Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

From An Explanation of America: LAIR Robert Pinsky Inexhaustible, delicate, as if Without source or medium, daylight Undoes the mind; the infinite, Empty actual is too bright, Scattering to where the road Whispers, through a mile of woods … Later, how quiet the house is: Dusk-like and refined, The sweet Phoebe-note Piercing from the trees; The calm globe of the morning, Things to read or to write Ranged on a table; the brain A dark, stubborn current that breathes Blood, a deaf wadding, The hands feeding it paper And sensations of wood or metal On its own terms. Trying to read I persist a while, finish the recognition By my breath of a dead giant's breath-- Stayed by the space of a rhythm, Witnessing the blue gulf of the air. "[An] ambitious and immensely likable long poem . . . a poem which--a rare thing--seems to combine intimacy and authority." "Wise and compassionate. . . . It is one of the most readable long poems in recent memory, graspable by all."---Kenneth Funsten, The Los Angeles Times "I can't imagine anyone who, after reading An Explanation of America, wouldn't want to return to it again and again."---William H. Pritchard, Poetry

From A Woman Under the Surface: MOON AND EARTH Alicia Ostriker Of one substance, of one Matter, they have cruelly Broken apart. They never will touch Each other again. The shining Lovelier and younger Turns away, a pitiful girl. She is completely naked And it hurts. The larger Motherly one, breathlessly luminous Emerald, and blue, and white Traveling mists, suffers Birth and death, birth and death, and the shock Of internal heat killed by external cold. They are dancing through that blackness. They press as if To come closer. "Ostriker's poems illuminate the places where myth and daily life converge. . . . [She] writes with much intelligence, in a language characterized by the clarity of its images and the precision of its rhythms." "Cool, cerebral, studied. Passionate, visceral, immediate. Can the same poet write both kinds of poems? . . . Alicia Ostriker is not only writing both kinds of poems-she also is fashioning poems that are cold and fiery at the same time."

Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California. She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980. From Erosion: SAN SEPOLCRO Jorie Graham . . . . How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No-one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line bodies and wings to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It's a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops. Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980. "The attempt to find all the stops, to range through the gamut of possibility, makes Ms. Graham a poet of landscape and memory as well as a poet of art."

"Winner of the 2012 Book Merit Award in the General Trade, Poetry Series, New York Book Show" "Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry" "Kathleen Graber, Winner of a 2017 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters" "Winner of the 2011 Literary Award for Poetry, Library of Virginia" "Finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry" "Finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America" Kathleen Graber teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of The River Twice (Princeton) and Correspondence and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker and the American Poetry Review, among other publications. Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber's award-winning second collection of poetry brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim. "Graber is one of the most interesting, slippery and philosophical new poets to come along in a while. . . . What makes Graber's poems so fresh and wild are the associative slips that happen between the distant past and the urgent present." "Nothing short of a revelation. Graber is a new poet that we should have always had but didn't until just now. Graber is the kind of poet who thinks out loud, though not in the tricky, needley way of John Ashbery, but like someone very smart and very well-read trying to get to the bottom of every troubling and exciting thought. She thinks about her day to day life, family and friends, their every day goings on, their deaths and big tragedies, and she thinks about big ideas-life, death, meaning-mostly in the same poem. She name-checks some of the big figures of Western thought-Marcus Aurelius and Walter Benjamin, for instance-but does so as if she were talking to or about friends. She manages to do a scholar's work in these poems without the alienating haughtiness of many scholars. And despite their learned-ness, these are poems anyone could love. . . . If you only read one book of poetry this year, that's not enough, but start with this one."---Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly "Graber's book-this is her second-is one of the few to come out in 2010 that has joined the little clutch I have of poetry books I read and reread. It's an unusually wise and sturdy book for a poet whose career is so young. . . . Graber isn't a formal innovator, nor is her subject matter--family, love, friendship, death, and the great books of classical literature-new to poetry, but she is nonetheless an absolute original. . . . Which is not to say she is by any means a grandiose poet. She's more of a very smart friend. Her problems are common-how to get along with others, how to make everyday love last and/or hurt less, how to have fun in the midst of a typically difficult life-and her poems offer, if not solutions (for there really are no solutions, are there?), company, and really good reading." "A really unusual, engaging second book. Graber writes philosophical, meditative poems in a diction that's strangely natural and conversational; one poem is occasioned by leaving her keys in the apartment complex laundry room and locking herself out, another by rereading Walter Benjamin. The effect is of eavesdropping on the neurotic yet rigorous mind of an

"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "Mother's Sewing Box," "For My Father Looking for My Uncle," and "The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria." Finally, the poet's words again: ". . . you get / just what you want" and (just before that), "Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."--Marvin Bell

