Wesleyan Poetry

Icelight, Ranjit Hoskote's eighth collection of poems, enacts the experience of standing at the edge-of a life, a landscape, a world assuming new contours or going up in flames. Yet, the protagonists of these poems also stand at the edge of epiphany. In the title poem, we meet the Neolithic cave-dweller who, dazzled by a shapeshifting nature, crafts the first icon. The 'I' of these poems is not a sovereign 'I'. A questing, questioning voice, it locates itself in the web of life, in relation to the cosmos. In 'Tacet', the speaker asks: "What if I had/ no skin/ Of what/ am I the barometer?" Long committed to the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic, Hoskote embraces talismans, premonitions, fossils: active residues from the previous lives of people and places. Icelight is a book about transitions and departures, eloquent in its acceptance of transience in the face of mortality. Aubade Rumours of wind, banners of cloud. The low earth shakes but the storm has not arrived. You pack for the journey, look up, look through the doors at trees shedding their leaves too soon, a track on which silk shoes would be wasted, a moon still dangling above a boat. Wearing your salt mask, you face the mulberry shadows. The valley into which you're rappelling is you.

<P>From the depths of sorrow following the sudden death of her closest female mentor, Brenda Hillman asks anguished questions in this book of poems about separation, spiritual transcendence, and the difference between life and death. Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her. </P><P>Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.</P>

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"-postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery-nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living? [sample poem] XI. the more ground covered, the more liberated you became I am scared my mind will turn on me. I am scared I will be naked in a burning house. I am scared my children won't outpace me. I am scared my children (who aren't made by me) believe I am a sad imitation of the others. I am scared I will gather in a room where everyone will ask me to remember and when I don't lie they'll say I'd hate to be you. I've lived long enough to be scared my kidneys will give out on me. I've lived long enough to know just when they should. I have never shared my fears with anyone; I am scared they will map the land and take liberties. Will the women be ashamed? I'm scared to ask. What will live again? What will die with me?

<P>About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken. Check for the online reader's companion at http://petergizzi.site.wesleyan.edu.</P>

<P>This groundbreaking, transgenre work-part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past-is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/</P>

Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.

In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from the random, often perfect, pigeon feathers found on city streets. In a seamless weave of poetic sentences, The Tatters explores how our human processes of examination are often bound up with destruction. These poems enable us to be present with the sorrow and horror of our destructive nature, and to honor the natural world while acknowledging that this world no longer exists in any pure form, calling to us instead from cracks in the sidewalk, trash heaps, and old objects. Check for the online reader's companion at tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.

2021 PEN Open Book Finalist 2021 NAACP Image Award Finalist, Poetry 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, Longlist Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes-linguistic, cultural, racial, familial-of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart. SAMPLE POEM Testimony for Tamir Rice, 2002-2014 Mr. President, After they shot me they tackled my sister. The sound of her knees hitting the sidewalk made my stomach ache. It was a bad pain. Like when you love someone and they lie to you. Or that time Mikaela cried all through science class and wouldn't tell anyone why. This isn't even my first letter to you, in the first one I told you about my room and my favorite basketball team and asked you to come visit me in Cleveland or send your autograph. In the second one I thanked you for your responsible citizenship. I hope you are proud of me too. Mom said you made being black beautiful again but that was before someone killed Trayvon. After that came a sadness so big it made everyone look the same. It was a long time before we could go outside again. Mr. President it took one whole day for me to die and even though I'm twelve and not afraid of the dark I didn't know there could be so much of it or so many other boys here.

Continuing her search for a neotropical mythos, in this brilliant second collection poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever after-breathless, diaspora calling. Similar to the incidents in Maroon Choreography, what resounds in these poems is an ecstatic love song of the Caribbean Americas, of the main lands and islands, shaped and reshaped as breathwork, ritual, communion, and fantasy. In essence, the collection speaks to raise the vibrational frequencies of all species on Earth through a sensual pulse of Black English. From Alchemical Sirens it flickers in balsamic appeal moist in the palms of our hands a psalm a lamp a sap in our laps an asp plausible love song after love poems were last put on hold as in b l a ck a r t the new black art is this - find the lost soul and love it

The Book of Landings brings together the second and third parts of Mark McMorris's visionary trilogy "Auditions for Utopia,"-initiated in Entrept-and marks two stages in the evolution of the poet's conception of space. The first stage of the collection is the entrept, a space where disparate vectors of identity congregate, come into conflict, and finally merge into hybrid forms. The poetry follows a trajectory of diaspora, or exile, instigated by conquest, colonialism, wars, and political defeat in the search for Utopia. In The Book of Landings the promised dwelling has been removed from the realm of physical geography, and there is only transition-fragmentary episodes of arrival and departure, in transit from one entrept to another. These episodes of transit do not only compose a linear sequence only. Instead, they define a space or surface marked by repeated traversals over time-tracings and, importantly, re-tracings, by explorers, conquerors, migrants, merchants, slaves, refugees, and exiles-a city of palimpsests. An online reader's companion will be available at markmcmorris.site.wesleyan.edu.

