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Nobody’s Mother
This award-winning author's autobiography in verse is narrated in a likeable voice that will resonate with a wide audience. Themes include feminism, aging, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, and nostalgia for Jewish culture along with a critique of its patriarchal and warlike aspects. Along the way, Newman offers such delights as an ode to the now-shuttered Second Avenue Deli, and a playfully erotic exploration of middle-aged love.
No Sweeter Fat
The briny tastes and stormy weathers of the Pacific Northwest permeate this first poetry collection, voiced by a woman whose appetites for food and love are more than the world allows. These poems speak honestly of loneliness and pleasure. Winner of the 2006 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest.
No Loneliness
A sacred quiet permeates this debut poetry collection, winner of the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Abandoned barns are Cone's churches; the steady rhythms of farm work, his liturgy. The birth of a daughter is both miracle and memento mori, a sweet paradox held together in an extended lyric poem that envisions poetry as a transmission of love across generations.
My Favorite Apocalypse
The enticing title says it all: this author embraces all the joys and sorrows of the body, flamboyant as a rock musician yet wryly wise as a philosopher. Unusual juxtapositions abound, but her words always discover that they enjoy each other's company.
Monsters and Other Lovers
Raw, sensual, touched with bittersweet humor, Glatt's poems take an unflinching look at women's bodies experiencing love and death.
Making Certain It Goes On
No modern poet captured the essence of a place as well as 20th-century master Richard Hugo, whose tightly paced free verse reveals the dignity of America's forgotten towns.
Maine
Offbeat offerings in this winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize include "Hair Club for Corpses" and a sestina in which every line ends with "Bob". Winter can switch from serious to humorous and back again in a blink: "Everyone's losing at something./ It just matters more to some people, for example, Orpheus/ or Ty Cobb."
Love Poem to Androgyny
Fierce, tragicomic poetry chapbook voices the struggles and desires of a lesbian whose masculine appearance leads her (not always voluntarily) to adopt alternate identities in response to others' preconceptions. This writer's fertile imagination was formed by a hostile world in which one best expresses one's true self by wearing a mask. "Who will believe us that deception is only/ a matter of cutting through the red tape?"
Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize Anthology 2010
This engaging and accessible anthology features the winners and numerous runners-up from the first year of this contest, sponsored by a small press in Connecticut whose motto is "Delight, entertain and educate". Well-known contributors include Ed Frankel, Diane De Pisa, and A.D. Winans, alongside a number of writers who are just beginning their literary careers. A concluding section is devoted to the rediscovery of lesser-known authors including Jon Norman, Richard Harteis (partner of the late William Meredith), and Vernice Quebodeaux. The authors' bios are often as colorful as the poems themselves.
In the Ghost-House Acquainted
Prizewinning first collection of poetry depicts the farming life unsentimentally yet with wonder at the mysteries of birth, death and transcendence. The language of these poems can be as stark and rugged as a Massachusetts winter, then blossom forth with the joy and terror of encountering the sacred in the cycles of nature. This book won the 2004 New England/New York Award from Alice James Books and the 2005 L.L. Winship award from PEN/New England.
In the Collage of Life
Artistically designed limited-edition chapbook pairs poetic reflections with intricate abstract pen-and-ink drawings and collages suggesting forms from nature. Schulman keeps alive the tradition of books as art objects, creating an "illuminated manuscript" with a decisively modern feel.
Hum
Winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, this electric debut collection embodies the vitality and struggle of becoming a man. The word "elegy" is not entirely right for such energetic, muscular poems, but there is mourning here for May's native Detroit and the men of his family who were scarred by addiction, war, and racism. The speaker of these poems fights back with beauty, noticing the shine of the handcuffs while enduring police harassment, or the inspiring message on the plastic bag that holds his relative's ashes "in a Chinese takeout box". In the age of e-readers, AJB's elegant book design makes a case for the pleasures of print. Poems titled after various phobias are interspersed through the book on black paper with white type, creating moments of visual "hush" amid the "hum" of text.
Here, Bullet
Recently returned from the Iraq war, this former infantry team leader depicts the agony and adrenalin rush of combat, as well as the moments of unexpected stillness and beauty in a soldier's precarious life in a foreign land. This striking debut collection won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books.
Heaven
Sensual, joyous and profound poems make Christian ideas and images fresh again. Required reading for all poets seeking a modern idiom for the language of faith.
From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New & Selected Poems
This delightful first volume in Hobblebush Books' Granite State Poetry Series offers formal verse that is light-footed, elegant, and full of surprises. Many of Pratt's poems concern his work as an apple-grower in New Hampshire, describing the farming life with humor, wistfulness, and reverence. There are also poems of family life, European travel, meditations on aging and the mystery that lies beyond.
Forms of Gone
The poetic equivalent of a Chagall painting, this collection by a daughter of Holocaust survivors pays homage to the burdens and treasures of Jewish history. "I hoped to become one/ on whom nothing would be lost."
