Wisconsin Poetry Series – serie

This collection of poems covers such diverse topics as forgotten Hollywood actors, flying saucers, CIA shenanigans, comic books, cereal flavours, beatnik kitsch and jazz.

Reactor gives voice to beloved and ruined American landscapes through extended meditations of an urban mystical wanderer.

An unsentimental and at times disquieting first collection, the poems of About Crows excavate self, family, race, location, sex, art, and religion to uncover the artifacts of a succession of traumas that the speaker does not always experience firsthand but carries with him to refashion into some new importance. This is a book of half-states, broken affiliations, and dislocation.            The speaker leads the reader through the fragments of a flooded town that grows increasingly elusive the more one looks for it; through a succession of Seoul "love motels" that further displace the outsider to unclaimed margins transformed into sites of creative invention; through "galleries" of artwork, where movement, color, and image are renewed through ekphrasis; and through the world of the metatextual long poem "The Cult Poem," where good and bad moral binaries tangle into a rat's nest of our best and worst spiritual ambitions.            The poems and sequences of About Crows are marked by their artistic balance of the sublime and the profane, of polyphony, syntactical complexity, clashing images, cagey humor, and unsettling sincerity, all trying desperately to connect.

Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.

With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.

Traversing time, cities, and voices, The Apollonia Poems finds its central aesthetic in place: physical and locational, perceptual and imagined. Judith Vollmer's poet-wanderer explores the layered terrains of urban environments from Pittsburgh to the Mediterranean to the Carpathians. Employing narratives and lyrics, songs and reports, and a short verse-play in three voices, Vollmer's meditations are by turns elegiac and celebratory, colloquial and lyrical.

Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert WrigleySeason of the Second Thought begins in a deep blue mood, longing to find words for what feels beyond saying. Lynn Powell's poems journey through the seasons, quarreling with the muse, reckoning with loss, questioning the heart and its ""pedigree of Pentecost,"" and seeking out paintings in order to see inside the self. With their crisp observations and iridescent language, these poems accumulate the bounty of an examined life. These lines emerge from darkness into a shimmering equilibrium—witty, lush, and hard-won.

What is good fortune? The Golden Coin asks—and answers—this question in poems about youth, conflict, travel, family love, and the joys and fears of getting old. Aboard his sailboat, Feldman draws lessons from the sea about time and history. His gaze tempered not by nostalgia or longing but by satisfaction and happiness, he finds wry joy in the Havana airport's sniffer dog napping near the impounded luggage. In acknowledging the inevitability of change, he reports from the battle zones of an essentially lucky life, with only as much sadness and terror as ordinary life inevitably requires.

In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.

Charting a journey through schoolyards and laundromats, suburban gardens and rice paddies, yoga studios and rural highways, Michelle Brittan Rosado crafts poems that blend elegy and praise. In settings from California to Malaysian Borneo, and the wide Pacific between them, she explores themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. With empathy for the generations past, she questions how we might navigate our history to find a way through it, still holding on to the ones we love. Like an ocean wave, these poems recede and return, with gratitude for the quotidian and for beauty found even in fragments.bring me backto the in-betweenwhere my breathhas always lived,without containment,like two legs pointingtoward the ocean, or these armsreaching into sky—excerpt from ""Ode to the Double 'L'"" Michelle Brittan Rosado. All rights reserved.

These poems trace the speaker’s emotional biography from a wild and impoverished rural childhood through tender and terrifying adulthood. Rooted in the heart and the messy organs of our mortality, Melissa Crowe’s work is epistolary in tone but gritty in texture. She reckons with the pure pain and buoyant beauty of survival, loss, parenthood, and letting go. These deeply personal poems embrace the hurt that accompanies intimacy and insist that we love fiercely.

In these poems, well-known spaces both reassure and imperil, and language both anchors and disorients. Molly Spencer's speakers navigate the landscape of human experience, building upon the cycles of a household throughout the seasons of the year. Ordinary places and things - a kitchen table, a memory, a beloved's thigh - are viewed as if through the lens of a shifting, unsettling kaleidoscope. This incisive collection suggests that the imagined comfort we find in familiarity and routine belies the unease that lingers beneath.

In his landmark debut, Carlos AndrÉs GÓmez interrogates race, gender, sexuality, and violence to explore some of the most pressing issues of our time. These poems address the complexities and nuances of toxic masculinity, assimilation, homophobia, and the joy and anguish of trying to raise Black children in America. GÓmez casts an uncompromising eye toward both brutality and tenderness, going where we are most uncomfortable and lingering in moments of introspection that reveal fear, grief, or hatred. Birthed at a breaking point, these poems carve open silence, revealing fissures that welcome the light. Unflinching, poignant, and powerful, Fractures is both a gut punch and a balm.

