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These poems exist in the wake of catastrophe: rogue gunmen, debt, hoax bombs, riots, and consumerism all haunt its pages. And yet this collection cuts through pain to open up a way forward, thrumming with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of…
Elegant and contemplative, these poems explore what it means for our lives to change—dwelling on the moments decisions are made, from a move to a new job to the birth of a child, and the repercussions we grow with afterward. This collection stares…
The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important…
Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is filled with explosive wit and humor. Yet even at their most surreal—whether taking as their subject a Kaiser Permanente hospital, Shark Week, or…
This National Poetry Series winner follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. From Nancy Drew to Cinderella, the familiar yet surprising speakers of these…
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”
Inspired by ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites, this collection captures the intersection of the natural world and sacred art. These poems fill this space with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight suggest the impermanence of life…
These are poems of absence, written in the wake of terrible loss. Addressing death, art, travel, and beauty—assembling a guide to survival in the face of the seemingly insurmountable—this collection finds, in mourning, what it means to survive.
This collection takes the physical, elemental world as its point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape. Some of these poems begin with the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—while others emerge from a…
Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, this collection mines the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence. In the South, “lard sizzles a sermon from the stove”; in Chicago, we feast on an “opera of peppers and pimento”…
These poems relocate the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Drawing inspiration from the high school relationship between Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom, they do with language what miners have always done to the earth…
This collection takes as its subject the moment when emotion and energy flood a work of art. Inspired by the work of artists as chronologically and geographically diverse as Brueghel, Anish Kapoor, Caravaggio, and James Turrell, these poems seek not…
A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a…
A handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. This National Poetry Series winner pulls shards of tenderness—and a transformative, regenerative force—from a world where…
Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and…
During one month each year, for six years, the author wrote a short poem each day. The resulting six sequences of this masterly collection offer haunting reflections on time, and capture the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another.
In unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload and tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, these poems blur the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. This is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by the…
From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Minnesota and Georgia—and from the intimate messages of the heart to the global immigration of African Americans—these poems explore with urgency the relationships among travel, alienation, and home. Part…
Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. This breathtaking anthology brings together…
The winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry probes the depths of the human psyche. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed patient…
Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that comes…
Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But where—asks this intense and ambitious National Poetry Series winner—is the Color Line in the mind, in the body…
Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, this collection crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, and the bonds that bring them together. In these poems, the female body rises from a foundation of stars; songbirds are cut…
These are poems rooted in the flatlands and lowlands: the Midwestern lawns, fields, lakes, and creeks of the author’s childhood, and the farms, canals, and seascapes near her family home’s in Holland. And from these seemingly empty spaces—and the…
Navigating both depression and the search for inspiration, this collection sits at the threshold between faith and doubt, the visible and the invisible, the physical and the metaphysical. These poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we…
A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and…
This collection shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. From Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty to a train hurdling along the west-reaching…
In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. The resulting collection is varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered.
Taking their inspiration from the alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are both humble and exotic. Highly ambitious and astonishingly beautiful, this collection deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in…
These haunting and crystalline poems examine the moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person realizes he can barely see the place he set out from, and must make his way back to the present. In this journey, Thoreau’s “border life”…
This haunted and haunting collection swings between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems explore how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we…
This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical…
A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City”—an unnamed, crowded place. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our…
Drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, and Turkish proverbs—this winner of the American Book Award explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration. These poems reveal a…
In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision. Touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our…