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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…

From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, an extraordinary collection—at once urbane and earthy—that navigates the thoroughfares and tributaries of human nature.

Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, these poems take the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. This remarkable collection captures the ineffable experience…

California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—these poems take on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation. This collection offers…

At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way. With wit and energy, these poems define the author’s existence as…

Musician. Curmudgeon. Trailblazer. Prairie populist. Teacher. World traveler. Cultural critic. Humanitarian. Scholar. Skeptic. Insightful humorist. Charismatic speaker. Firebrand. Seer. This collection of new and selected poems paints a portrait of…

Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem.

The verse here merges subject and…

A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in these poems often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience. This…

Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism…

From the revulsion on a child’s face as the speaker’s recovering body struggles to walk after a stroke, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. This collection engages…

Rapturous and electric, these poems take us through a glittering underworld of illness and recovery, on a confrontational, explosive trip that is at once euphoric and brutal. Without relying on familiar narratives of despair and pity, this collection…

Written over the course of three decades, this extraordinary collection of new and selected poems is expressive variously of love and rage, vulnerability and authority, distraction and focus, and, perhaps above all, a sharply empathetic sense of…

From the copper plate of an Intaglio print to the patched muslin form of a dressmaker’s mannequin to the maddered boy taking shape on a loom, these poems transform the ephemeral into the eternal. Along the way, the collection combines an affection…

This collection of poems tells the story of a woman named Bead and her search for safe harbor. The maritime International Code of Signals—a dictionary of ship’s pennants and the message they convey—becomes a symbolic guide to Bead’s journey, as she…

In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies. The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas “grind their teeth/under the blue roof of…

Offering perspectives both intimate and expansive in nature, these poems are informed by the immediate, rural landscape of Wyoming, as well as sociopolitical forces outside the speaker’s control. This collection speaks to an American consciousness…

With firm roots in science and the natural world, the author’s poems have been compared to Emerson’s and Whitman’s. She has written about motherhood, art, science, spirituality, and the tension between humanity and wildness. This edition presents the…

Drawing from history, ethnography, and anthropology, this collection speaks to Afro-Cuban heritage, magic, syncretic religion, and legacies of displacement and assimilation. These poems bring to life a distinct mesh of grit and beauty, sound and…

The impending death of his elderly father leads the narrator of this book-length poem back to the particular mystery of the sacramental self, the terror and the necessity of bearing witness. These powerful eulogies testify that the courage to die is…