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Aurally rich, structurally varied and inventive, sensually textured, these are poems at once passionate and analytical, descriptive and meditative, lyrical and complex—poems that keep one eye on the moon while leveling their gaze at the self and its immediate world. With an alert nuanced intelligence, a sinuous flexible line, Moldaw’s poems turn swiftly and sharply, surprising us in their range and ease, their visionary core. While, in the quoted words of the painter Agnes Martin, “the mind knows what the eye has not seen,” Moldaw’s exact and sometimes challenging language bring eye and mind together, with revelatory transparency. A wild fire brings into focus her daughter’s unknown birth mother; a columbary outside the hospital window becomes a columbarium as she comes to terms with a friend’s dying of AIDS; tossing the I Ching coins affords the occasion for a long meditative sequence built on distilled moments; overheard piano music catalyzes a reverie of longing; Walter de Maria’s sculpture Lightning Field inspires a layered, penetrating rumination on art and life’s “multi-angled interrelationships.” Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars, Moldaw constructs poetry of imaginative daring that illuminates and transforms the life within us all, repeatedly achieving, to quote from The New Yorker, “lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” -
The poems in Synergos smack of Whitman and Martí, two of Roberto Manzano’s most important influences; they outsoar anything pedestrian, even in celebrating the here and now and the close-to-hand. Translated by Steven Reese, the collection covers Manzano’s poetry from his earliest to his most recent work, which won the 2005 Nicolás Guillén Prize, one of Cuba’s highest awards. The text includes a substantial amount of interview material that clarifies Manzano’s poetics and places it within the traditions of recent Cuban poetry. Manzano’s writing offers a window into contemporary Cuban life in its attention to the local landscape and environment, an attention that won Manzano the 2007 Samuel Feijóo Prize for Poetry and the Environment. But its greatest achievement lies in making, from the local and everyday, a poetry that is unmistakably universal. “Manzano’s poems go beyond the traditionally circumscribed lyric, beyond the often humble and household range of so many contemporary poems. Translating those poems, and talking with Manzano about his work, was to experience that energy and ambition at close range, too close indeed to avoid being affected by it permanently Manzano offers one of the great gifts of translation—to be changed oneself in the process of that other, impossible change: moving a poem out of one language into another.”—Steven Reese, translator of Synergos -
Toucans in the Arctic is an inspired truant from any number of poetical schools. In this lyric case study of tumult and tranquility, the poet, tour pamphlet in hand, wanders through the national park of the psyche, noting surfeits of beauty and ruin as he scrambles across the eerie landscapes of identity and marriage. “In this long-awaited first collection, Toucans in the Arctic, Scott Coffel writes, ‘When I see a woman at the Cottage Bakery/immersed in Ulysses or The Brothers Karamzov/my desires align themselves in neat rows/for the march into liberated Paris…’ Of wide reference and deep thought, of language taut and somehow new, these are 21st Century poems of joy, rage, erudition, wry humor, monumental tenderness. You will remember the day you discovered this book.”—Suzanne ClearyAwards
[icon color="#dbbb5c" size="14" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]2010 —Poetry Society The Norma Farber First Book Award -
Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch. “Thorpe Moeckel’s Venison is civilized and wild, like a life lived well, a barbaric yawp of pain and joy and true wonder at the brilliant ordinariness of a life lived close to the earth and close to the bone. Moeckel’s fine poetic is whetted on the visceral and cannily transcendental. Read it.”—Christopher Camuto “This wonderfully layered poem shows us ‘how to come to know the woods such that you dream them through the eyes of the deer. This is the praise song of the hunter and the world he hunts.”—Michael Chitwood -
Through a variety of questions both overt and embedded, the poetry and prose poems in this collection explore the inexplicable too-muchness/not-enoughness of imaginative experience: Is this the neighborhood we signed up for? What in our universe can be trusted, what holds things together and apart, and what was time contemplating as it sprang into existence? -
What would poets say about each other’s poems if they were really honest? The answer is in Wild and Whirling Words. Thirty-three of America’s best and most important poets, diverse in gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, geography, political disposition, and aesthetic commitments, took the challenge. Each volunteered one of her or his own poems, which the moderator then circulated anonymously among the other poets, who responded anonymously. The results tell a story about how poets read poems and how they write poems, about what poetry is, and about the state of contemporary poetry in America. -
