Princeton of Contemporary Poets

From an award-winning poet, an exciting new collection that explores exile and return, from North Africa to North America In Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy, an American poet who moved back to the United States after living for years in Morocco, reflects on exile and return as he describes the experience of leaving North Africa and rediscovering a North America both recognizable and unrecognizable. What does it mean to feel exiled both away from and at "home"? What does it mean to miss something? In forms such as the sonnet, ghazal, and triolet, Aurora Americana takes up the distant and recent past of the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to the deadly "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, Virginia. But the book also meditates on smaller, momentary encounters across racial and national barriers, from evocations of Francophone Africa to a screening of Black Panther in Portugal for a mostly white audience. Allusions to Fannie Lou Hamer, Frantz Fanon, Prince, John Coltrane, Alessandro de' Medici, Ahmed Zaki, Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Nasser Zefzafi, and others anchor the collection. With poems set at or near dawn, Aurora Americana explores an ominous yet hopeful new morning in America, one in which potential cataclysm exists alongside possibility and change. Myronn Hardy is the author of five previous books of poems, including Radioactive Starlings (Princeton). His poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, the New Republic, and the Baffler, among other publications, and have won many prizes, including the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award. He teaches at Bates College. "Myronn Hardy's tough, analytical, associative mind moves with astonishing inventiveness between America and Algeria, and between persona and his own speaking voice, as in the splendid title poem. His idiom is as spare as it is singular, but never obtuse or unmoored from ordinary human concerns. Quietly visionary, Aurora Americana is among the best books of poems I've read in a long time."-Tom Sleigh, author of The King's Touch: Poems "A clear-eyed vantage of America. . . . [Aurora Americana] is in itself the record of a complicated parting triggered by being an expatriate, and the necessity of returning home."---Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation

A wide-ranging collection from a rising poet that showcases her sharp, contemporary voice In Stem, Stella Wong intersperses lyric poems on a variety of subjects with dramatic monologues that imagine the perspectives of specific female composers, musicians, and visual artists, including Johanna Beyer, Mira Calix, Clara Rockmore, Maryanne Amacher, and Delia Derbyshire. In such lines as "let me tell you how I make myself appear / more likeable," "as I grow older I like looking at chaos," and "I want to propose a hike / and also propose mostly," Wong's style is confident and idiomatic, and by turns contemplative and carefree. Whether writing about family, intimate relationships, language, or women's experience, Wong creates a world alive with observation and provocation, capturing the essence and the problems of life with others. Stella Wong is the author of the poetry collection Spooks and the chapbook American Zero. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, and Bennington Review. "The poems in this volume demonstrate an extraordinary sensibility, which is imaginative, perceptive, and intrepid. Reading these poems is like riding a verbal roller coaster, full of excitement and surprises."-Ha Jin, author of The Woman Back from Moscow and A Distant Center "Stella Wong's Orpheus is female, and the poet herself a forceful Eurydice who refuses to return to the underground and play dead. She's a switched-on, savvy, confident, aggressively witty, and get-out-of-the-way poet. American poetry needs her fighting spirit. Nodding to experimental women composers of the '60s and forward, Wong herself has a taste of the synthesizer's surrealism. She goes where her uncaptured nature and her powers of observation take her."-Cal Bedient, author of The Breathing Place "Perceptive and gripping. . . . [Stem is] an impressive series of dramatic monologues. . . As Wong dips in and out of various personae, her biting cleverness remains consistent throughout. These insistent poems achieve a brash and beautiful irreverence." "Stem is full of colour and candour."---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews "An energetic and resonant collection."---Ian Pople, The Manchester Review

Compelling poems that celebrate language as it encounters the nameless variety of the natural world, from Australia to Italy An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West's poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. West's intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity. Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean. Again and again, language and the senses throw themselves into the nameless riot of the world, from eucalypts and clouds to a medieval bell tower and the sounds a pencil makes as it crosses a page. Simon West is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Carol and Ahoy and The Ladder, which was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards. He is also the author of Dear Muses? Essays in Poetry and the editor and translator of The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. He lives in Melbourne, Australia. "Words, in Simon West's poems, are so lovingly proffered in all their materiality that we rejoice in the further revelations of meaning and import. All poetry is local, and West situates us in locales that are rich in resonance-whether Australia or Italy or some region of the mind where we become part of a wider world."-Paul Kane, author of A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina "West finds inspiration for his gorgeously detailed poems in the figures and likenesses of nature: a eucalyptus twists 'like wrist joints in an artist's portfolio,' new growth catches 'the light like a crowd / of scimitars in the breeze.' The Australian poet's formally engaged, often rhyming verse-sonnets, couplets-reveals a mind nurtured in a Mediterranean climate of classicism."---David Woo, Literary Hub "It is a handsome book in a distinguished series."---Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review

A remarkable book of poems that mixes humor about the absurdities of office life with moments of Zen-like wisdom Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen's lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York. In the poems' dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides "to quit everything except work," sacrificing her life and loved ones to bury herself in her four jobs, striving at any cost to find relief from the attempt to both have a life and be a good worker-"No one was happy to see me, and so / at last I could work. No one said it's okay. It wasn't / okay, thus my work flourished." Despite such discontents, I Was Working finds humor, play, and even joy in its original and compelling search for the possibility of self-liberation. Ariel Yelen is a poet whose work has been published in Poetry, BOMB, the American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and other magazines. "Ariel Yelen's poetry is exquisitely witty and charming. These poems are intimate etchings of a poet's daily life under late capitalism. Astutely observed, pleasurable to read, and heartbreakingly relatable, I Was Working is a collection you'll read and reread."-Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine Empire and Minor Feelings "I love poems that impart how poets get by, meaning, what we do for a living. I also love poems that take risks that can only come from lived experiences of risk. In I Was Working, Ariel Yelen lays bare the sly vagaries of late capitalism (would you rather be 'love-low' or 'money-low'?) and offers a way to reinvent our relationships outside the logic of exploitation through authentically living with others. Yelen uses the tension of writing poetry when she has no time to write to create some of the most beautiful 'work poems' I have ever read. Her book is no small miracle-it's so good."-Stacy Szymaszek, author of Famous Hermits and The Pasolini Book "In her debut poetry collection, I Was Working, Ariel Yelen composes with the strangled chords of the contemporary workplace a fresh kind of music. . . . Yelen's poems convincingly render the drone, distraction, and seething frustration of that chthonic bargain the modern creative has to make: holding a day job."---Austin Adams, Rain Taxi Review of Books