Auto Mechanic’s Daughter

Charting the vicissitudes of her own life, and the travails and triumphs of the lives of those whom she knows and loves, Harryman's poems travel great distances, both internally and geographically, from the Kentucky of her youth to the California of her present moment (with a detour in Europe). In this movement we encounter moments of wisdom and insight, the small epiphanies derived from love and loss, grief and celebration, dreams and nightmares, curses and blessings . . . from gratitude and despair. Auto Mechanic's Daughter is a lyrical journey into life's private places and the small joys encountered there.

eel on reef

In eel on reef, award-winning writer Uche Nduka challenges every expectation of an African poet. His unique voice is a heady amalgam of Christopher Okigbo, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Kamau Brathwaite, and something only Uche can bring. In reading Nduka's poetry, the reader is encouraged to enjoy each instant, each image, while resisting the instinct to construct linear meaning in the poems.

Even though Nduka is acutely aware of his landscape and the politics of his world as an African poet, he knows that while writing out of--and sometimes against--a tradition that seems bent on didacticism, he is also unable to ignore the rituals of lament and protest that one associates with that tradition.

Gomer's Song

Gomer's Song is a contemporary reinterpretation of a Bible story. Gomer, a harlot, was the wife of the Old Testament prophet Hosea. But even after marriage to Hosea, she refused to conform to her expected role. In Gomer, poet Kwame Dawes finds the subject for a beautiful contemporary exploration on the cost of arriving at freedom with an uneasy grace.

The Ravenous Audience

Kate Durbin’s debut volume is not for the weak of gut. Cum, blood, vomit, and other bodily juices slop off the page in a grotesque reanimation of history and art’s female villains and s/heroes. Unlike other feminist revisionist texts, The Ravenous Audience refuses to rescue the “misunderstood” bitches of our cultural past, instead viscerally imposing the scope of their bodily and existential horrors — including each woman’s culpability. Durbin even throws the reader, and the poet, into the cauldron. Complicating all easy notions of responsibility, she points the finger in every direction possible — before biting it clean off!

The Lesser
Tragedy Of Death

In a collection of poems that is part biography, part dialogue, part history and part chorale, The Lesser Tragedy of Death aims to capture the ephemeral, brutal life of one unnamed "brother." His sister's voice provides the narrative thrust--probing, questioning, regretful--revisiting scenes from their past and arguing with her brother over the family legacy and her complicity in his demise.

What happened that led this gentle, generous boy to a world of drugs, homelessness, and crime? What upheavals, personal and political, spun their lives in such radically different directions? Who bears responsibility? The sister tries to piece together their stories from discordant shards, hearsay, speculation, witnessing. Her reports are contested by the brother, corroborated by unreliable others, undermining the nature of inquiry itself.

Controlled Decay

Controlled Decay, Gabriela Jauregui's debut poetry collection, is animated by a rich sense of language's polyglot permeability, which she uses to explore the interpenetration of manifold cultural spaces, from the sublime to the grotesque. Beautiful and wounding moments manifest in her unique lyrical and political engagement with the world.

These poems emerge from points of connection and slippage where present and past, human and animal, converge. They range across a stunning variety of poetic landscapes and voices: from a dance hall in East Los Angeles to a steam bath in Morocco; from the author's native Mexico City subway system to the intimacy of a grave; from a guerrilla army commander's voice to that of a poet who is self-conscious of the weighty lineage she inherits. Jauregui pushes the boundaries of form and language: We find short puzzle-like metaphysical poems that resonate deeply, and also longer rhythmic ones that break open narrative. In all her poems, Jauregui's watchful street savvy and sensual attention to words incorporate her responses to the world that surrounds us and give palpable form to the pirates, birds, dancers, witches, and mothers who come to life in her work.

Globetrotter
and Hitler's Children

Globetrotter & Hitler's Children is a book of two sequences, melded beautifully and seamlessly, both of which are the shape of the poet's consciousness and body in relation to space and place. Globetrotter is an immigrant's paean to the city of Toronto, while Hitler's Children is a poet's struggle with race, otherness, and Germany in the spirit of witness, passion, humor, melancholy, and understanding.

Conduit

Conduit is infused with the cacophony of everyday existence and the neon dance of dreams. This intricate debut by Khadijah Queen channels the unbroken murmurs between body and spirit, methodically traversing an uncertain reality on a path that moves beyond the edges of words.

In deference to Plato, Cratylus, and Central American rituals, Conduit exposes a tender core, fearlessly pulling away the roughened muslin of our shared human skin.

Abstraktion
Und Einfühlung

If you said "cubism" fifteen times, you would be getting close to some of what Percival Everett, a famous novelist and gifted painter himself, is playing with in this new book of poems. In words that mimic process, the poems here attempt to reverse the canvas, taking perspective and skewing it to reflect the world around it, spiraling into the work as a way to get out of it. Often what stands in the way of art is art itself, a lingering delusion that there is such a thing as beauty, especially universal beauty. The same is true of a belief in transcendence. To buy into it is to merely substitute one word for another, to fall prey to a correspondence theory of truth.

to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length

This groundbreaking poetry collection is a work of interval, delay, and retracing--a writing of shifts of silence. Each page serves as a kind of frame that superimposes itself temporally, aurally, and visually on the pages that come before and after to produce a process of both afterimage and surfacing. Inspired by the process of painting and over-painting a canvas--the perceptual and image-layering found in processes of superimposition--To Be Hung from the Ceiling by Strings of Varying Length explores both the creation and decay of memory and perception through phases of sound and space, whereby seeing and writing generate and erase themselves simultaneously.

re: f(gesture)

An author who dances with language as effortlessly as Fred Astaire. —
— Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael

Has No Kinsmen

Has No Kinsman is an amazing exploration of the soul of all that is abstract and yet is more real for it. Kim's language is supple, sensual and these poems are emblematic.
— Chris Abani