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"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer--she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes." --Eileen Myles A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader. I was reading a line in a book, then reading a line in another book, and performing small acts in between: I sat at intervals on the toilet, I slept sporadically, I ate kale and "fish food," and called myself "Renee" for a time. Nobody knew who I was at the grocery store, but going there was my big event. I knew the books of these people; I knew these people and I didn't change their names, but when they appeared in my books it wasn't really their stories I was telling, so they didn't need my protection and I could go "Danielle, Danielle" all day.Born in Atlanta, GA, in 1971, Renee Gladman studied Philosophy at Vassar College and Poetics at New College of California. In addition to Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), she is the author of eight works of prose, including the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), as well as a book of poetry, A Picture-Feeling. Her most recent work of fiction Morelia is forthcoming in 2016. A longtime publisher and bookmaker, her projects include Clamour (1996-1999), Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and Leon Works (since 2005). She is the recipient of a 2014-2015 fellowship from The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2016 grant to artists from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in New England with poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.

Listed in The Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2014 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry Winner of The Believer Poetry Award "The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form...Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory."--The Rumpus "There was a time some of us believed poetry and poets could save the world; CAConrad never stopped believing it."--The Huffington Post From "M.I.A. ESCALATOR": The ultrasound machine gives the parents the ability to talk to the unborn by their gender, taking the intersexed nine-month conversation away from the child. The opportunities limit us in our new world. Encourage parents to not know, encourage parents to allow anticipation on either end. Escalators are a nice ride, slowly rising and falling, writing while riding, notes for the poem, meeting new people at either end, "Excuse me, EXCUSE ME..." My escalator notes became a poem. CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which he pushes his political and ecological efforts even further.These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics. CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009), as well as several other books of poetry and essays. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

Winner of the Big Other Award in TranslationWinner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary WorkFormally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

Dorothea Lasky’s stunning new collection of poems presents an unfurling, terrifying, and fiercely loving embodiment of motherhood as a force of creation.Inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, Lasky writes from the inner realm of a third pregnancy and guides us through a suspended timeline taut with anticipation. Mother documents caring for small children, the death of the mother, and the simultaneous anxiety and darkness of impending birth, as Lasky transmits from a deep mythic and biologically immediate space: “And even though I’ve spent / Eight months now / Dreading the sight / Of anything red / Now I long to bleed all over.” Invoking the eternal symbol of the mother, Lasky asks us to consider an expansive understanding of the horror and devotion inherent in the daily practices of existence.

The poems in Chelsey Minnis’s Opera Fever read like a dangerous bodice-ripper, glamorous and haunted. From the covid claustrophobia in which they were written, these poems sharply maneuver from steamy observations to gravitas (and then some groaning under the fur coats../Let's be very hard on veils.. / Like a dark summer with too many funerals...). In movements that feel delightfully restless and darkly romantic, we readers are lucky to be caught in their quake.

Named a Best Book of 2025 by Books Without BordersA vivid translation of Abū Zayd alAnṣārī’s early Arabic weather lexicon, Book of Rain reveals a richly detailed linguistic landscape devoted to the many forms of rain.The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.So begins translator David Larsen’s introduction for the Book of Rain, the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words, by early Arabic linguist Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī. In Larsen’s translation, Abū Zayd’s lexicography of rain is simultaneously an academic, archival, and poetic pursuit.After the fashion of Larsen’s award-winning translation of Names of the Lion, these rich, extensive lists provide detailed descriptions of specific kinds of rainfall, including al-tahtān, or “The Outpour,” a kind of continual rain, or al-waṭfā’, or “The Beetle-Brow” which  is a “briskly-flowing rain that is counted among the continual rains, whether it is of long or short falling.” Here, we are provided language for frosts, dews, thunder, lightning, clouds, and, of course, the various and plentiful words for waters. Coupled with Larsen’s introduction, the Book of Rain is a source of endless interdisciplinary inquiry which will continue to fascinate readers for centuries to come.

"One of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time."—Dwight Garner, New York Times“In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked, and often funny.” —Publishers WeeklyChelsey Minnis’s new collection of poems follows the struggle of a flawed character in a cinematic world. Playing with old ideas of wealth and love from Holly wood’s golden era, these poems flirt with nostalgia without ever succumbing to it, casting a new light on the present through the fantasies of the past.What do you want with me? I’m just a dirty little shoplifter.I’m like a woman in a sequined gown in a dark cave. Can you tell me I’m worse than others?OK, yes, I’m worse than others, but can you say I’m the worst of all?Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.

“Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti“An inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings, and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel.” —Michael McClurePreserving Fire recounts the life and thought of the Surrealist, Beat Generation, and San Francisco Renaissance poet Philip Lamantia through his fugitive prose works. Ranging from poetry to politics to mythology to dance, from manifestos to travelogues to wartime declarations of conscientious objection, these writings, expertly collected by friend and longtime City Lights editor Garrett Caples, offer a dynamic picture of Lamantia’s multifaceted intellectual life and the artistic movements he helped shape.Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was an influential Surrealist, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poet. He is the author of many books, including Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, Meadowlark West, Tau and Journey to the End, and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.Garrett Caples is the author of many books, most recently Power Ballads and Retrievals. He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia and is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series.

Letters to Wendy's is an outrageous, tragic, genre-bending novel written over the course of a year on comment cards from the fast-food chain restaurant Wendy's. Through the letters, the book traces a year in the life and thoughts of an unnamed narrator obsessed not only by Biggies and Frosties, but also by consumerism, pornography, and mortality.

In his introduction to this, Richards’ debut collection, Tomaz Salamun writes "It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it. How he restores internal time to the work of art."

In this follow-up collection to the National Poetry Series winner A Hummock in the Malookas, Rohrer’s poems play against convention, finding dark, surreal underpinnings in the seemingly innocent objects and experiences of everyday life. Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.

Of Beckman’s follow-up collection to his APR-Honickman award winning first book, Tomaz Salamun writes: "There are no similarities with Apollinaire or Ginsberg, except with what they were doing to Time while they were young." The contemplative poems of this collection unfurl in startling and beautiful new ways.

Much anticipated in poetry circles, this debut poetry collection by the well-known younger poet and critic rises to the occasion, at once bold and tender, experimental and clear. Jean Valentine writes: "New consciousnesses shine here in delicate, angry, ecstatic, funny, heartbroken play: the forked lightning of true poetry."

Clumsy acrobats tumbling through the circuses of philosophy, architecture, politics, religion and just about anything else you can think of, Steve Shavel’s wild meditations drift and whirl with spastic brilliance among language’s most earnest and playful coincidences.

Caroline Knox’s vision tears the seams of everyday life, turning expectations on their heads in favor of rediscovery. She pulls on a thread of language to ferret out surprises, absurdities, fascinating facts, time warps, Freudian slips of etymology and startling tenderness. In Knox’s world, everything is one syllable away from everything else, full of a rich connective and investigative energy traced by an expert hand.

Written by 100 American poets, Isn't It Romantic offers an engaging look at how contemporary poets respond afresh to the well-trammeled territory of the love poem. Award-winning poets from across the country lend their voices to this important document of contemporary poetry. The book also features a bonus full-length audio CD of love songs by independent recording artists. Anthology Contributors include: Karen Volkman, Joe Wenderoth, Eleni Sikelianos, Juliana Spahr, Brenda Shaughnessy, Matthew Rohrer, Claudia Rankine, D.A. Powell, Hoa Nguyen, Noelle Kocot, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Young, Brian Henry, Christine Hume, Matthea Harvey, Arielle Greenberg, Thalia Field, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Timothy Donnelly, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Stephen Burt, Joshua Beckman, and more. Contributors to the audio CD include: David Berman, Richard Buckner, Vic Chesnutt, Ida, Doug Martsch, Mark Mulcahy, Megan Reiley, Jenny Toomey and more. Editor Brett Fletcher Lauer is the poetry in motion director at the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of CROWD Magazine. He is the co-editor of Poetry In Motion from Coast to Coast (W. W.Norton, 2002) and his poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Editor Aimee Kelley is the editor and publisher of CROWD Magazine. She received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA from the New School for Social Research. She has worked at non-profit organizations such as the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spinning Jenny, 811 Books and elsewhere. Charles Simic (Introduction) is the author of many books of poems, including The World Doesn't End, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Conscious of politics and of music, these poems continue Conoley's explorations into the questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. This collection takes its title from Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben's notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning. Gillian Conoley's collections include Lovers in the Used World, Beckon, Tall Stranger (nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Some Gangster Pain and the chapbooks Woman Speaking Inside Film Noir and Fatherless Afternoon. Winner of several Pushcart Prizes, the Jerome J. Shestack Award in Poetry and included in Best American Poetry, she is poet-in-residence and professor at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt.