<P>Between 1855 and his death in 1867, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated a new-and in his own words "dangerous"-hybrid form in a series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen. Important and provocative, these fifty poems take the reader on a tour of 1850s Paris, through gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, revealing a metropolis on the eve of great change. In its deliberate fragmentation and merging of the lyrical with the sardonic, Le Spleen de Paris may be regarded as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a specifically urban writing, the textual equivalent of the city scenes of the Impressionists. In this compelling new translation, Keith Waldrop delivers the companion to his innovative translation of The Flowers of Evil. Here, Waldrop's perfectly modulated mix releases the music, intensity, and dissonance in Baudelaire's prose. The result is a powerful new re-imagining that is closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation.</P>

What actually happens within the revolution of the clock's hands? In The Writing of an Hour the poet considers the effort and the deliberateness that brings her to her desk each day. Despite domestic and day job demands and widespread lockdown, Coultas forges connections to the sublime and wonders what it means to be from the Americas. These poems verge on the surreal, transform the quotidian, and respond anew to the marvelous. The Writing of an Hour takes the reader on a journey in four sections; from a bedroom to an improvised desk over the North Sea, where she attempts to create an artwork inside an airplane cabin flying over Greenland's rivers of ice. The Mending Hour I tied one on, I mean I took my grandmother's apron, its strings and glittery rickrack and I wore it on the streets of the East Village. The apron is a cloak of superpowers, a psychic umbrella I paraded past Emma Goldman's E. 10th St. address, and rang her doorbell for a sip of water. My domestic armor is made of gingham though a woman is still considered an unelectable candidate.

<P>The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008–2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we "know it when we see it"? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of "disaster capitalism," Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed. This stunning follow-up to Versed-winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award-is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism.</P>

Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize (2006) Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses is a series of poetic meditations on islands and exile, language and ritual, and the force of personal and historical passions and griefs. These poems are haunted, figuratively and literally, by spirits of the African diaspora and drenched in the colors, sounds, and rhythms of the islands. But they also encompass the world of the exile and return, and the events of 9/11 in New York City. Brathwaite is one of the foremost voices in postcolonial inquiry and expression, and his poetry is densely rooted and expansive. Using his unusual "sycorax" signature typography and spelling, Brathwaite brings a cultural specificity, with distinct accents, sonic gestures, and pronunciations, into his pages-making them new, exciting, and rich in nuances.

<P><B>Winner of the Pen Center USA West Literary Award in Poetry (1990)</B></P><P>New Dark Ages is a book of ideas that exhibits a rare quality – adventurousness. The poems are intelligent and deeply felt, complex and crystal clear. Donald Revell writes about things as tender and as complicated as happiness and freedom. His poetry brims with images, wonder, and discovery, as it seeks to answer such questions as :If the original idea of America is defunct, what has taken its place? If privacy is no more, how do we go about the business of loving? If God and history have become one, what is the relationship between morality and expediency?" And, above all, "Why is it that, in spite of all, the twentieth century is so heart-breakingly beautiful – a true vindication of humanism?"</P>

Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities-to their portrayal in the media-and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017) Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

<P>In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constituted-only to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.</P>

In Sarah Blake's epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. There, they discover the world anew, negotiating their place among the trees and the rain and the animals. Something brought them to the woods that nearly killed them, and they're not sure they want to live through this experience either. But the world surprises them again and again with beauty and intrigue. They come to meet a pregnant horse, a curious mouse, and a dead bird, who is set on haunting them all. Blake examines what makes us human when removed from the human world, what identity means where it is a useless thing, and how loss shapes us. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all-just the strangeness of the woods. Includes a stunning art feature by Nicky Arscott. 7. If only the night held one dream instead of many. In the next dream you dig up the bird. In the next dream you dig in the same place and find a gun. You've shot someone. You weren't supposed to return to this place where you hid the gun. You're an idiot in your dream. In the next dream the horse returns. The horse startles you awake. But you are still asleep. Dreams are some wicked things. In the next dream you are in a desert. That's different. You forget what grass is. What it smells like. What the shadows of trees look like across your legs. You laugh your head off at the sight of a cactus. In the next dream you can see the spirit of the bird that will haunt you for weeks. Her tongue makes you think all of her words will come out garbled. Then you remember all she does is sing.

