Marie Alexander Poetry Series – serie

"Whatever Shines is an admirable and dazzling first collection. The voice is indisputably unique and haunting, and one looks forward to anything the poet writes in the future." --Jim Harrison

"Imagine Alzheimer's sufferers and their loved ones treading water in a choppy sea of exhaustion and despair. Now picture Nancy Lagomarsino's "Light From an Eclipse" as a life preserver, airborne and spinning toward them -- a missile of hope and survival. The book is, in equal measures, heartrending and celebratory of the beauty and buoyancy of life in the face of death. I read this book moved and shaken by its poetic sensibility, its wisdom and the gift of its grace." -- Wally Lamb

This is a fierce book, deeply attentive to nuance and rich with emotionally compelling drama. The author uses the breadth of the hybrid form and the cumulative power of each section to go deep into myth, marriage, art, and the natural world.

A selection of one-hundred and ten poems, sixty-three of which are new, from the man Alan Cheuse called 'a marvellous godfather' to the prose poem.

In this quiet, clear-eyed collection Townsend meditates on the varieties of loss, childhood bereavement, depression and divorce to arrive at the realisation that it is through loss that we come into possession of some of life's most profound gifts. She articulates what it was like to grow up motherless, explores life in a step-family, scrutinises depression, breaks codes of feminine silence, and celebrates the enduring power of place.

Selection from two previous collections join a large collection of new work which continues Rutsala's exploration of the prose poem as a literary form. "Sounding at times like plot summaries of stories by John Cheever that Cheever never got around to writing and at other times like witty fables, or meditations on the tricks of language, Rutsala's wonderful prose paragraphs are at all times rewarding journeys into the inner life, the secret life of three o'clock in the morning, when everyday defeats acquire a weird glamour and heroism." -- Charles Baxter.

"Magdalena" is a finely drawn collection which, with sometimes painful honesty, examines the vagaries and vicissitudes of a heart in conflict with itself. The poems invoke the nature of an independent woman embracing her sexuality, travels, and being in the world.

This collection is unique in its diversity and includes voices from Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States. Poets include Nin Andrews, Robert Bly, Ale Debeljak, Russell Edson, Marie Harris, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Peter Johnson, Kim Kwang Kyu, Morton Marcus, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Charles Simic, Tomas Transtromer, James Wright, and many others.

Available for the first time, this significant volume collects over one hundred of Robert Bly's prose poems written over a period of five decades. It includes the bulk of several landmark out-of-print volumes as well as uncollected poems and new material. Bly has been one of the leading writers of the prose poem since the re-emergence of the form in the 1960s.

Kim Chinquee lives in Buffalo, New York, where she teaches creative writing. This is her first book of flash fiction.

"It's unusual to call a book of poetry a 'page turner,' but this collection, with the knocking and jostling of words that mark the peculiar rhythm and appeal of the prose poem, is just that. Iglesias has an uncanny ability to capture whole sweeps of history in a few lines, while her eye and ear for the quotidian result in the characters pulling us from one remarkable incident to another as if they had physically taken us by the elbow, whispering urgently."--Marie Harris Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry.

"In the white space out beyond Elisabeth Frost's cropped tales, subtle situations, plausible and bizarre fantasias, you may sense the ghosts of Kafka and Borges strolling. But these delicious, low-key, disturbing and always surprising prose poems, with their train of lyric elegance, are a world unto themselves. All of Us is a compulsively readable book. And while you read, listen to the silences all around it."--Alicia Ostriker Elisabeth Frost is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews.

"Family Portrait doesn't just rewrite the history of the prose poem in America--it sets the record straight. Murphy's scholarly introduction sets the stage for a book that traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900--1950. Simply put, this collection belongs on every poet's--and poetry lover's--bookshelf. No one will be able to write about the prose poem without referencing Family Portrait."--Peter Conners The groundbreaking anthology of prose poetry collects over sixty voices including such well-known figures as Sherwood Anderson, William Lisle Bowles, Kay Boyle, e. e. cummings, H.D., Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Patchen, Riding Jackson, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Thornton Wilder, and William Carlos Williams.

"Postage Due is a dazzling series of necessary utterances. Wade uses the language of Christianity to section her book, fraught with joy and pain, to explore what we owe and to whom. She employs postcards, letters, and literary and pop culture heroines--most notably Oz's Dorothy--to tell and retell of the dreamlike past. In Postage Due, you will meet the (post-confessional) young lady who fell from a star."--Denise Duhamel Postage Due is a sometimes ekphrastic, often epistolary scrapbook of poetic artifacts documenting an odd girl's coming of age. Julie Marie Wade is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures and Small Fires.

"In Hurt's breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a 'deep layer of red dust.' The Rust Belt's rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every musical sentence."--Oliver de la Paz "In Hurt's sparkling debut, the tinny, melancholic, gorgeous stir of Baudelaire's heartbroken metropolis is heard again, but this time its flesh and spirit are rusted. Hurt brings the prose poem back to life."--Sabrina Orah Mark Rochelle Hurt was forged from iron ore in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. Currently, she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is pursuing a PhD.

"Some Women I Have Known is deliriously immersive, but the real beauty of this work is in the juxtaposition. What yokes the memory of a friend's dying mother, a kidnapped heiress, a syphilis-stricken aunt, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and a woman in a yellow steakhouse shirt? Birds, women, horses, and pears float interdependent in the persistent spume of this gorgeous book."--Barrie Jean Borich "The writing in this collection is lyrical and composed, controlled even, and I know I'll come back to it again and again."--Jill Talbot Re'Lynn Hansen's novel, Take Me to the Underground, was nominated for a Lambda Award. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and lives on Lake Michigan.

"So unexpected, so revelatory, such exquisite prose (and poetry) these 'sequences,' as the editors choose to call them, may be undefinable, but they are certainly not indescribable. I describe them as hypnotic, startling, and alive."--Dinty W. Moore Nothing to Declare is a ground-breaking anthology of cross-genre work. What you will find here are linked prose poems, narrative sequences, lyrical essays, koans, fairy tales, and epistolary addresses. It contains the work of over fifty writers including Nin Andrews, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Marie Harris, Jim Harrison, Gian Lombardo, Debra Marquart, Julie Marie Wade, and Gary Young.