National Poetry Series – serie

Alice Fulton's writing has been characterized by The New Yorkeras "electrifying," and the poet herself, according to Publishers Weekly, "may be Dickinson's postmodern heir."

"The Great Bird of Love brims with a life so intense that itmust be told quietly. The pages are quirky, full of surprise, variety,humor, and the sustaining reliable voice of a worthy guide to experience.These poems come from perception informed by sympathy, and the languageis alive with verbal adventure."-- William StaffordA book in the National Poetry Series

Selected by Dave Smith as one of the five volumes published in 1990 in the National Poetry Series          "I could not leave this book aside nor, among so many worthy others,could I choose another. It interested me, crooned to me, and in theend I loved it. I hope he writes many more. Read it. You will see why."— Dave Smith          "A poet whose own craft is beyond dispute and whose gifted hearthas something to tell us about our ordinary selves we had almost despairedof hearing again in the American tongue." —John D. Bernard,Poet Lore

This is the first cloth edition of one of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series, Philip Levine said: "The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry. . . . Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music."

Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as one of five volumes published in 1996 in the National Poetry Series"Marcus CafagÑa is a poet who shies at nothing, who willnot turn away from what he sees--ordinary people struggling against, andsometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate. The Broken Worldis a deeply humane and accomplished first book--probing, watchful, compassionate,and necessary."-- Edward Hirsch"I challenge anyone to be unmoved by The Broken World. CafagÑanever gives up in these difficult, heart-rending poems." -- Jim Daniels,editor of Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on RaceThe Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depthand maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance--adistressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisiscenter. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus CafagÑa has led usthrough the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his nativeMichigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide,a death that has come to symbolize for CafagÑa the confusion andmadness of the twentieth century.

Selected by Sandra McPhersonfor the 1996 National Poetry SeriesThe late poet James V. Dickeywas judge of the Yale Prize poetry competition when he wrote to A. V.Christie, one of the finalists, "I have become very fond of yourpoems, especially the elegiac ones. . . . Your work is heartfelt; onebelieves every word of it. . . . You have given me much in-depth pleasure;have moved me strongly."The work in Nine Skies is as Dickey described it--heartfelt, moving. Here is what otherssay about it:"Beautifully craftedand sustained, with six or seven poems as fine as anything being writtentoday. This remarkable book is a rite of passage for the poet and speaksof even better things to come." -- Elizabeth Spires"Only the best poetryis written this well, with this much craft and conviction. Of course thepoems are meditative and elegiac, brilliant and finely detailed, but theyare also thought through and wholly felt, so that even in their smallmoments they celebrate."-- Stanley Plumly"A. V. Christie writeswith a Romantic's eye and a Realist's heart, so there is no sentimentality,that sickness afflicting our age. The voice on these pages is hard-bitten,luxuriant, and true." -- Henri Cole"Nine Skies isa graceful realization in each detail of elegy or celebration." --Sandra McPherson

An astonishing new talent, Rigoberto GonzÁlez writes with a clarity of the senses that pulls the reader into a marvelous and unfamiliar world. The sidewalk preacher, the umbrella salesman, the nurse on the graveyard shift, the professional mourner- all allow GonzÁlez a clandestine glimpse of their lives. Crackling with the dry electricity of the desert and flashing with the brilliant colors of Mexico, GonzÁlez's poems are rooted in the fertile soil beneath poverty's dust, the border's violence, and longing's desolation.

No other contemporary novel received the volume and intensity of criticism and curiosity that greeted Nigger Heaven upon its publication in 1926. Carl Van Vechten's novel generated a storm of controversy because of its scandalous title and fed an insatiable hunger on the part of the reading public for material relating to the black culture of Harlem's jazz clubs, cabarets, and social events.  "The book and not the title is the thing," James Weldon Johnson insisted with regard to Nigger Heaven, and the book is indeed a nuanced and vibrant portrait of "the great black walled city" of Harlem. Opening on a scene of tawdry sensationalism, Nigger Heaven shifts decisively to a world of black middle-class respectability, defined by intellectual values, professional ambition, and an acute consciousness of class and racial identity.  Here is a Harlem where upper-class elites discuss art in well-appointed drawing rooms; rowdy and lascivious drunks spend long nights in jazz clubs and speakeasies; and politically conscious young intellectuals drink coffee and debate "the race problem" in walk-up apartments. At the center of the story, two young people--a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer--struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism.  This reissue is based on the seventh printing, which included poetry composed by Langston Hughes especially for the book. Kathleen Pfeiffer's astute introduction investigates the controversy surrounding the shocking title and shows how the novel functioned in its time as a site to contest racial violence. She also signals questions of racial authenticity and racial identity raised by a novel about black culture written by a white admirer of that culture.

Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air."  The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.

Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series  In the Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are "transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another."  No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are transfigured. Tempering steely candor with a sophisticated delight in wordplay, these poems turn on a dime from the sensual to the eerie, the resigned to the hopeful, the comforting to the shocking. Each poem weaves together layers of dream, remembrance, and fantasy, distilling from romantic excess a gritty, spare language of truth-telling and surprise.

With blazing wit and a searing language, David Groff writes fiercely of erosion and endurance in this stunning debut collection. At turns fervent and elegiac, dishy and sly, these poems confront the effect of AIDS and HIV on a brotherhood that dealt firsthand with grief and loss and, later, the tenuous prospect of survival. Peopled with the spirits of dead gay men, uncertain lovers, mortal parents, and spectral friends and brothers, Groff's poems are unified by their preoccupation with what erodes us and what we can hold onto when life and love devolve.  Theory of Devolution is a book of balances: alternately passionate and restrained, headlong and meditative, engaged and knowingly detached. David Groff's territory is Chelsea and Fire Island, at the end of a nightmare crisis but nowhere near the end of an epidemic. How, in such times, to speak? These pages give voice to an ‘always-dying particular man,' examining the evidence of loss and pleasure and the deep bonds of affection in poems alive with ‘an odd crabbed pulse of beauty they refine to true detail.'" –- Mark Doty  "David Groff's poems open our attention by a subtle, unflinching love of human being. The live, known past spins sharp and fine in and out of the now of his vision. His language exhilarates." –- Marie Ponsot

Arranged in four parts--each associated with a particular Louisiana city--the poems in Rhythm & Booze trace the hardships and uncertainties, as well as the moments of unexpected sublimity, of a life lived in a continuous struggle between fresh starts and destructive old patterns.  Mirroring the music of New Orleans, Kane's poems combine traditional form with improvisational flourishes. Rhythm & Booze charts her progress as she undertakes a number of journeys, from youth to experience, from blues bars to college classrooms, from city to country, from chaos to something approaching peace.

Departing from simple observations of the people and setting around him-- neighbors, friends, and lovers in New York City--Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum explores personal and familial relationships set to the rhythms of jazz in an urban landscape. Though comfortable at the edge, these poems deal with reality and move forward by transforming pain into beauty.

Fables for the modern age

Providing poetic entry into the visual artsIn Michelangelo's Seizure, Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters--from Caravaggio and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock--to demonstrate how these artists transformed physical, psychological, and political suffering into art. Mirroring the brushstrokes in long, metaphor-laden sentences, Gehrke moves freely through the canvas, into and out of the artists' lives, into the public realm, into history, to capture the way the creative mind can transform even the most violent surroundings--a prison cell, a battlefield, a madhouse--into a masterpiece

In his debut collection, Colin Cheney maps an American landscape of New York rooftop gardens, occupied Iraq, and crumbling New England farms. In poems inhabited by Charles Darwin and climate scientists, Beethoven and Elliott Smith, the reader finds a way to navigate the beauty and fears native to modern life. One sees in Cheney’s poetry the convergence of the urban and the natural and the ways in which the two inhabit each other—an uneasy coexistence at best, but the only kind possible.Pollination and endangerment loom large in Here Be Monsters, as do the binaries of creation and destruction. A whale dies trapped under a bridge; bees kept in rooftop gardens lose their way; a friend stricken by malaria is taken to an urban hospital that doesn’t recognize the disease; a woman cremates her beloved dog in her pottery kiln and finds, the next morning, two perfect clay lungs among the ashes. In his poems Cheney explores the various types of damage with which humans are so closely entwined, including our encroachment on nature, our propensity to give in to our worst impulses, and the havoc that our cells can wreak on our own bodies.

In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what’s next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.On BafflementWe drew a prison in the sand and it wouldn’t go away.Not even beneath the foam of the biggest waves.The torn leg of a starfish clung to the door.A piece of seaweed clung to the bars over the windows.The tide came in higher and we thought, So much for the prison.Somebody asked why did we draw that thing,And were we growing old watching it this way.We felt compelled to make love in the sand a few feet off.Then we drew another one, just to see if we’d make love again.

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman’s poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.

Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.

Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.

In his second collection, Christopher Kondrich navigates the link between what we see as our inner value and the external world that supplies it. Valuing’s deeply personal poems explore faith, love, ethics, and mortality from a variety of angles and through a variety of poetic forms as a means of questioning the origination of one’s own value system. Does it come from the belief in a god, from the love one gives or receives, or from the diminution of the self and its desires? If “you cannot sneak through your life,” as the speaker of one of Valuing’s poems proclaims, then how might one ensure that the noise a life inevitably makes is an echo of the values one holds dear?

Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that "the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events." Poet Diane Louie thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view.More genus than hybrid species, prose poems can straddle the obvious limits and less-obvious liberties of perception. This active characteristic of spanning and connecting is especially relevant in a time of cultural polarization. Marrying, even uneasily, the inquiries of science and spiritual longing can illuminate what they—and we—have in common: a desire to understand our presence in a universe that does not yield ultimate answers.

Extinction Theory is a collection of pseudoscience poems that try to provide rationales for some of life’s most salient mysteries. Where is God? What does it mean to belong? Who killed the dinosaurs? Kien Lam creates new worlds with new rules to better answer these perennial questions. His poetry is that of discovery, of looking at the world as if for the first time. Lam exposes the transitory and transcendent nature of things and how we find meaning.At the heart of this collection is also a cataloging of the smaller “extinctions” in life. Every passing moment is the death of something, and try as we might to recreate the feeling, it can never be the same. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s a donut. It changes its shape as we juxtapose it against something new. Extinction Theory is as much about language as it is about the absence of language. Of English, of Vietnamese, and then of neither.

Survival Strategies is a love story wrapped in a reckoning. Arranged in three parts, this collection of poems follows a narrative arc.The speaker, who is returning to the Sonoran of her birth after many years away, takes us with her on a journey of enlightenment. In the course of the first section, "The Sunniest Place on Earth," we learn that the speaker has developed a deep hatred of the desert (a reflection of herself) due to the way she was treated and what she witnessed while being raised there. As we move through to part 2, "Estivate So You Don't Die," we see the speaker grappling with her past as a sensitive person amid the rugged realities of life in the Southwest. As this section closes, there is a long-form prose poem assembled as a mythopoetic fable titled, "The Mother and the Mountain," that explores her mother's childhood. This section brings revelation to some of what precedes it and reveals the speaker as the buttress of this family who, though an outsider, walks a path first laid by her mother. The final section is titled simply, "After," and as its title suggests, is a short set of poems that wrap up the arc and bring peace to our speaker as she comes to realize she never hated the desert, nor herself, as she is set free by the ocean of the Pacific Northwest.

Blue Loop is composed of poems about addiction and recovery, using meditation as a lens through which memories of loss and harm might begin to be processed and accepted. It seeks to prioritize—and demonstrate—dwelling with the self in the present moment, avoiding the tendency to do what those in the recovery community call future tripping: our innate, strong desire to visit things not yet come to pass through the mode of anxious attachment. In fact, these poems are against attachment, in the Buddhist sense, accepting and appreciating the beneficial gifts of calm from loved ones and community of all kinds but in search of release from the need to rely on such connections completely. Therefore, often, they are lonely poems.Despite searching for connection, the speaker remains most faithful to—and finds grounding in—the self. The goal of Blue Loop is to provide potential strategies and modes of thought for readers navigating any form of recovery or in search of more balanced being.