American Poets Continuum – serie

Winner of the 1994 Lamont Poetry selection of The Academy of American Poets. "Kelly has a talent for coaxing out the world's ghosts and then fixing them in personal landscapes of fear and uncertainty...Smoothed by nuances of sound and rhythm, her poems exude an ambiguous wisdom, an acceptance of the sad magic that returns us constantly to the lives we might have led."--Library Journal

Poet, teacher, essayist, anthologist, songwriter and singer, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the country's most acclaimed writers. Her voice is generous; her vision true; her subjects ordinary people, and ordinary situations which, when rendered through her language, become remarkable. In this, her fourth full collection of poetry, we see with new eyes-a grandmother's scarf, an alarm clock, a man carrying his son on his shoulders. Valentine for Ernest Mann You can't order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter and say, "I'll take two" and expect it to handed back to you on a shiny plate. Still, I like you spirit. Anyone who says, "Here's my address, write me a poem," deserves something in reply. So I'll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them. Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn't understand why she was crying. "I thought they had such beautiful eyes." And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way.Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them as valentines and they became beautiful. At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet. Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite. And let me know.

A new collection of narrative poems and dramatic monologues that dissolve the boundaries of poetry and prose fiction.

The long-awaited tenth collection of poetry from the Shelley Memorial Prize-winning poet Lucille Clifton.

In poems that span the time from her son's fetal stages through the first year of life, Laurie Kutchin's, The Night Path, focuses on the genesis of life. These poems express the connection between the inner and outer worlds showing the reality that is around us and the transcendence that is possible with this awareness. Winner of Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 1997.

Buddha alarm clocks, Shiva spice racks, dying gardeners, gunned-down prostitutes, suicidal visionaries, and a god "who is shorter/and a better cook than your God" populate these poems that arrive Plus Shipping. Demanding our perception of the world in payment, Hicok shows us that time has "bones we can count/and a soul made temporal by math."

The final collection from one of American's most noted poets.

In White City Mark Irwin makes stunning jumps in imagination to create poetry that is Rilkean in conception and execution, yet speaks to America at the end of the 20th century. Irwin's vision for American is as broad as Walt Whitman's while his language is propelled by changing rhythms, lush music and fresh imagery. As in Quick, Now, Always (BOA Editions, 1996), the poems in White City deal with a past that is beyond recovery ("before the word had become motor"), a future that is ominous and a present that is uncertain. "Do we belong where we are going," Irwin asks in "Wind," "or where we are?"

Dorianne Laux's long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted--poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter's Wife," a woman recalls her husband's homecoming at the end of his work day: Then I'd open his clothes and take the whole day inside me--the ship's gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead kissing metal. The clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, and the long drive home. And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures: Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat's eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe ...With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Poems of loneliness and late nights, liquor and loss.

In the title poem of this collection, the speaker declares that "the common measure of love is loss," signature qualities of the poems of Michael Waters. Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems collects the best of Waters, whose vivid, sensual poems evoke poignant memories of loss and the emotional aftermath. Contains generous selections from Waters' six previous volumes, as well as new work. Michael Waters is the author of six previous poetry collections. Among his awards are a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and two Pushcart Prizes. He is professor of English at Salisbury State University in his home town of Salisbury, Maryland.