"It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake."-Brigit Pegeen Kelly, National Poetry Series judge A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety of intimate perspectives and using a range of innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture, and circumstance, alive and speaking. Tyehimba Jess' numerous awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A native of Detroit, he is a proud alumnus of the Chicago Green Mill Slam teams and Cave Canem. His first nonfiction book is African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (Citadel Press, 2003).

Complex and intimate, Reverse Rapture is an account of a band of explorers who go sifting through the artifacts and sensations of our times in search of a core. The generous voices of these poems bring the reader along on their quest. In awe of everything, these explorers, and the poems recounting their adventures, create a gorgeous lyrical web filled with new ways of seeing. Dara Wier is the author of eight previous collections of poems, most recently Hat on a Pond and Voyages in English. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and The American Poetry Review, she teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In-depth interviews with poets have been a popular feature of Verse magazine-and this volume collects many favorites, along with new interviews commissioned for this collection. The poets represent a wide range of aesthetics, ethnicities and politics. Although a particular focus of the book is emerging and innovative American poets, the collection also features interviews with Australian, Scottish, Irish, Czech, Slovenian and Kashmiri poets, as well as established American poets such as Hayden Carruth and Charles Wright. A vital record of contemporary poetry and an engaging read. Brian Henry's poetry collections include Graft, American Incident and Astronaut, and he is the editor of On James Tate. Andrew Zawacki is the author of Anabranch and By Reason of Breakings, co-translator of Ales Debeljak's Arrow's Shadow and an editor of Verse since 1995.

Beckman's new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is, as Publishers Weekly notes, "the real thing." Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous poetry collections, translations, and collaborative works. His awards include a NYFA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Like moonlight, McCann's attention gives weird clarity and an alien glow to post-industrial landscapes and human interiors. These poems are startling and irreverent, but also emotional and approachable. They uncivilize us into seeing the world as both ruin and possibility: "It was danger/ gave them life/ but damage/ makes us shine." Anthony McCann is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His books include I Heart Your Fate, Moongarden, and Father of Noise. He lives in Los Angeles.

"Remember when I told you about the memory competitions?" asks Dara Wier in her latest collection. Memories, apologies, and misunderstanding compete in this series of lyric poems that are intricately connected in their ability to recollect and speak to one another.

"Basking in the twilight of Late Romanticism, Meier ...finds the rays seductive but damaging ...Meier's sophisticated debut promises further developments."-Publishers Weekly on Terrain Vague Domesticity, nature, and heartbreak inhabit this seriously playful second collection. Through precise description and inventive vocabulary, Meier's poems are relentless in their efforts to sincerely address contemporary uncertainty and love. A great book for readers looking to rediscover Romantic poetry: "Embrace was a word first used of forts, / until the one body fell down inside the other body, and was lost."

"Joe Wenderoth is a brilliant writer, original and subversive, sensitive and strange. I read his work with awe and admiration."-Ben Marcus "Joe Wenderoth's brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the 'too much.' ...But in Wenderoth's case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary-a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth's instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible."-Cal Bedient This clear-eyed new work from a favorite young poet is searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Joe Wenderoth's determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness. "Luck" So a screaming woke you just in time An animal's scream, or animals'. What kind of animal it was doesn't matter, and cannot, in any case, be determined. The point is you are saved. Your mouth has been opened.Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore and is the author of five books of prose and poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.

If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in ourselves: "Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary." Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978. She is the author of several chapbooks and has attended Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

With the adventurousness of Ashbery and the gregariousness of Billy Collins, no one's bag of tricks is as bottomless as Caroline Knox's. They're Quaker guns, a creative ruse, the kind you couldn't and wouldn't fire: they're flotsam, jetsam, or any old trees, ships' logs. They're broken masts. They're the Friends of the Friends. Caroline Knox is the winner of the 2005 Maurice English Award and the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.