the page under his watchful eye—always speaking in the traditions of Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks. Ground Zero challenges but pays homage to the thousand underbellies of Chicago with Smith’s wicked, cigarette-in-the-beer language: “I ain’t diggin’ no concrete coffin, / No backyard mausoleum / To keep me a pickle sweet aplenty / Plied with sardines and pork sausage wieners / Livin’ out the chance that some bubble-flesh victim / Will come puckered up and scabby lipped / To kiss me in the name of a new mankind.”

Ground Zero leaves no doubt. The Slampapi / instigator / visionary / you-may-love-me-or-hate-me-but-my-history-will-always-be-chiseled-in-everything-the-poetry-world-does-next collects a survey of his land and his experience, no matter how beautiful or flawed. This book lets the landmines of imagery and Chicago’s slow and uneasy drawl showcase one of our most original voices.

The story of Sir Guy, once as familiar as the tales of King Arthur, is now largely forgotten.

Originally composed about 1240 A.D., this heroic romance early circulated in countless manuscripts, first in poetic, then in expanded prose form. Later, in 1525, the extended version was printed in French, and later still, in 1821, it was rendered into English. That last essential act unfortunately served little purpose, since the translation was thereafter available only to successive descendants of the family that prepared it. In 1959, however, The University of Texas acquired this unique translation, followed by a copy of the rare 1525 issue in 1963, and with both texts rejoined now offers, through William B. Todd, one final service: an edition for present readers.

So rescued from oblivion, Guy of Warwick emerges as a grand exemplum of chivalric conduct. Perhaps even more than Arthur, or Launcelot, or Galahad, the hero is a very proper knight, displaying at once all the mundane attributes of nobility: unswerving loyalty to kin, kith, and king; the ready rescue of damsels in distress; the prompt dispatch of dragons, giants, or other enemies of the realm—and in aftertime exhibiting also all the spiritual qualities of true gentility: defense of the faith against every infidel, mortification of the flesh, and final withdrawal to a hermitage. Thus Guy may rightly deserve not only his early accolade as the "Hercules of England" but also some measure of the tribute usually reserved for a patron saint. However regarded, this knight's exploits must necessarily rank as one of the great "matters of Britain" and again become an essential part of Western cultural heritage.

Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.

Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence.