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This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged but also startlingly lush, and even its...
This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, in dialogue with science, geography, art, and aesthetics...
Selected by Victoria Chang, this winner of the Jake Adam York Prize is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being. With arresting lyricism and humility, these poems attend to...
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart...
Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. And rain, endless rain: turning pulpy with sunlight, seemingly on the verge of a flood. These are the moments of an ordinary day—rendered, throughout these poems...
This is a collection about time—about memory, and remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography: in these poems, objects hold history, even if they’ve grown...
The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind—breathes new life...
A companion volume to The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom. But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, these poems take...
A final collection fully inscribed with the daring of the author’s acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. These poems brush up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force...
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. This collection shows us the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying...
The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive. In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention;...
Love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved, finding tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared. This is a collection that translates between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word ...
This collection deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. From experiences defined by an urban landscape...
This masterful companion to Day Unto Day finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. Like its predecessor, this collection begins with time: six sequences, each written...
The Trakl siblings were gifted and troubled: Georg a poet, Grete a pianist, and both gone at a young age. Inspired by their mysterious and intense relationship, the winner of the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a keening...
Finalist for the Midwest Book Award
From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting love.
Writing love poems fifty years into a marriage is no easy task...
Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, this collection is a darkly humorous and unsparingly honest catechism of the self. Why? these poems ask. Why our cruelty? Why our loneliness? And how do we connect?
One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection. These poems, crafted with the care of a master gardener tending his topiary, seem to...
Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia. In these poems we see both the lost and the bereaved, the...
Deepwater Horizon, Hurricane Katrina, Flint: this is the litany of our time, and these are the events traced in these poems, invoking the poet as moral witness. Incorporating interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources,...
At once profoundly intimate and ambitiously broad in scope, this collection explores the place of individual losses and joys in the context of greater historical tragedy and triumph. In a multiplicity of voices and tones, these poems reflect on...