The poems in Drift Ice view the natural world through a lens of ecological and spiritual concerns. They focus especially on Prince William Sound in Alaska fifteen years after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, Long Island Sound at the estuarial mouth of the Connecticut River, and Sri Lanka before (and, in one poem, after) the tsunami. The poems address the myth of a once-pristine wilderness and the indifferent, ever-changing nature of “nature” and our human place in it, as they also investigate the flexibility and lambency of lyric form. “In her new and marvelous book, Drift Ice, Jennifer Atkinson evokes the natural world with preternatural clarity…This is a beautiful book, mature, exciting, innovative, and unforgettable.”—Alan Shapiro -
“In this, his most intricately composed book, his most important yet, Bruce Bond has achieved a sonorous grandeur.”—Bin Ramke “With the luminous precision of music, Bruce Bond has crafted, in Cinder, a generous and urgent collection of poems, a work that celebrates the human condition and terrifies us with it in equal measure. The result is a book of poems weighted with dark vision, set loose. Bruce Bond is one of our generation’s best poets, and this is his best book.”—Laura Kasischke -
Chromatic bears as its epigraph the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s assertion that “Desire is the very nature or essence of every single individual.” The three sequences of poems in Chromatic test that claim. Each borrows its title: “Remarks on Color” from Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Eighteen Maniacs” from Duke Ellington, and “The Well-Tempered Clavier” from J. S. Bach. Exploiting those predecessors, the poems in Chromatic explore the full range of effects caused by human desire, from ecstasy to despair. “Among the new writers who interest me most at the moment. . . . Hix is cerebral, ingeniously inventive, and often scary. He is an experimental poet whose experiments usually succeed—a rare event in contemporary letters.”—Dana Gioia, TurnrowAward
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]2006 Finalist — National Book Award in Poetry -
In this book of voices, speakers resurrected from the deeper past and the dead chafe against the circumstances of love, sex, loss, and longing. The Casanova Chronicles & Other Poems includes forty sonnets, each written in a relaxed meter. Each sonnet is a persona poem, told from the point-of-view of a real-life character. In The Ballard Sonnets those characters include Alba Ballard, her husband, her son, and two of her pet parrots, all of them dealing with the effects of her death. "In this wild, sexy, exuberantly off-the-wall collection, parrots, puppets, and the great Casanova take turns force-feeding Viagra to the stuffy old sonnet. But it's Myrna Stone's Rabelaisian gift for language that really steals the show. My head's still spinning."—George Bilgere -
Also Dark is fresh from the pen of Angelique Palmer, a Black Woman Queer Mama forced to forge her own armor and create her own path. Bigotry, ageism, sexism, colorism, homophobia, and ableism are given voice and a voracious opponent in her poems. -
Tim Seibles’ Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems is in many ways a book of memories, a chronicle of both the personal and the political. Driven by a restless and wide ranging imagination, the poems are sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly serious, sometimes erotic, sometimes mystical, and occasionally all of these things at once. -
In the third Tribus by Etruscan Press, we present work by poets of three generations: William Heyen, H. L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano. It was Di Stefano’s new book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, which inspired this tribute to three generations. Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realized future, in which Di Stefano’s daughter faces an array of 21st century challenges. For the last half-century, Heyen’s poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the British Royals. In this book, Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi Patrol. H. L. Hix’s work is also inextricably involved with the world as seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, yet it also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the inner life. This theme is most prominent here, in How It Is That We. -
Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2,000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, and soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body. -
For our fourth Tribus, we present Fates, in which three poets—Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, and D. M. Spitzer—weave destinies by reimagining stories from the past. The books of Fates resist retellings. Instead, they reopen stories we have been carrying with us. They explore the limits and possibilities of form, testing the poetic line. And they invite new voices to disturb the universe. Each book of this Tribus, at once a daring translation and a rich original work of art, offers a distinct poetic voice. Yet, when read together, the books of Fates transform into a collective love song, three disparate poets all singing resolute, all singing luminous.