For Girls (& Others)
Two centuries of advice for girls, from Victorian health texts to Internet chat rooms, get remixed and satirized in this playful poetry collection with an underlying serious question: how to secure a space of enjoyment and dignity when one's identity is continually subject to public judgment.
Folly Bridge
This poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press charms the senses with narrative poems that sing the particular music of locales ranging from Oxford to the Kansas prairie. One can hear the splash of the oars in the languid call-and-response of "Punt House, River Cherwell", or the off-key enthusiasm of the Midwestern mother in "Roxie Margaret Mouths the Words", who gives her children the gift she was denied, the belief that everyone deserves to find their voice. Alexander creates characters that will remain in readers' hearts.
Folding Ruler Star
Described by its author as "a value-neutral 'Paradise Lost'", this distinctive poetry collection explores the free-floating shame that arises from our simultaneous desires for connection and self-protection. Objects acquire human faces and vulnerabilities, while human faces are deconstructed into schematics ("five security zones"). The book is comprised of paired poems with the same title, enacting the imperfect mirroring of the self in intimacy with another. Runner-up for the 2006 Fence Modern Poets Prize.
Floating Girl (Angel of War)
Luminous poems depict the spiritual tragedy of warfare through the idealized figure of the dead child, who amazingly deigns to comfort us with her beauty even as she indicts the ways we fall short of true humanity. The title poem in this prizewinning collection from Elixir Press took first prize in the 2003 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest. The book cover and design are also first-rate.
First Rain
The poems in this chapbook are spare yet filled with longing, like the empty rooms in an Edward Hopper painting. Their narrators reach for the unsentimental wisdom to be found on the far side of divorce, aging, and other losses. This collection won the 2009 Pecan Grove Press National Chapbook Competition. High-quality book design enhances the appeal.
Enola Gay
Dazzling imagination of a post-apocalyptic world. Here is experimental verse that never becomes detached from its foundation in raw personal emotion and political outrage.
Detour
This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman's identity in the middle of her life, through a son's birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet's hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person's experience. This feat is accomplished through White's use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty.
Deposition
Intense, sometimes cryptic verse explores the title's dual meanings of a witness statement and the removal of Christ from the cross. Ford's poetry occupies the territory between crucifixion and resurrection, a "dark night of the soul" that ruthlessly clears the ground for faith without making any cheery promises. Another must-read for poets working on spiritual themes.
Degrees of Latitude
A woman's life unfolds in this finely crafted book-length poem, composed of found texts, fragments of conversation, and images recollected with the context-free vividness of a dream. Blossom takes on weighty subjects like divorce and alcoholism at a slant, breaking them apart into sentences separated by daring associative leaps, like the scattered impressions that a child might gather but be unable to process.
Darker
The former US Poet Laureate needs no introduction, but this early collection (1970) deserves to be rediscovered. Other poets use images as metaphors; in "Darker", the images are the raw sense data of a surreal, often sinister new universe. "My neighbor marches in his room,/ wearing the sleek/ mask of a hawk with a large beak." Dare to enter the "phantasmagoria" (Howard Bloom's description) of the poet's mind.
Dance and Disappear
Winner of the Juniper Prize. These poems radiate joy and spiritual insight.
Crime Against Nature
Politically urgent but never one-dimensional, in language that's always clear but never pedestrian, this groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life. Connecting her loss to other forms of oppression and violence against women, she dares to dream of a world that "will not divide self from self, self from life." This collection was originally published in 1989 by Firebrand Press and won the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize, a second-book award from the Academy of American Poets. A Midsummer Night's Press, in conjunction with the lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom, reissued it in 2013 in an expanded edition with historical notes and an author essay.
Crazy Love
This poetry collection is enlivened by twin passions for social justice and the beauties of the Colorado landscape. In these poems, nature always provides a restorative place of peace and abundance when the wartime news becomes overwhelming. Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cutthroat.
Common Carnage
His ninth book of life absurd, and fascinating... "Two barn owls discuss Descartes as they/disembowel a field mouse without the help/of knife or fork. They are friends and/share even the tastiest bits. For instance,/each gets one lung. Sum, says one. Ergo/cogito, says the other. Then they chuckle./The night is cold; the fields are white...."
Colma
This chapbook from FutureCycle Press is named for a necropolis outside San Francisco, a city of cemeteries where the dead outnumber the living by 800 to 1. Yet Laue's poems are anything but morbid. Like the Biblical writer Ecclesiastes, this poet cannot erase his awareness of mortality by means of religious rituals or hopeful platitudes, but finally finds a precarious peace in appreciation of the present moment, and a substitute for immortality in the cycles of nature.
Christening the Dancer
Vital, innovative first collection of poems blazes with the agony and ecstasy of rebirth. "We stand in the fusillade,/refusing to camouflage ourselves./Every bullet swallowed turns to gold in our bowels."