<P>Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, "The Pretty Redhead," a farewell to the epoch that he-as poet, convict, art-critic, artilleryman and boulevardier-did so much to conjure and sustain until his death on Armistice Day in 1918. Readers of Apollinaire's more familiar early work, Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995), will find here a darker and yet more tender poet, a poet of the broken world who shares entirely the world's catastrophe even as he praises to the end its glamour and its strange innocence. This English translation, facing the original French, illuminates Apollinaire's crucial and continuing influence on the European and American avant-garde. The volume includes a short translator's preface.</P>

<P>Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.</P>

Peter Gizzi has said that "the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also-as it has been for centuries-a work of love. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature-the time & details of the world-meaning the space(s) in which we live-defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope." [sample poem] Creely Song all that is lovely in words, even if gone to pieces all that is lovely gone, all of it for love and autobiography as if I were writing this hello, listen the plan is the body and all of it for love now in pieces all that is lovely echoes still in life & death still memory gardens open onto windows lovely, the charm that mirrors all that was, all that is, lovely in a song

mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times. [sample poem] i'm like a woman who once knew splendor* sometimes i feel like the pink panther all naked and pink lost in the morass of do the best you can today and nigga heal thy self our end of winter spirits break like old tibetan snow i remember you was conflicted and i found myself alone here on my ancient hurt the disquieting hum of living history dear god, please put my head above my heart we can only be together if the stories are told plain face same instrument just a couple of coke bottles full of gasoline like god and rain is a waste of time my mother used to clean houses as a child some days i can barely get out of bed in my mind she's like diana ross scrubbing the white lady's stairs in lady sings the blues except prettier and with green eyes i've just been living off of cough drops and water and anger just sitting in the whole foods parking lot eating pineapple i am literally the definition of "hot mess" pain changes everything somebody come and pick up my limp body off the ground i am dying a slow ohio death we miss you starman it's our first sunrise of the burn * "dark side of the world"erica lewis

<P>Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised - love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar - are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. </P><P>Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native - and feminine - language.</P>

<P><B>Winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry (2002)</B></P><P>This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy, from denial to humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz's insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of good and evil, health, blame, personal boundaries - in short, a new sense of self. These poems remain intimately bound to the world and of the senses, becoming documents of transformation.</P>

Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023 An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry. During an enchantment in the life Do you love a living person absolutely? Tell them now. In a half-unwieldy life you made, under the hyaline sky, while the dead drank from zigzag pools nearby, if they saved you in your wild incapacities, in timing of the world's harm in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal, when others said you should feel grateful to be minimally adequate for the world's triple exposure or some tired committee... The ones who love us, how do they break through our defenses? We're tired today. Come back later. Their baffled voices melting our wax walls with a candle, the ones who understand what being is-the glowing, the broken, the wheels, the brave ones- they have their courage, you have yours,,,; when you meet the one you love, it is so rare. When you meet the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.

Sylvie Kandé's neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today's tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé's language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun. Country folk who made themselves belated mariners their bodies cadence them to cleave with the oar's tainted tip the purple mounds of the great salt savannah which no furrow marks where no seed takes root (But to say the sea earthly words are little suited) At the point of the dream they were a myriad no less and no more to cross the coral barrier in laughter with its vermilion flowers: there remain but three barks adrift full so full to the point of capsizing

A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman's early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman's literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years with lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman's continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer's introduction situates Spellman's work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly. [sample text] THE TWIST a dancer's world is walls, movement confined: music god's last breath. rhythm: the last beating of his heart. a dancer follows that sound, blind to its source, toward walls with others. she cannot dance alone she thinks of thought as windows, as ice around the dance can you break it? move

The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko's writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language-although "perpetually incomplete" and shifting in meaning-remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet's Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko's work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader's companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.