In her stunning second collection, Carlina Duan illuminates unabashed odes to lineage, small and sacred moments of survival, and the demand to be fully seen 'spangling with light.' Tracing familial lore and love, Duan reflects on the experience of growing up as a diasporic, bilingual daughter of immigrants, exploring the fraught complexities of identity, belonging, and linguistic reclamation. Alien Miss brings forth beautifully powerful voices: immigrants facing the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first Chinese American woman to vote, and matriarchal ancestors. The poems in this ambitious collection are immersed in the knotted blood of sisterhood, both celebrating and challenging conceptions of inheritance and homeland.I browse througharchives full of men and women with long black hair,throwing themselves into the land. thread of grass. threadof immaculate touch. paper son, or paperdaughter. my own papers marked with wings, the pointedtip of an eagle's beak. here, I'm made prey.I pledge allegiance.-Excerpt from 'Alien Miss Confronts the Author'

Daniel Khalastchi's third collection provides an uncompromising exploration into the political and societal disturbances facing America today. Electioneering, lack of affordable health care, the increase in mass shootings, and the continued fight for equal rights are juxtaposed against an unlikely sense of hope and optimism. Lurking behind each page is the ever-present issue of immigration, with specific focus on the escape of the author's father from Iraq and the pressures linked to living as an Arab Jew in the middle of the United States.Through unnerving gallows humor and radical honesty, these poems redefine the American experience by asking the reader to consider what it means to live in the shadow of a perceived sense of freedom and to have faith when believing feels hopeless. Khalastchi's perspective as an Iraqi Jewish American brings sharp focus to the holistic uncertainties of religion, politics, assimilation, illness, love, and loss—with absurd, visceral, and wry acclaim. I type intothe internet your high schooland find rubble. Your daughterhas the flu. We are sickwith disappointment buteveryone is fine.—Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"

Joshua Nguyen's sharp, songlike, and often experimental collection compartmentalizes past trauma--sexual and generational--through the quotidian. Poems aim to confront the speaker's past by physically, and mentally, cleaning up. Here, the Asian-American masculine interrogates the domestic space through the sensual and finds healing through family and in everyday rhythms: rinsing rice until the water runs clear, folding clean shirts, and attempts at re-creating an unwritten family recipe. Yet past wounds remain present like permanent marker under layers of paint or spilled fish sauce set into car upholstery. Infused with the Shinto-inspired organizing practices of KonMari and the catchy nihilism of Mitski's songs, the poems in Come Clean unpack, organize, and tidy up life's messy joys and hurtful chaos with intimacy, grace, and vulnerability. No matter how smattered my insides,I am relieved that I left my room tidy—One less ugly sight.  I always wanted to die clean & prettywhile my dreams made music in the night.—Excerpt from "Last Words"

Blue sky, yellow flowers, cool jazz, and Renaissance poetry all inhabit Betsy Sholl’s latest collection of poetry. Grounded in the everyday but never mundane, these poems remind readers of the wonders that surround us. From a child’s drawing tattooed onto the arm of a mechanic to bats under the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Sholl points to the richness of life.As the volume carefully and slowly immerses us in the poet’s world, we gradually begin to understand that this is our journey of exploration as much as hers. Where does one find joy in the face of loss? Why does music exist in a world of grief? How long does it take love to overwhelm pain?Through these powerful poems we learn to see past the unreliability of memory and into the depth of the present. The child makes you a blue inch at the top of the page, and it’s still hard for grown-ups to think you come all the way down to the space between grass blades—Excerpt from “Dear Sky”

Moving beyond a biting indictment of American popular culture, Jameka Williams captures the reader’s gaze and stares right back: “I’m sorry, America, but I’m rich in baby oil & paperback novels only these days. So finish paying for me with what is mint. No conditions.” In this stunning debut collection, Williams offers a deeply personal investigation into how Americans (herself included) have been duped, buying into classism, sexism, and racist beauty ideals, while sacrificing the freedom of self-love and self-determination. With whip-fast profanity and fiery humor, she charts a tender, exalting, and vibrant path to freedom from mirrors, stages, and screens.Fiercely feminist, Black, American, and powerful, Williams speaks for a generation of obsessive social media influencers and consumers, revealing the complex ways in which we are all actors, witnesses, and victims in our public and private performances. Though we may be permanent residents of this soulless cultural landscape, this stunning collection refuses to let it define us.I am not the same machine which came ramblingoff the conveyor belt, hugging the bolts & wiresspilling from her vivisection. I’m last year’s modelwith a sleeker, softer system of cool disdain formy Internet addictions.  —Excerpt from "I Intend to Outlast"

