National Poetry (HarperCollins)

An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Gabriel Spera's The Standing Wave was a winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet Dave Smith. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition. Jennifer Kronovet's poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with language-sentences, words, phonemes, punctuation-and how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances. In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.

"These poems are so generous, so bright and sharp, so funny and winning, they feel immense." -Paul Guest "Erika Meitner is the new voice of intelligent and emotional poems. Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too." - Nikki Giovanni Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner's Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry-a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Paul Guest-Ideal Cities gloriously perpetuates NPS's long-standing tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

Bird Eating Bird is a new collection of poems from Kristin Naca, winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series mtvU prize as chosen by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. Playful and serious all at once, Kristin's work explores the richness of her cultural and linguistic heritage and perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.

A moving and kinetic collection of poetry from the 2018 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Monica Youn. Unexpected, unusual, and stirring. From diving-bell spiders to the nervous system of the human body, from trees growing so heavy with fruit that they split to dogs galloping through snowy hills, Moffett's world is rendered with precision, intricacy, and extraordinary beauty. Exhilarating in its technical expertise but also steeped in a profound connection to the natural world and the human psyche, Nervous System is a collection from a major emerging voice.

Winner of the 2011 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by D.A. Powell, Marcus Wicker's Maybe the Saddest Thing is a sterling collection of contemporary American poems by an exciting new and emerging voice.

A winner of the 2010 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Ilya Kaminsky (author of Dancing in Odessa, recipient of the 2004 Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, among other honors, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry), Vizsolyi's work perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from emerging poets. For thirty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

An exciting new collection of prose poetry from an emerging talent, Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise was a winner of the 2006 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet John Ashbery. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

"These are my songlines; they helped me to re-connect with the landscape, and with my own life," says Sabra Loomis of the poems which appear in House Held Together by Winds. Winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition as selected by James Tate (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award), Sabra's work perpetuates NPS's tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser known poets. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

From "Portrait of the artist, gaslit" to "Portrait of the artist's ancestors" to "Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper," the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. "Portrait of the artist as a young man" has long been the default position, but these poems carve out a different vantage point. Seen through the lens of motherhood, of working as a waitress, of watching election results come in, or of simply sitting in a waiting room, making art--and making an artist--is a process wherein historical events collide with lived experience, both deeply personal but also unfailingly political. When we make art, for what (and to whom) are we accountable? And what does art-making demand of us, especially as apocalypse looms? With its surprising insights, Harbinger, the latest book from acclaimed poet Shelley Puhak, shows us the reality of the constantly evolving and unstable self, a portrait of the artist as fragmentary, impressionable, and always in flux.