The Work-Shy painstakingly reconstructs a chorus of voices rescued from hermetic "colonies" and fragile communes, from worlds that work in ways that defy work as we know it. Its poetic assemblages offer direct testimony from the first youth prison in California and from asylums for the chronically insane (preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City). Painful facts emerge about "sterilization mills" in California, where thousands of individuals became subject to compulsory procedures (policies that shaped eugenics practice in the Third Reich). In addition, the poems "translate" asylum texts-the writing of the insane-into a wider field of social conflict and utopian fragments of not-yet-being. Activating what Susan Howe calls "the telepathy of the archive" (and Peter Gizzi dubs "archeophonics" in the title of his latest collection), the poems of The Work-Shy become part of a "book of listening," occupying identities rooted in the demimonde and in places of confinement. Voices echo to form a ragged chain of soliloquies, kenning and keening, riddles and rants. Published under the collective, anonymous signature of the BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, the book operates at the crossroads of lyric and documentary poetries, of singularity and collectivism. An online readers companion will be available at bluntresearchgroup.site.wesleyan.edu.

Winner of Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award for Poetry, given by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, 2018 Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life-not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.

<P>Since issuing its first volumes in 1959, the Wesleyan poetry program has challenged the reigning aesthetic of the time and profoundly influenced the development of American poetry. One of the country's oldest programs, its greatest achievement has been the publication of early works by yet undiscovered poetry who have since become major awarded Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes, National Book Awards, and many other honors. At a time when other programs are being phased out, Wesleyan takes this opportunity to celebrate its distinguished history and reaffirm its commitment to poetry with publication of The Wesleyan Tradition.</P><P>Drawing from some 250 volumes, editor Michael Collier documents the wide-ranging impact of these works. In his introduction, he describes the literary and cultural context of American poetics in more recent decades, tracing the evolution of the Deep Image and Confessional movements of the 50s and 60s, and exploring the emergence of the "prose lyric" style. Although the success of the Wesleyan program has inspired its share of imitators, no other program has had such a fundamental impact. Works by the eighty-six poets included her both document and celebrate that contribution.</P>

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely, a girl on the cusp of desire. my dangling toes take the rest the rest of my body refuses. spine upright, my pose proposes anticipation. i poise in copper-colored tension, intent on manifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises like sap, sprouts from my scalp and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria blue and feathered, and grow toward it, choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am black and becoming. -after Alison Saar's Blue Bird

<P>Time spent in Japan, and everyday life in Berkeley and Oakland, come together as a kaleidoscope of words and consciousness in New Time. Leslie Scalapino pushes at the edges / spatial shape of language and experience in her new collection by writing that is itself events, which are to "punch a hole in reality."</P><P>Real events, occurring in real time, are transformed in the act of writing them as perceived rather than interpreted. Phrases repeat, conjoin, break apart, and return in this challenging and innovative work, as Scalapino moves toward a "new time" wherein there is no 'inner' - one's illusion that is "the adamant social being / is inner" and "the body is a new form."</P>

Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers, and translators, including John Ashbery, D.J. Enright, and Douglas Dunn.

<P>Believing and espousing an American tradition alive in the testimony of Anne Hutchinson, in the prose-poetry of Thoreau, and in the music of Ives, Donald Revell's new poems seek moments of harmony between language and silence. The death of the poet's father and almost concurrent birth of his son form the emotional underpinnings of this meditation on faith. "Every morning, beginning in childhood, / the music of variation sustains / the equal loneliness of every soul." These spare and elegant poems speak of a conversion in which a new city is founded in the heart of silence, and grace is a refinement of grammar.</P>

Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda. Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: "Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we'd go under." Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our "bit part in the history of the future." [sample text] The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said Hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there like nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, get sucked to the bottom. We'd sink and become creek bed; its deep mud would claim us, hold us hard and close.

<P>Like an underground river, the astonishing poems of Joseph Ceravolo have nurtured American poetry for fifty years, a presence deeply felt but largely invisible. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo's aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light the highly original voice that was operating at an increasing remove from the currents of the time. From a poetics associated with Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery to an ever more contemplative, deeply visionary poetics similar in sensibility to Zen and Dante, William Blake and St. John of the Cross, this collection shows how Ceravolo's poetry takes on a direct, quiet lyricism: intensely dedicated to the natural and spiritual life of the individual. As Ron Silliman notes, Ceravolo's later work reveals him to be "one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation." Many new pieces, including the masterful long poem "The Hellgate," are published here for the first time. This volume is a landmark edition for American poetry, and includes an introduction by David Lehman.</P>

<P><B>Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry (2009)</B><BR><B>Runner-up for the Northern California Book Award for Poetry (2009)</B></P><P>Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being-and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also-because it is about many kinds of power-is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic, intuition and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.</P>