“I am going to make a poem,” writes Emily Bludworth de Barrios, “As if / I could put beautiful things in a box to keep them there.” With Shopping, orThe End of Time she has done that and so much more. These kaleidoscopic images reflect and reverberate across time and space, revealing collisions of identity, motherhood, childhood, houses, shopping malls, industrial canals—the hopes and fears of what we’ve lost and gained over the decades in our mad rush for connection, for ownership, for goods.A detective’s red thread spiderweb mapping the constellations among parenting, capitalism, aging, and ghosts, this stunning collection is wistful, unmoored, glamorous, and immense. These tour-de-force poems simultaneously capture an impression of emptiness and pleasure, of existing in a liminal space filled with both hollowness and potential. Even though we lived at the edge of a great rupture,It was difficult to tell when the world broke.—Excerpt from “Ravine”

Poets have been writing about love for centuries, so it is thrilling when a new voice comes along capable of breathing new life into old structures. In (At) Wrist, Tacey Atsitty melds inherited forms such as the sonnet with her DinÉ (Navajo) and religious experiences to boldly and beautifully seek a love that can last for eternity.Celebrating and examining the depth and range of her relationships with men, Atsitty tenderly shares experiences of being taught to fish by her father, and, in other poems, reveals intimate moments of burgeoning romantic love with vulnerability and honesty. Through these poems, grounded in a world both old and constantly remade, she reminds us that it is only by risking everything that we can receive more than we ever imagined. The result is a collection that lives simultaneously under the stars and in our dreams.All I know is it’s the season  when wind comes crying, like a baby whose head knocks a pew during the passing  of the sacrament, that silence— her long inhale filling with pain. Excerpt from “A February Snow”

Venezuelan poet Juan Calzadilla (b. 1931), past recipient of the National Prize in the Visual Arts and the National Prize in Literature, is considered one of the most influential poets of the Spanish language. But while his books have appeared in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Spain, his work has not been widely available in English until now.In 1961 Calzadilla was a founding member of El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale), an avant-garde collective that sought to fuse politics and aesthetics. He published three books of poetry under its umbrella—Dictated by the Pack (1962), Bad Manners (1965), and The SupernaturalContradictions (1967)—which are all presented here in an omnibus edition, masterfully translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott. Decades later, these poems still resonate, profoundly illustrating a sense of entrapment, of societal pressures on the individual, and of steadfast refusal to give in. Suffused with surrealist imagery, exuberant, exciting, and unexpected, The Roof of the Whale Poems is a breathtaking collection.The main occupation we have given this prisoner is to force him to restlessly pace around what on closer inspection turns out to be a labyrinth whose inside space exactly matches the convulsions of his brainA convicted man we have put to death . . .—Excerpt from “The Prisoner of His Conscience”

Grief fractures and scars. In Afterlife Michael Dhyne picks up the shattered remains, examining each shard in the light, attempting to find meaning—or at least understanding—in the death of his father. “If I tell the story in reverse, / it still ends with nothing,” he writes. Yet it is in the telling that Dhyne’s story—and the world he creates—is filled. The echoes of his childhood loss reverberate through adolescence and adulthood, his body, the bodies of those he loves, and the world around them—from Bourbon Street to dark and lonely bedrooms, from grief support groups to heartachingly beautiful sunsets.How we are shaped by our experiences, and how we refuse to be shaped, is at the heart of the poet’s search for memory, meaning, and love—in all its forms and wonders. This bold and tender debut is a rousing reminder that poetry and art can heal.It’s one thing to remember, another to not forget. A girl says, Can I start with my birth? and I ask her if anything happened before that, her eyes bright with wonder. - Excerpt from “95 South”

In raw, lyrical poems, Host explores parasitic relationships—between men and women, sons and mothers, and humans and the Earth—and considers their consequences. Throughout this collection, flukes abound, both chance occurrences and flatworms changing their hosts’ behavior. How much control do we have over our lives? To what extent are we being controlled? And how much does it matter in the end?Revealing the unvarnished pain of mistreatment—whether inflicted maliciously or accidentally—Lisa Fay Coutley examines legacies of abuse in poems that explore how trauma parasitizes bodies, infecting the text, repeating in language and image the injuries the body has been subjected to. How can people heal from intergenerational trauma—and how can humans mend themselves when they live on a planet they abuse daily?Ask me whylight can pour warm through a cold baywindow while water under sun is darkas a closed door. A man’s handerases a girl’s thigh. The trees start starvingthemselves into everyone’s favorite color.Her darkest room digs itselfbelow her throne. The body knows no wrong move. The more love, the more.—Excerpt from “Oubliette”