Becoming the Villainess
Coherent, engaging first collection reads like a single long poem in the voices of fairy-tale ingenues and villainesses, B-movie femmes fatales, superheroines, and mythological women. Moving easily between colloquial humor and poignant lyricism, Gailey summons up a feminist pantheon. The recurring figure of Philomel, whom the gods turned into a nightingale after her brother-in-law raped her and cut her tongue out, epitomizes the mixed blessing of art that is brought into being by tragedy. Were women not silenced, this collection seems to say, we would not have the dazzling indirections of myth and fairy tale, the coded language of comic-book symbolism. "Everybody loves the dead girl after she's dead."
Barely Breathing
Also known as the artist Tom Taylor, Spiel has written several books that provide material for this powerful collection of new and selected poems. With tough-guy bluntness, a wicked sense of humor, and a haiku-like economy of words, Spiel sketches characters so real you can smell their sweat: traumatized vets, greedy Americans, aging couples hanging on to love despite memory loss, one-night stands picked up in roughneck bars. This is queer poetry without aesthetic preciousness or airbrushed bodies.
Bad Bad
In this unique offering from Fence Books, the author indulges her passion for the textures of language (and clothing), while poking fun at the pretensions of the academic poetry scene. Adopting the persona of a naughty little girl, the speaker of this book deflects criticism by flaunting her frivolity, yet at the same time secretly hopes to impress everyone with her cleverness. The pleasures of this book (particularly its 68 "prefaces") compensate for some repetitive passages.
AWE
Marrying surrealism to a childlike matter-of-factness, in a voice reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, these poems convey the delight and bafflement of having "your mind...whipped by the large whisk of God."
As If Gravity Were a Theory
Winner of the 2005 Cider Press Review Book Award, this first collection limns the wonders and losses of everyday life with clarity, compassion and a deceptive simplicity that is the distilled product of wisdom. Admirers of Douglas Goetsch and Wislawa Szymborska may find Colburn's poetic voice especially resonates with them.
Aqua Curves
Feminine archetypes get a modern reinterpretation in verses alternately playful and poignant, in this prizewinning collection whose guiding spirit is the mermaid. Winner of the 2005 Stevens Prize from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
Any Holy City
Winner of the Gerald Cable Award reclaims the story of Abraham and Isaac as token of the fierce, ambivalent love of fathers for sons, and perhaps of God for man - a love that in one moment could devour its creation or die for it. Other poems take us from the American prairie to the permeable border between the worlds of the living and the dead. "This is how we came to/ love this life - / by wanting/ the next."
And Still the Music
In this prizewinning poetry chapbook from Flume Press, the author speaks on behalf of "Eve and Persephone and all/ those other wayward girls" who bravely danced through a dangerous world. Even painful anecdotes brim with a life force conveyed by Townsend's love of sensory details. Book design is above-average with glossy paper and French flaps.
A Knot of Worms
These quiet poems are charged with a sacred attention to healing the wounds sustained by our bodies and ecosystem. In the aftermath of war or illness, the human spirit finds wholeness by recovering our common bond with whales, dragonflies, and even worms. This chapbook was published in the New Women's Voices series from Finishing Line Press.
A Defense of Poetry
This winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize rediscovers the glorious art of invective in the title poem, comprising several pages of (footnoted) insults such as "your brain is the Peanut of Abomination" and "suing you would be like suing a squirrel". This book is a uniquely uninhibited burst of creativity which reminds poets how much firepower we're not using.
A Bride of Narrow Escape
Lush poems, at first heavy with the weight of memory and responsibility as the author nurses her dying parents, then laden with a sweeter burden of nature's ripeness and the enjoyment of her own body. A mature and trustworthy voice. This book was published by Cloudbank Books in their Northwest Poetry Series.
Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract
Everything you need to know about pitching your novel to agents and editors. Includes advice on selecting an agent, plus how to write query letters, synopses and book proposals, with many helpful samples of each.
Write Ways to Win Writing Contests
A witty and practical guide to finding the best contests for your work. Topics include identifying the judges' tastes, "popular" versus "literary" styles of writing, preparing a professional-looking manuscript and avoiding scam contests. Though his examples are drawn from fiction, poets will also find this guide indispensable. John Reid is the founder of the Tom Howard poetry and prose contests, now sponsored by Winning Writers.
Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer
Make your moods work for you, judge if and when to quit your day job, get along with the others in your home and tap the power of positive and negative thinking.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition
Create work that meets today's professional standards with guidance on grammar, usage, formats, design and sourcing (including electronic and online sources).
The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction
Over 200 inventive exercises to help you break out of old patterns and discover new things about your characters. Kiteley uses word limits rather than time limits to provide discipline and focus. The prompts are grouped according to the technique they are designed to develop (timing, narrative voice, and so forth) and include brief discussions of why they work.
Poetry Previews
Reviews important contemporary poets and makes it easy to order their books.
How to Make a Living as a Poet
Successful slam poet offers creative ways to support a career as a full-time writer. Also includes advice about how to give good readings, write effective press releases, and other practical skills.