"One of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2012" Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Inventing Difficulty. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, Poetry, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of upstreet. This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wisława Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force. Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen. One tells the story of young lovers "warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts," while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room." Another poem defines the speaker via a "packing slip" of her parts--"brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia." The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection. From The Two Yvonnes: WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK Her cries impersonated all the world; The fountain's bubbling speech was just a trick But still I turned and looked, as she implored, Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks: Just radio, whose waves might be her wav- ering, whose pitch might be her quavering, I turned toward, where, the sirens might be "Save Me," "Help me," "Mommy, Mommy"-everything She, too, had said, since sloughing off the world. She took to bed, and now her voice stays fused To air like outlines of a bygone girl; The streets, the lake, the room-just places bruised Without her form, the way your sheets still hold Rough echoes of the risen sleeper, cold. "[Greenbaum's] great intelligence, skill with abstraction, humor, and talent for endings raise her poems far above the mundane." "Greenbaum's work, written in the everyday patois of urban Americans, has been characterized as edgy and idiosyncratic, localized and wry, and she's earned comparisons to Whitman and Hart Crane for her lyrical familiarity with the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and environs. . . . Greenbaum's storyteller is not just interesting, but interested, and invested, in the world. Be it a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, or Texas in the twentieth century, hers is a truly cosmopolitan perspective, refreshing and unique, but now practiced and increasingly refined."---Diego Báez, Booklist "This collection, in Paul Muldoon's series of Princeton Contemporary Poets, arrives trailing clouds of glory. . . . [Jessica Greenbaum] has a clear, precise, authentic and seductive narrative voice."---Keith Richmond, Tribune "While Greenbaum finds it 'odd that just one key / let me in my front door / and into my life every day,' her fluidly, even propulsively written second collection is itself a splendid key to everyday experience."---Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Readers can be grateful that the poems collected in The Two Yvonnes are between covers at last. In it we find Greenbaum, in her clear, Brooklyn vernacular--usually in the first person--exploring the preoccupations of Inventing Difficulty: issu

Niall Campbell was born in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. His first UK collection, Moontide, won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for both the Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward prizes for best first collection. He lives in Leeds, UK. The North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry The Scottish poet Niall Campbell's first book, Moontide, won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, the largest such prize in the United Kingdom, was named the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for both the Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward prizes for best first collection. First Nights-which includes all the poems in Moontide and sixteen new ones-marks the North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry. First Nights offers vivid descriptions of the natural world, and the joy found in moments of quiet, alongside intimate depictions of new parenthood. Campbell grew up on the remote, sparsely populated islands of South Uist and Eriskay in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, and First Nights is filled with images of the islands' seascapes, myths, wildlife, and long, dark winters. But the poems widen beyond their immediate locations to include thoughts on sculpture and mythology, Zola and Dostoevsky, and life in English cities and French villages. In the poems on early fatherhood, the geography shifts from coastal stretches to bare, dimly lit rooms. Stripped back, honest, and immediate, these poems capture moments of vulnerability, when the only answer is to love. Combining skilled storytelling, precise language, an allegiance to meter and form, and a quiet musicality, these poems resonate with silence and song, mystery and wonder, exploring ideas of companionship and withdrawal, love, and the stillness of solitude. The result is a collection that promises to be a classic. "Playful and profound-Campbell's own wonderfully nuanced perspective is . . . remarkable." "Full of striking moments, the poems . . . are illuminated by powerful lyric impulses."---David Wheatley, Guardian "Niall Campbell's debut collection is a wonder. These poems have the freshness and modernity that can only burst from roots deep in folk tradition. They surprise and alert us to what poetry has done, is doing, and will do. The edge on Campbell's lines is sharp, and he knows how to wield it, like an axe."-Gwyneth Lewis, Inaugural National Poet of Wales, 2005–6

Myronn Hardy is the author of four previous books of poems: Approaching the Center, winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize; The Headless Saints, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Catastrophic Bliss, winner of the Griot-Stadler Award for Poetry; and, most recently, Kingdom. He divides his time between Morocco and New York City. From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet's native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world's relationship to the collective past. Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing-and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground. A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet. "[Radioactive Starlings] is an illuminating, if occasionally difficult, collection." "What Myronn Hardy attempts in Radioactive Starlings, few dare to dream of doing, and rightly so, for rare is the poet that is capable of the breadth, depth, and density that characterize his exploration. I know this, because, reading it, I am overrun."---Ciahnan Darrell, Marginalia "Myronn Hardy is a citizen of worlds, including the North Africa where he lives and the America where he was born. Recalling Damascus, he sees Dylann Roof emerging with 'the gracelessness of the unburied,' and on Ibn Rochd Avenue in Rabat, an image of a father tying his son's shoes evokes Trayvon Martin's untied laces. Filled with ecstatic moments, the poems in Radioactive Starlings are supreme examples of lyric restraint as well as lush, colorful precision. This compelling collection makes a powerful case for claiming Hardy as one of our finest lyric poets."-Khaled Mattawa, author of Tocqueville: Poems "Exigent, insistently international in their references, Myronn Hardy's poems combine painterly sensuality with a restless interrogation of history and self. Bodies, in Hardy's poems, stand where other bodies stood centuries before. Absences grow visible; someone is always looking at someone else looking away. Such themes are enacted in Hardy's singular prosody. The starlings of the book's title are what unite all the poems and places. We sense them, specks of blackness, flying over us, blowing through us like neutrinos, bringing us together, living and dead, into the fullness of our humanity."-Forrest Gander, author of Core Samples from the World

Miller Oberman has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a 92Y Discovery Prize, and Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. His work has appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, the Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman's startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse. Shaped by Oberman's scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. "Wulf and Eadwacer," a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as "On Trans" draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry. "Oberman beautifully renders a complex and ever-changing knot of temporalities in which past and present overlap and exert force on each other." "A reflection on the meaning of welcome, this etymologically alert work is calm and joyful. . . . An Old English scholar and translator, Oberman is the sort of poet who hears in the tree of poetry not only the leaves rustling and the branches creaking, but the roots drinking and eating."---Carol Rumens, The Guardian "Rarely does one read something both so old and, at the same time, so new. Old in the sense that the taproots of these poems reach so deep and so wide, and new in the sense that they often startle with their originality. The poems are immediately understandable, mysterious, and authentic. Miller Oberman has written a book that makes me want to shake his hand, to salute him, and to say, frankly, that these poems and this book fill me with gratitude and joy."-Thomas Lux "Miller Oberman's magnificent first poetry collection encompasses ageless themes of love, fear, seeking, and finding. He speaks of 'times trans-shifting,' bodies transitioning, of journeys through light and shade, torment and consolation: the forging of new identities in new words. Among the poems are glorious flashes of gold and garnet, finely wrought Old English verses made to gleam in bold, clear translations. Anglo-Saxon England and postindustrial America call out to one another across the millennia: casting new-old light on graves, ruins, horses, and words themselves. These are poems to keep close by, to share, and to sing out loud."-Carolyne Larrington, University of Oxford

Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. In 2019, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, the highest award presented by the Poetry Society of America. Her other awards include the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Philadelphia. A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air-a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as "Sarah's Choice" and "Reading the Bible Backwards." In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry's lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes. "The book is a feast. And if you flip to the back, where her earliest poems are, you can see Wilner, right from the beginning, working with the question of a new mythmaking."---Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's "Before books, the ancients had their memory theaters to treasure and keep in reach all they knew. Eleanor Wilner's memory theater is a vast and glorious gathering of years of poems that question, deepen, rage, inspire, and connect. Working from myth and history, through grief and edgy expanse, Wilner is our oracle, the generous troubling overvoice of our age, our light, our dark, and our best."-Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief "Eleanor Wilner's poems, old and new, are political in the best sense-her deep commitment to justice enhances her commitment to making good poems, which she achieves by wit, astonishing lyric skill, and compassionate intelligence. This is a gorgeously important selection of the work of one of our best poets."-Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice "There are poems in this book that I have carried in my head for decades now. They have helped me love, grieve, praise, and, at the appropriate moments, curse. It steels my spirit to know that Eleanor Wilner is still out there so avidly and lovingly attending to this hurt world of ours."-Christian Wiman, author of Once in the West Praise for Eleanor Wilner's previous books "[Wilner's] sudden flights of lyricism are disarming and dazzling."-New York Times Book Review "There is so much that is impressive in Wilner's mature poems. In an era which has been labelled 'The End of History,' she examines history's less obvious lessons. If the past is to teach us, she seems to say, then we must re-invent and re-shape it."-Poetry

"Winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, University of North Texas" Kathleen Graber is the author of two previous collections of poetry, The Eternal City (Princeton), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Correspondence. She is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Powhatan, Virginia. An impressive new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award Taking its title from Heraclitus's most famous fragment, The River Twice is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. The world presented in these poems is a fluid one in which so much-including space and time, the subterranean realm of dreams, and language itself-seems protean, as the speaker's previously familiar understanding of the self and the larger systems around it gives way. Kathleen Graber's poems wander widely, from the epistolary to the essayistic, shuffling the remarkable and unremarkable flotsam of contemporary life. One thought, one memory, one bit of news flows into the next. Yet, in a century devoted to exponentially increasing speed, The River Twice unfolds at the slow pace of a river bend. While the warm light of ideas and things flashes upon the surface, that which endures remains elusive-something glimpsed only for an instant before it is gone. "Even more powerful than the profound intelligence of Kathleen Graber's poetry is its wisdom, and its compassion for the many private and collective forms we singly and together take-forms like self, other, community, and nation. The River Twice is lyric philosophy, and a supreme consolation."-Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars "If your faith in poetry, or in the human species, has ever faltered, read these poems. If you have ever doubted that generosity of spirit and brilliance of intellect are inseparable virtues, read these poems. Kathleen Graber is one of the two or three finest poets working in America today; no one can surpass her for musicianship or moral penetration."-Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2014 Praise for Kathleen Graber's The Eternal City "Nothing short of a revelation. . . . If you only read one book of poetry this year, that's not enough, but start with this one."-Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly "[An] outstanding collection. . . . These poems are like cherishable letters from a friend abroad. . . . Graber reminds one that poetry can be the most liberating form."-Kate Kellaway, The Observer "Serious poetry as inviting as an intimate conversation. See for yourself."-Meghan O'Rourke, NPR "[Graber's] careful balancing and sensitive descriptions often feel as refreshing as a cold drink on a hot summer day."-Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"Finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, Northern California Book Reviewers" Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Almanac (Princeton), and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other publications. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California. A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere "flyover country," a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled "The Light at the End," suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smith's reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world. "The quiet rural boys and men of Smith's poems want neither colorful escape nor radical transformation, though their hard lives speak to our social system too. . . . They want to make do, get by, as disillusioned adults, and they find it harder than it should be, in part because farm life has always been hard, in part because much of America does not see, or does not want to see, them. . . . Weldon Kees, Donald Justice and, behind them, Robert Frost constitute the tradition in which Smith works, and in his hands it is political."---Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review "Inspired by his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, tales of rural life lead the way in this Austin Smith collection focused on family, violence, and memories."---Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews "Austin Smith . . . weav[es] the everyday violence of farm life into poetry that darkens the Robert Frost idyll. Flyover Country buzzes with the sober vitality of acknowledgement, refusing to recognize 'the cat you love coming back / From the windbreak' without the 'rare songbird / In his mouth.' Smith unveils the brutality of otherwise Instagram-friendly landscapes, instilling a deep sense of stability in the core of his poetry. In their logic, these poems subconsciously circumvent sensationalism - the dead bird in the jaw of the cat prevents us from posting it to Instagram."---Verity Sturm, Michigan Daily "Flyover Country by Austin Smith is a marvelous collection that conveys deep insights and exquisite details about life in the Midwest. . . . What links his subjects, as the title suggests, is the fact that seemingly invisible actions taken by Americans have lasting consequences in places we typically choose to view only from a distance."---Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post "This masterwork is pure body heat about the humane and the inhumane - how we treat

Dora Malech is the author of two previous books of poetry, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and many other publications. She is assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore. A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body's bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language. "Stet," from the Latin for "let it stand," is a proofreading term meaning to retain or return to a previous phrasing. The uncertainty of changes made and then reconsidered haunts Stet as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and the limitations of spelling. How does one "go back" on one's word or "stand by" one's decisions? Can a life be remade or revised, or is the past forever present as in a palimpsest? Embodying the physicality and reproductive potentiality inherent in the collection's forms and figures, Stet ends expectantly, not searching for closure but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what comes next. By turns troubling and consoling, Stet powerfully combines lyric invention and brilliant wordplay. "In Stet, Dora Malech adds a stiff dose of emotional urgency to formal experiment, finding in anagrams, erasures, and Oulipean constraints like the 'beautiful outlaw' a way to advance a continual re-interpretation of deeply felt content. . . . Malech's effort . . . foregrounds the beauty and power of what form-and the willingness to follow it without knowing the end result-can achieve."---Marcella Durand, Hyperallergic "[Stet] is a package of dynamite that could go off at any moment-combustible words that separate and come together like a gorgeous debris. They tweak the page with hidden truths made of language and utterances that are puzzle solvers-but what is the puzzle? Perhaps dimensionality on the page that speaks only if you want it. . . . Some pages are electro-pop, some are written by a spirit animal, but Malech's got pipes, and by God they sing."---Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books "The poems in Stet often contain a forward and backward movement enacted through language play. In [Malech's] use of anagrams and rhymes, her subtle transpositions of letters from one word to the next . . . she lays bare the process of figuring out what to tell and how to tell it, especially at times when language fails us most. . . . It is play with a purpose, because between the words and white space, 'Sometimes we step into something true.'"---Maya Phillips, American Poets "In this collection, we see a poet playing with language, cavorting with words and meanings that continue cascading into something else, something new, always metamorphosizing. This sense of play has value: Malech demonstrates her love and admiration for language as she shares poems that are playful, that are musical, and that make us think about words as arrangements of symbols that we ultimately assign meaning to. These poems remind us that poems do not always have to have a clear narrative, and their value is not necessarily in their decipherability."---Despy Boutris, Gulf Coast Magazine "[A] smart, at times pyrotechnic collection-she structures many of her lines with anagram-that is, like all great poetry, a joy to read aloud."---Spencer Hupp, Sewanee Review "I was half amazed, half inspired, fully captivated by Malech's form. Reading this book exposed me to a type o

Nate Klug is the author of the poetry collection Anyone and Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil's Eclogues. His poetry has appeared in the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and The Best American Poetry. A Congregational minister, he lives in Albany, California. An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments" Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables." "Nate Klug's Hosts and Guests examines the sometimes uneasy, shifting economies between what serves as host and what is hosted in an array of contexts, from the Anthropocene to mother and fetus. . . . But it is perhaps in his delicate, intricate syntactical suspensions and arrangements, as much as in his arresting image systems, that Klug conveys the beautiful struggle of risking love and belief in bodies seemingly made to be lost to us."---Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books "Klug is writing some of the strongest poetry you can find in American letters these days. Stoically fierce and vividly alert. The signature surfaces of a Nate Klug poem . . . are often somehow simultaneously beautifully smooth and a little edgy. But they are also chiseled and efficient, and these qualities together are a sign of the richness in the depths they signify."---Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's "Intelligent, wry, learned, and at times witty . . . Klug bears witness to the fruitful cross-pollinations of contemporary poetry and contemporary religious faith…he is worth watching. - Library Journal" "Klug is a poet of attention for whom metre is a slow-mo technology that lets you notice what's in front of you. But he also finds words for interiority, helping you notice emotions that get lost in the rush of the everyday. - James K.A. Smith, Image Journal newsletter" "Klug, at his best, can marry image, movement, and melody into precise order… I find myself…so refreshed by the poems of Hosts and Guests. - Christian Detisch, 32poems.com" "Quirky and philosophical. . . . the poems in Hosts and Guests are . . . both exploratory and concise; they wander without filler or clutter. Klug's descriptions are sharp, subtle, perceptive. . . . Here is the startling opposite of dogma's violence: a free thinker who keeps running into God despite his disavowals."---Caroline Pittman, Threepenny Review "What's the secret of these fresh and mysterious poems? In their lightness of touch, clarity, probity, and almost Japanese spareness, they bathe the ordinary in otherworldly light. Cicadas, young parents, a baby, North American bars and highways, jellyfish, a Horatian ode, the death of Pompey, religious faith feeling its way, an inchworm shrinking from em dash to hyphen-all find their places, revealed, in Nate Klug's delicately paced syntax and gracious reticence. A book both timely and ageless, a balm, a boon."-Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems "Nate Klug's Hosts and Guests is a fine book full of rich nuance, complex emotions,

From a sequence, "The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden": Gihon, that compasseth the whole land At the first frost we found our sheep with strangled hearts, lying on their backs in the frozen clover, their eyes wide open as if they were surprised by a constellation of drought or endless winter. The wolves walked into the snow, like men who have given up living without love; cows would no longer let go of their calves, hiding them deep in the birch groves. Everywhere the roads gave off their wild animal cries, running toward the edge of what we had thought was the world. And the names of things as we knew them would no longer bring them to us.

Troy Jollimore is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Syllabus of Errors (Princeton), which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of the year; and At Lake Scugog (Princeton). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Poetry, McSweeney's, and many other publications. He is professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. Website www.troyjollimore.com Twitter @TroyJollimore From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a new collection of philosophical, elegiac, and wry meditations on film, painting, music, and poetry itself Earthly Delights begins with an invocation to the muse and ends with the departure of Odysseus from Ithaca. In between, Troy Jollimore's distinguished new collection ranges widely, with cinematic and adventurous poems that often concern artistic creation and its place in the world. A great many center on films, from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia to Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. The title poem reflects on Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, while another is an elegy for Gord Downie, the lead singer and lyricist for the cult rock band The Tragically Hip. Other poems address various forms of political insanity, from the Kennedy assassination to today's active shooter drills, and philosophical ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's musings on beauty to John D. Rockefeller's thoughts on the relation between roses and capitalist ethics. The book's longest poem, "American Beauty," returns repeatedly to the film of that name, but ultimately becomes a meditation on the Western history of making and looking, and-like many of the book's poems-an elegy for lost things. "National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Jollimore presents a new poetry collection richly infused with classical mythology and analysis of classic movies, plays, works of art, and literature, and of relation to creations. . . . Jollimore offers unique perspectives on the self we play at being and the self we are or think we are in poems about singular characters in such films as No Country for Old Men, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Being John Malkovich. Jollimore's immersions raise the question, Are we simply vessels to be filled?" "[A] ruminative, elegant fourth book by Jollimore. . . . As the book's title [Earthly Delights] suggests, Jollimore's delight and pleasure in description is evident in these gorgeously textured poems that are equally full of intellectual inquiry and feeling." "Sophisticated yet accessible, this sonorous work addresses life in an unillusioned way and will appeal widely." "The poetry excels . . . where Jollimore incorporates his concern of the contemporary observer with the unique situations of today: corporate public relations, movie theaters, and a devastated environment."---Keene Carter, Colorado Review "This engaging and unusual book mixes humor, philosophy, and political ire, drawing repeatedly on film references to examine palimpsestic constructions of the self-the 'slipping in and out of roles,' the possibility of two people seeing through a single pair of eyes, the next life that is likewise an earlier life. Jollimore's riveting language is both familiar and uncanny, somehow as lean and precise as it is lexically rich."-Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Twice Alive "Earthly Delights is full of parentheticals, ellipses, allusions, and contradictions. Jollimore's poems delight in syntax that tries, through capacious twists and turns, to locate what is the real. They raise philosophical questions about nostalgia and representation, melancholy and pleasure that Jollimore never attempts to resolve, preferring instead to place the reader where 'everything is / in flux and ungraspable.' A vibrant, restless, and deeply intelligent collection."-Paisley Re

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky: CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky Against weather, and the random Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws Of biography, chance, physics-- The unseasonable soul holds forth, Eager for form as a renowned Pedant, the emperor's man of worth, Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy. As the small children learn, what happens Takes over, and what you were goes away. They learn it in sardonic soft Comments of the weather, when it sharpens The hard surfaces of daylight: light Winds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokes All over a wrecked house, The nude wallpaper and the brute Intelligence of the torn pipes. Therefore when you marry or build Pray to be untrue to the plain Dominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when not A soul is there, and how it implies Always that separate, cold Splendidness, uncouth and unkind-- On chilly, unclouded mornings, Torrential sunlight and moist air, Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist. "Remarkable. . . What [these poems] are attempting is important: nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience."---Hugh Kenner, The Los Angeles Times Book Review "The pleasures of Pinsky. . . . are the unfashionable, or at least the unfamiliar, ones of sanity, the cool entertainment of alternatives, and the conviction. . . that speech. . . is not only interesting but shares with both lyric and nonsense a certainty of resonance. . . ."---Richard Howard, Poetry "It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic."-Robert Lowell

From Before Recollection: TRANSCENDENTAL POSTCARD Ann Lauterbach The outlook such that time is told on waking, Without aid of cock or clock's crow. In fact all the birds are elsewhere, Poised on glossy page or in some fall Migration. Sun up over mountain is precision, Then mist travels, exhaling day. All else, all change, is air, Dew relenting on the blades And mirror rhymes Where water bears resemblance: A strut of hues to pale even Revlon's alchemy and, In the center of its glaze, a cauldron of sky-cast blue. "Lauterbach's philosophical poems are concerned with the naming of things, with our perception of emotions, ideas, and objects. . . . [a] small, memorable collection. . ."

"Finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize, Arrowsmith Press" Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1997. He is the author of the chapbook Nearness, and his poems have appeared in many publications, including the Paris Review, Brittle Paper, and Lolwe. He lives in New York City. The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry Please make me pretty, I don't want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher's assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem "prayers" and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: "The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country." "Incredible. . . .A stunningly good book of poems."---Elisa Gabbert, New York Times "Tawanda Mulalu's first book is an energetic and energizing assemblage of restlessly shifting modes, juggling forms and shuffling styles. The linguistic playfulness that animates his poems conceals neither their serious intent nor their underlying melancholy."---Troy Jollimore, Washington Post "A sensory and exciting debut. . . . These inventive, lyrical, and well-crafted poems offer memorable insights at every turn." "The collection's energy is constant, and some of the poems' most straightforward moments are the most affecting. . . . A sharp, playful, and thoughtful work for poetry lovers." "These fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. . . . [Please make me pretty, I don't want to die] presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image." "I am moved by the cool, wounded clarity of Tawanda Mulalu's poems, and startled by their flashes of stark, irrefutable knowing. Please make me pretty, I don't want to die is an elegy, an aria, a prayer for bodies-and a nation-and a planet-on some dire cusp."-Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States "Mulalu is very much aware of his Black body and the America around him-of the shootings, all the anxieties of being 'there,' and the simple yet difficult task of going outside. But at the same time he has created with such clarity this incredible archive of arias, elegies, prayers, and song. These are a delight to read and to listen to, a frenzied spring of hope."-Clifton Gachagua, author of Madman at Kilifi "The resonant tone of dreams is never far from Tawanda Mulalu's deliciously and wildly imaginative lines, even though this dreamer is wide awake. Everything this poet touches shows plainly a genuine strangeness, as if it had just come into existence. He discovers a new world at every turn of the street, with wit as well as wonder. In line after line, he sings."-Cal Bedient, author of The Breathing Place

"Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, Arrowsmith Press" Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including The Ruined Elegance (Princeton), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has also translated more than a dozen books of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poetry. She lives in Paris. The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "a master of musicality and enlightening allusions." In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls "creating between liberties." With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, "I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn." Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl-each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life. "A splendid follow-up to the LJ best-booked The Ruined Elegance with broader appeal." "Fiona Sze-Lorrain's fourth book of original poems, Rain in Plural . . . uses language to uncover questions of citizenship, memory, and image. We love Sze-Lorrain's lush, musical sensibilities. . . . If you've enjoyed her work in the past, you're sure to enjoy Rain in Plural, too!" "The poetry in her newest collection, Rain in Plural, is neither a mélange nor a mosaic of cultural, intellectual and linguistic referents, but a deeply intertwined layering . . . Sze-Lorrain seems at home and a visitor everywhere, connecting dots across cultures and continents, dipping into languages and cuisines. If there is a globalized future for English-language literature, this is perhaps an early glance at it."---Asian Review of Books, Peter Gordon "Provocative . . . lyrical. . . . These lovely poems slide between equally compelling realities that don't seem to belong together but ultimately unify and bring sense, compassion, and beauty."---Kyle Torke, Colorado Review "The collection reveals the inner-life of a truly remarkable poet. Radiantly intelligent, Sze-Lorrain's work is as musically intoxicating as the zheng she plays with precision . . . Rain in Plural is a collection of poetry deserving of multiple reads in the quietude of soft light over one's left shoulder."---Michael Escoubas, Quill & Parchment "Rain in Plural is a collection that quietly insists on your attention."---Lisa Higgs, The Adroit Journal "There is something for every reader in Rain in Plural . . . Rain in Plural is an invitation to a myriad of entanglements with the inner life, and what grows from the seeds planted there."---Hannah VanderHart, EcoTheo Review "Rain in Plural is a lush and intimate study of the porous boundaries of personal life. Inflected with quietude and hardened by rigorous examination, Sze-Lorrain's careful eye ranges over landscapes both within and outside the self, mining language for new entry points." "Fiona Sze-Lorrain's much-awaited fourth poetry collection, Rain in Plural, is a polyphonic gathering of wide-ranging themes. . . . Sze-Lorrain's work allows us to grasp, for a moment, the points of contact that translation perpetually seeks. Therein lies the philosophical importance of Rain in Plural: eschewing equivalence, Sze-Lorrain c

Gary J. Whitehead is the author of two previous collections of poetry. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been featured on Garrison Keillor's public radio program the Writer's Almanac. Whitehead teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in New York's Hudson Valley. An inventive and observant collection of lyric poems from the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets With skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead's lyrics root around in the earth searching for sustenance, cluck rather than crow, and possess a humble majesty. Confronting subjects such as moral depravity, nature's indifference, aging, illness, death, the tenacity of spirit, and the possibility of joy, the poems in this collection are accessible and controlled, musical and meditative, imagistic and richly figurative. They are informed by history, literature, and a deep interest in the natural world, touching on a wide range of subjects, from the Civil War and whale ships, to animals and insects. Two poems present biblical narratives, the story of Lot's wife and an imagining of Noah in his old age. Other poems nod to favorite authors: one poem is in the voice of the character Babo, from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, while another is a kind of prequel to Emily Dickinson's "She rose to His Requirement." As inventive as they are observant, these memorable lyrics strive for revelation and provide their own revelations. "Whitehead's poems are learned without being fussy, masterfully observant and complete. He provides a seriously good time. . . . He is attentive in ways that offer a digestible, quirky adhesiveness. . . . [L]ike Tobias Wolff or other contemporaries in that league, Whitehead blurs with perfection the line between story-telling and poetry. . . . I repeat. Masterfully observant and complete."---Barbara Berman, Rumpus "It's skillful and beautiful without being twee, and like every book I'm about to mention, it deserves a wide audience. It's also gently amusing, with some high-flying acrobatics thrown in that never feel forced."---Barbara Berman, TheRumpus.net "[T]o reread his book is to see its invention--and to wish it were longer."---Stephen Burt, Yale Review "A distinctive, quiet-voiced, sharp-eyed collection."---Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator. She is the author of The Perforated Map and Unknowne Land, and her poems have appeared in the Nation, Denver Quarterly, the New York Times, and many other publications. Her translation of Bernard Noël's The Rest of the Voyage won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. She was born in Mexico City, spent her childhood in Paris, and now lives in New York City. A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories-and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature. Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before. "Scaffolding is a profound meditation. . . . [O]ne cannot but fall in love with the book, and its city, that Rivera has given us."---Ankit Basnet, Cincinnati Review "Scaffolding represents a vibrant, exploratory addition to the venerable and diverse New York tradition of 'city sonnets.' As among the teeming, gridded streets, the poems' play of pattern and randomness generates an electric dialogue between self and world, a dialogue replete as well with sonorous echoes from past and present masters (Roubaud, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Christensen, Coleridge, Wyatt, Donne, et al.). One poem declares, 'what small joy then / the fitting of these wild pieces together.' Indeed."-Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx "In faceted and fascinating turns of mind, these uncanny sonnets build a sensational edifice of canonical form and advanced lyricism. Eléna Rivera is a wonderful poet."-Peter Gizzi, author of In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