One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn’t want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, HernÁndez explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. These pages are infused with comfort, with desire, with heartache. Never absent is love, family. HernÁndez—hyperaware of American society’s dismissal or hatred of people who look like him—writes with a refreshing confidence, a sure knowledge of who he is and where he comes from. Transcending any particular experience, this volume will continue to resonate with multiple readings.he says I deserve someone who will love me the way  I love him. I want to kiss him, tell him love isn’t measured. I squeeze his hand instead, afraid of the thought of anyone looking at us  from the outside of my car. —Excerpt from “Defying the Dangers of Being”

“Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism.Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection. All titled “Word of the Day,” these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse.“You can't carry water in a sentence,” says the author—but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.Life is all gilded frescoesand Arnold Palmers at the clubhouse until Titus and his men pass through with torches, until CortÉs and his men pass through with torches, until Sherman and his men and so on, until men forget what their hands looked like without torches.—Excerpt from “Ruin”

In The Story of Your Obstinate Survival, Daniel Khalastchi boldly strides across a landscape of smoldering fires, unmarked boxes, and pictures of senators in airplane bathrooms as a way of asking: In the face of incessant turmoil, how do we go on? This exhilarating and innovative book collapses genre and upends narrative convention with dazzling wordplay and thrilling imagery.Inhabiting a world trapped somewhere between dreams and reality, these poems fuse the political and personal, public and private, pleasure and pain, to examine both calamities and the dogged persistence required to endure. On display throughout is Khalatschi’s exceptional capacity for detail and specificity, filling up this world to the point of breaking but never beyond, insisting on survival despite it all. Crowds around the circus serve as means of an escape,a legislative party bus of palliative care. There standing by the advent tent are penitential dentures, striking in their likeness to entire choking towns. Backed downand bound the carnival carnivorous is glowing, amidway ways away alit and stilted by the night.—Excerpt from “Trying to I Can’t Hit Anything Yet the Bodies Pile Up”

Dario Bellezza—Italy’s first openly gay, major prizewinning poet-novelist-playwright—was a bold, daring writer who energetically explored love, sexual transformation, and death. Bellezza embraced a variety of forms, from unabashed love-lyric to political narrative, and the fervor of his voice makes a compelling argument for his lasting importance as one of the most remarkable poets of the late twentieth century. Yet, until now, his work has never been available in English. Award-winning translator Peter Covino offers a wide-ranging selection of representative poetry from Bellezza’s career. Influenced by Rimbaud, the Beats, and the growing European gay rights movements, his poetry remains innovative and timely. Ranging from stray cats in the graveyards of Rome, to the literal and metaphoric fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, to the joys and disappointments of random hookups, Bellezza’s dazzling visions will sparkle in readers’ eyes like sunspots long after they complete this magnificent volume.

“There are fevers you still wish to forget,” writes Eduardo MartÍnez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation—or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Cowboy Park seamlessly blends themes of masculinity, identity, and the immigrant experience, offering a new perspective on the iconic image of the cowboy and a deeper understanding of the complexities of human experience. The detainment and deportation of MartÍnez-Leyva’s brother grounds this exquisite collection in the all-too-common familial tragedy of political violence and discrimination. MartÍnez-Leyva honors the people, language, culture, and traditions that shaped him, revealing the indignations, large and small, experienced by a community that is too often misrepresented and maligned. “My voice was the only thing keeping us warm,” he writes, and the warmth from this striking debut collection is beautiful to behold.“In Spanish, the act of coring an appleis called ‘descorazonar,’ to dishearten.All these years, I've kept my hands awayfrom everyone’s heart, including my own.I’d always love the things that bruised so easily.”—Excerpt from “Scenes from the Bone Orchard”

“It was breeding season, / wasn’t it, and they were running from something,” writes Caitlin Roach. Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia, surveilling her body, civic bodies, natural and political landscapes, and the child she longs to bring into—and ultimately protect from—this hostile world.Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. She writes, “Still, I watch / the watcher watch me watch / the man standing in front of me / peering through the crosshatch / iron mesh, waiting for bodies / beloved he knows he cannot touch / to arrive on the other side.”Surveille is a book about people under various forms of control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), about mothering, and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.Hold the husk.Suck each bead out. Thereare degrees of loss, speedsat which pain travelsthrough the body. See,even the rose neck’s bent. I do notneed to tell you I’m sick. I want tobe remembered for the absencemy body made in space.—Excerpt from “Gardening, the mother gives her daughter a lesson on loss”