Category Archives: Poetry
House Blend
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Poetic Brew
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Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
“Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms. Smith’s new book is just beautiful—and like the America she embodies and represents—dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines.” —Sappire
In the Futurity Lounge
“Finished and finely wrung, this book is a linguistic experiment in active collaboration with matter—the dense data itself. . . . Welish’s works are historical, social, and often lyrical in the desert.” —David Shapiro
Bright Brave Phenomena
“Nadelberg’s second collection offers dizzying shifts in scale and boldly propulsive logic from the stability of poems scrupulously attentive to what the aircraft industry calls ‘structural integrity.’ The familiar thrills and degradations of romantic love provide the book with much of its material, but Nadelberg’s hands render them strange all over again: ‘I am a picnic. Sit down and paw / your hands at my basket arrangements.’ The transformations love ruthlessly performs on us attune the poet to the radical mutability of the self and her reality—more than just a picnic, she’s also toothpaste, an ostrich, and ‘the river in [her] own way,’ to name a few—but where others might succumb to the doldrums of skepticism or even madness, Nadelberg finds innumerable ways of pulling herself together. This is a beautifully affirming book.” —Timothy Donnelly
Errançities
“Troupe is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology.” —Publishers Weekly
In the Shadow of Al-Andalus
“Mr. Cruz’s work has extended the linguistic, historical and geographical horizons within which we think of American poetry, doing so with masterful music, intelligence and humor.” —Nathaniel Mackey
Whorled
“These poems are filled with ‘a certain historical color of light.’ They’re funny, slyly political, and gorgeous. Working with a variety of forms and modes, Ed Bok Lee rocks my socks off. I love this book.” —Sherman Alexie
Sông I Sing
“If you see Bao Phi coming, you better do a gut check, and set your motherboard to receive. Anyone who has been lucky enough to experience his work knows he means to re-adjust our minds, unseat our comfortable assumptions, and teach our hearts to weep and sing. He is our grief-stricken brother howling, moaning, and wailing in remembrance of those who suffer because of inadequate representation. He is our ecstatic shaman, manifesting through his work the oldest sources of passion, imagination, and cosmic joy. Sông I Sing is a gift. Thank you, Bao Phi.” —Li-Young Lee
Exhibit of Forking Paths
“In James Grinwis’ Exhibit, exuberance and restraint live side by side as the poet moves surface to interior and back again in a reconnaissance mission to find out what holds its identity at bay and what holds its identity inside itself like ‘a bigger stone / inside the smaller one’ or ‘a cloud empty of another cloud.’ By turns definition, transformation, hermeneutics, these poems make me revisit the scenes of my worlds, doubled and forked.” —ELENI SIKELIANOS, NATIONAL POETRY SERIES JUDGE
The Iovis Trilogy
Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem cements Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry.
How Long
Padgett’s title poem asks: “How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China.” With the arrival of his first grandchild, Padgett becomes even more inspired to confront the eternal mysteries with a wry, rueful honesty.
Testify
“Testify, a great book, places itself at America’s street corner of Origin and Decay. A delicate, tentative lyricism arises full of want, and Lease is its astonished keeper.”—Gillian Conoley