"One of The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2015 (selected by David Orr)" Troy Jollimore is the author of two previous collections of poetry, At Lake Scugog (Princeton) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, the Believer, and other publications. He is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico. A new collection of poetry from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award . . . we are fixed to perpetrate the species- I meant perpetuate-as if our duty were coupled with our terror. As if beauty itself were but a syllabus of errors. Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book," and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore's first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal. Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha's Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo," is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet's favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?" "Intelligent, soulful and amusingly self-aware."---David Orr, New York Times Book Review "Equal parts craftsman, pundit, comedian, and aphorist, Jollimore applies an impressive range of skills to lift his elegiac meditations beyond simple poignancy, not the least of which are a flair for wry wordplay and the versatility to cast his 'objectified thoughts' in unanticipated directions." "A philosophy professor, Jollimore provides a banquet table's worth of food for thought, but he never lets his ideas race too far ahead of his imagery, allows melancholic fatalism to submerge his acute sense of humor, or permits irony to eclipse the heartfelt sense of loss and longing at the core of his poetry." "Anyone who has turned to nature in the wake of tragedy will immediately relate to the poetry in Troy Jollimore's collection Syllabus of Errors. The poems themselves makeup a series of meditations informed by bird songs, and travel from the environment populated by birds and fruit through the landscape of loss and grief. And like nature, the observer of this grief will wither, and lose, and rise renewed."---E. Ce Miller, Bustle "From the first lyric, 'On Birdsong,' one is captivated by Jollimore's unapologetic embrace of complex thought, of humor, doubt and praise. . . . While the poems [in Syllabus of Errors] play with rhyme and form, experiment with line length and syntax, it is the poet's vision that stands out, not his formal mastery. This, of course, is the real trick."---Meryl Natchez, ZYZZYVA "Thanks be to the powers of serious play. Rueful, resourceful, witty, and tender, Troy Jollimore's poems are at once a triumph of virtuosity and an extraordinary tribute to the amplitude of the human heart. Tonic in their clarity of means, joyful in their engagement with form, they also bespeak the rigor of a philosophical mind. I know no living poet who has been able to pursue such large ambitions with so transparent an instrument."-Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected

"Finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry" "One of Library Journal's Best Books 2015: Poetry" Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist. The author of two previous books of poetry in English, My Funeral Gondola and Water the Moon, she also writes and translates in French and Chinese. She lives in Paris. A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment. "The poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's The Ruined Elegance resonate with a voice that is both fragile and strong, physical and metaphysical, ancient and contemporary. As such, the collection serves as a sounding board for the powerful silence that echoes through language over the ages and across the continents. A master of musicality and enlightening allusions, Sze-Lorrain has written an English-language collection that is both accessible to a wide audience and rewarding to the closest of readers."---Christina Cook, The Rumpus "Highly crafted and interesting. . . . Sze-Lorrain does a compelling job of touching on new topics on each page. There is a lot of variation in style and the poems are relatively short with concise language, which makes this a fluid, informative, albeit sometimes difficult, read."---Brenna Marcuccilli, Pamplemousse "[Fiona Sze-Lorrain], who has lived in Europe, America and Asia, draws from every aspect of her broad perspective in this poetry collection. Lyricism and wisdom intertwine as she urges acute observation rather than an impossible search for exact truth: 'Believe me, / answers are small.'"---Aiyanna K. White, Columbia College Today "Sze-Lorrain's new book, a sharp requiem of buried emotionalism, fuses her serious imagination with an especially musically charged mind."---David Biespiel, American Poetry Review "Sze-Lorrain's new book of poems marks a fresh refinement in her art."---Michael Oliver, Antigonish Review "In the beginning was silence: Fiona Sze-Lorrain's poems honor this, 'trying to measure / a quiet too pure / and transparent for humans.' These are poems of delicate ferocity; they seem to emerge from a profound yet whiplashed attentiveness. Sze-Lorrain registers the subtlest vibrations of the most difficult as well as the tenderest things-twentieth-century atrocities make themselves felt in a gesture in a prison, a buried book, 'a revolution in the draft' of a feather. Also: poems, paintings, the eddies of sociable chat, 'the last / Manchurian sky,' the color of rain. Shards of elegy, lament, intermittent flashes of wit, a philosophical sensuality throughout: this is subtle, sophisticated, gorgeous, and