The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider's perspective on life in Israel today. [Sample Text] Unity We travel the silk road of evening, tobacco and desire flickering between our hands. We are warm travelers, our eyes unfurled, traveling in psalms, in Rumi, in the sayings of the man from the Galilee. We break bread under the pistachio tree, under the Banyan tree, under the dark of the Samaritan fig tree. Songs of offering rise up in our throats, wandering along the wall of night. We travel in the openness of warm eternity. Heavenly voices announce a coupling as the quiet horse gallops heavenward. We travel with the rest of the world, with its atrocities, its piles of ruins, scars of barbed wire, traveling with ardor in our loins, with the cry of birth. We sit crossed-legged within the rocking of flesh, the quiet of the Brahmin, the bells of Mass, the tumult of Torah. We travel through eagles of death, dilution of earth in rivers, in eulogies, through marble, we travel through the silk of evening, our hearts like bonfires in the dark.

<P>In her wry and riveting new collection, Marianne Boruch discovers things often taken for granted and holds them up to deceptively casual light, questioning them both mercilessly and mercifully. Employing a masterly range of tone and form, Boruch makes a sometimes strange but always revealing investigation of world and self, history and memory, resistance and release. Here a woman levitates behind a door as her daughter badly bangs out Mozart. Here God is caught before the moment of creation, before knowledge, before "the invention/ of the question too, the way all/ at heart are rhetorical, each leaf/ suddenly wedded to its shade." It's here raucous boys on their bikes are told-through telepathy-don't go to this war. Here, that a Dutch still life is returned to the small chaos of its making. And Eve, in "stained fascination," stares down the snake of the lost garden. The lyric impulse in these deeply interior poems stops time, even as the world, indifferent to its mystery, keeps happening.</P><P>Praise for Marianne Boruch:<BR>"Her poems are complex rather than simple rooms &#8230; they bring the world's strangeness, and their own, home to whatever reader is open to old mysteries, both in dreams and in the waking life they illuminate."-Philip Booth, The Georgia Review</P><P>"Marianne Boruch's (work) has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."-Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post</P><P>"Every detail of image and syntax shines with multiplicity."-Donald Revell, The Ohio Review</P>

First published in 1979, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers-musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald's work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable. An online reader's companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu.

Rae Armantrout's poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout's mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up To Speed, Next Life, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winning volume Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, and Itself. Including some of her most brilliant pieces, Partly affirms Armantrout's reputation as one of our sharpest and most innovative writers.

<P>This bilingual anthology brings together a representative selection from more than a half century of this distinguished Brazilian poet's lifetime work. Along with previously translated poems are many others in English for the first time. The remarkable group of poets and translators includes Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and W. S. Merwin.</P>

Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken. [sample poem] The Fifth Planet Come, early summer in the mountains, and come, strawberry moon, and carry me softly in the silver canoe on wires to the summit, where in that way of late night useless talk, the bright dark asks me, "What is the thing you are most afraid of?" and I already know which lie I will tell. There were six of us huddled there in the cold, leaning on the rocks lingering in the dark where I do not like to linger, looking up at the sharp round pinnacle of light discussing what shapes we saw-rabbit, man, goddess-but that brightness for me was haunted by no thing, no shadow at all in the lumens. What am I, what am I, I kept throwing out to the hustling silence. No light comes from the moon, he's just got good positioning and I suppose that's the answer, that's what I'm most afraid of, that I'm a mirror, that I have no light of my own, that I hang in empty space in faithful orbit around a god or father neither of Whom will ever see me whole. I keep squinting to try to see Jupiter which the newspaper said would be found near the moon but it's nowhere, they must have lied. Or like god, there is too much reflection, headsplitting and profane, scraping up every shadow, too much light for anyone to see.

How do we honor the dead? How do we commit them to memory? And how do we come to terms with the way they died? To start, we can name them. When schools collapsed in an earthquake in China, burying over 5,000 children, the government brutally prevented parents from learning who had died. Artist Ai Weiwei, at risk to his own safety, gathered the names of these children, and their names are the subject of this book. Each poem is a poetic meditation on the image and concept suggested by the etymology in the Chinese characters. This act of poetic translation is both a heartbreaking tribute to people whose names have been erased, and a healing meditation on how language suggests a path forward. July 30 Tiānwēi Celestial Awe He carried no iron into battle. When he lifted his hand, he brandished the sky.

This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography. [sample poem] The Distant Drum I am not a metaphor or symbol. This you hear is not the wind in the trees. Nor a cat being maimed in the street. I am being maimed in the street It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy. Speak this because I exist. This is my voice These words are my words, my mouth Speaks them, my hand writes. I am a poet. It is my fist you hear beating Against your ear.