Pretty Words - New In Poetry

Description: This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains. Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Description: The diverse poems in this collection form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics. But despite each poem's unique subject matter or occasion, all are fundamentally asking one overwhelming question: how to love this country? Blanco unravels the very fabric of the American narrative, pursuing a resolution to the inherent contradiction of our nation's psyche and mandate: e pluribus unum (out of many, one), charged with the Utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, and that America could and ought someday to be a county where all narratives converge into one.-- From statement provided by publisher.

Description: Jane Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider "the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap," recognize the intimacies of connection, and meditate upon doubt and contentment, a library book with previously dog-eared corners, the hunger for surprise, and the debt we owe this world's continuing beauty. Hirshfield's signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate.--From statement at Amazon.com.

Description: Billy-Ray Belcourt aims an anthropological eye at the contours of NDN and queer social worlds to spot that which is left unsaid when we look only to the mainstream media. Belcourt employs poetry, poetics, prose, and textual art to illuminate the rogue possibility bubbling up everywhere NDNs are. Part One examines the rhythms of everyday life, which include the terrible beauty of the reserve, the afterlives of history, and the grammar of anal sex. Part Two experiments with form and practice, putting to use, for example, a mode of documentary poetics that unearths the logics that make and unmake texts like Treaty 8. NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field emerges out of a form of auto/ethnographic sensibility that is at turns campy and playful, jarring and candid.-- From statement provided by publisher.

Description: A collection drawn from Laux's five expansive volumes, and including new poems that pay homage to her mother. Laux finds expression in earthy and lyrical depictions of working-class America, while exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration. -- adapted from jacket.

Description: "From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent--and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry." -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass's trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date."-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "A British poet's debut collection, winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry"-- Provided by publisher.