"Winner of a 2015 Whiting Award, Whiting Foundation" "Finalist for the 2012 Levis Reading Prize, Virginia Commonwealth University" Anthony Carelli was raised in Poynette, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before completing an MFA in poetry at New York University. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including the New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first book. In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet's materials-words, objects, phenomena-are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed. Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Carnations reminds us that unremarkable places and events-a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café-can, in a blink, be new. A short walk home is briefly transformed into a cathedral, and the work-worn body becomes a dancer, a prophet, a muse. ______ From Carnations: THE PROPHETS Anthony Carelli A river. And if not the river nearby, then a dream of a river. Nothing happens that doesn't happen along a river, however humble the water may be. Take Rowan Creek, the trickle struggling to lug its mirroring across Poynette, wherein, suspended, so gentle and shallow, I learned to walk, bobbing at my father's knees. Later, whenever we tried to meander on our inner tubes, we'd get lodged on the bottom. Seth, remember, no matter how we'd kick and shove off, we'd just get lodged again? At most an afternoon would carry us a hundred feet toward the willows. We'd piss ourselves on purpose just to feel the spirits of our warmth haloing out. And once, two bald men on the footbridge, bowing in the sky, stared down at us without a word. "[Carelli] is able to write in a way that allows for the sublime and the absurd to come together. But Carelli's free-flowering humour never distracts from his purpose and the ending is masterly. . . . Reading these uncommonly fluent poems is like being on a raft in a fast river. It is rewarding to go with the flow, trust and keep the faith (as Carelli tries to do)."---Kate Kellaway, The Observer "Carelli's debut introduces a voice as refreshingly contemporary as it is pleasantly expansive in its subject matter. . . . The results are as elegant and eloquent as they are humane and believable." "In the symbology of flowers, carnations in general indicate affection. There is no poem entitled 'Carnations' in Carelli's first collection. But affection is its master mood, the affection of a vital young man for the world of his experience. . . . They're real experiences, conducive to mixed feelings, yet Carelli writes of them in language so enlivening and fresh that they become blessings."---Ray Olson, Booklist "[A] promisingly talented writer."---Benjamin Ivry, Newark Star-Ledger "Carnations pays homage to the poet's masters and ushers in an exciting new talent. . . . This wonderful collection is as good a guide as they get."---Piotr Florczyk, On the Seawall blog "This is a magnificent book. . . . Ooh! God bless these poems!"---Raphael Allison, Rain Taxi Review of Books "Warm, conversational and colloquial."---Keith Richmond, Tribune

Troy Jollimore's first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Believer, among other publications. He teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico. This is an eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a "snappy, entertaining book." A triumphant follow-up to that acclaimed debut, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." Jollimore is a professional philosopher, and in witty and profound ways his formally playful poems dramatize philosophical subjects--especially the individual's relation to the larger world, and the permeable, constantly shifting border between "inner" and "outer." For instance, the speaker of "The Solipsist," suspecting that the entire world "lives inside of your skull," wonders "why / God would make ear and eye / to face outward, not in." And Tom Thomson--a character who also appeared in Jollimore's first book--finds himself journeying like an astronaut through the far reaches of the space that fills his head, an experience that prompts him to ask that a doorbell be installed "on the inside," so that he can warn the world before "intruding on't." ______ From At Lake Scugog: LOBSTERS Troy Jollimore ? tend to cluster in prime numbers, sub- oceanic bundles of bug consciousness submerged in waking slumber, plunged in pits of murk-black water. They have coalesced out of the pitch and grime and salt suspended within that atmospheric gloom. Their skin is colorless below. But when exposed to air, they start to radiate bright green, then, soon, a siren red that wails: I'm dead. The meat inside, though, is as white as teeth, or the hard-boiled egg that comes to mind when one cracks that crisp shell and digs beneath. Caress the toothy claw-edge of its pincer and you will know the single, simple thought that populates its mind. The lobster trap is elegance itself: one moving part: the thing that's caught. "This sophomore effort mostly continues in the first book's nervous, witty, self-conscious, and at time self-despising modes. . . . Pantoun, epigram, terza rima, puns, and invented forms with new rhyming requirements make much of the volume a pleasure in terms of technique. . . . Altogether different and hard to forget are poems on which Jollimore concludes: stern, vulnerable, lyrical reactions to environmental peril." "In this second outing by 2006's National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for Tom Thomson in Purgatory), the poet considers age-old but vexing philosophical dualities: appearance vs. reality, mind vs. body, belief vs. knowledge. Given his day job as a philosophy professor, these aren't surprising subjects; what surprises is the deftness with which he handles them, conjuring great American songbook lyricists ('Don't be misled:/ that sea-song you hear/ when the shell's at your ear?/ It's all in your head') more readily than Descartes or Heidegger. . . . Seriously playful ('no screw-up goes unscrew-/ tinized') or playfully serious ('no man's an iPod'), Jollimore adds buoyancy to weighty human dilemmas without trivializing or distancing them. An engaging collection." "Troy Jollimore, a philosophy prof at Chico State, won a National Book Critics Circle prize with his first poetry collection; his second, At Lake Scugog, is easily that good. In lush language draped over familiar forms, Jollimore explores the nature of the self, but don't let that frighten you off. He's got a great sense of humor and an equal fondness for a pun and a laugh, as in Tom Thomson in Tune": "no man's an iPod." Take that, John Donne!"---Kel Munger, Sacramento News & Review "Fans of Tom Thompson in Purgatory a

Austin Smith was born in the rural Midwest. Most recently, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land. This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry. From Almanac: THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM Austin Smith Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks or the molds of busts donated by the Art Institute of Chicago to this dying town's little museum, there was a mummy, a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit room by himself. I used to go to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh who, expecting an afterlife of beautiful virgins and infinite food and all the riches and jewels he'd enjoyed in earthly life, must have wondered how the hell he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois. And I used to go alone into that room and stand beside his sarcophagus and say, "My friend, I've asked myself the same thing." "[A] lucid debut. . . . [S]elf-contained, compact stories [that] will stick in the mind for a while." "Smith's close familiarity with the everyday tragedies of our human existence is recorded in diction that is readily accessible to the average reader, but which has a depth that is capable of resounding through the hearts and souls of his audience, facilitating their response, even if they come from an essentially nonpoetic background. . . . Smith's work is well worth investing in, so do consider acquiring yourself a copy--he is clearly a modern-day poet who deserves your attention."---Lois Henderson, Bookpleasures.com "Almanac by Austin Smith is a magical collection of lyrical poems which mark, and mourn, the passing of a way of life, of the small family farmer, in the rural Midwest. . . . It's a stunning first collection, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the reinvigorated Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets."---Keith Richmond, Tribune "Smith's farm disasters make memorable reading if you care about poetry whether or not you care very much about farms."---Stephanie Burt, Yale Review