Poetry
100 Chinese Silences
Timothy Yu's first book of poems, 100 CHINESE SILENCES, brims with sharp, angry, sarcastic and tender poems. He delivers dazzling lines with the deadpan wit and precise timing of Buster Keaton, the stone-faced master of silence. In fact, I had not realized until now--and I mean NOW--that Keaton is really the Timothy Yu of silent films, while Yu is Yu, a slayer of dragons, who knows the millions of sinister and inscrutable ways the Chinese have been silenced in blockbuster films, best-selling novels, Broadway musicals and award-winning poems read on NPR, and closely scrutinized in graduate classes and parking lots of Asian fusion take-out joints with funny names. Not only does Yu make Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder stand on their pointy heads in ways that are illuminating and funny, but he also skewers Jeb Bush, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Marianne Moore, and Eliot Weinberger right through their bright yellow Chinese hearts. You got to love a poet who can do that and never miss his mark. I present you with Timothy Yu, noble Chinese archer and master poet.--John Yau
In Timothy Yu's hall of 100 Chinese poetic mirrors, puppies, blossoms, and hobbled feet clatter against the American grain, leaving wet prints as frowning emoji ciphers to rise up with a mighty bitch slap for Asian/American difference. These poems burn with gloriously wry disdain at the abundance of chinoiserie tinging modernist lineages of geopolitically western poetic traditions. By striking out at un-self-conscious performances of western cultural sophistication, Yu exposes these voices' indebtedness to emptied Chinese images. I pleasure in his poetry's mythic 10th century crystal penis, how it penetrates western imaginative impotencies to see otherwise. He's sharp, incisive, potty- mouthed, unapologetic, slippery, angry, urbane... His silences are fearsome and knowing. Fuck that yellow-faced hologram of Confucius! I want to hear what Timothy Yu has to say!--Sueyeun Juliette Lee
I can't remember when I last read a book as necessary, and as wickedly fun, as Timothy Yu's 100 CHINESE SILENCES. Yu responds to, rewrites, and reforms a whole poetic tradition of Western representations of China and the Chinese, from Ezra Pound to Gary Snyder to Billy Collins. Yu wears his learning lightly, and his various parodies, pastiches, and campy retakes on the poetic tradition balance a love of the poetry he's spent a career studying with a necessary critical edge. Our age demands a re- assessment of old representations of the mysterious east, and Timothy Yu has come through with exactly what we need. 100 CHINESE SILENCES has breakthrough book written all over it.--Robert Archambeau
100 Selected Poems
100 Umbrellas
a little rain, a little more
Abundance to Share With the Birds
After the Fireworks: 40 Poems of Learning About Life
The reader is invited to take a stroll through a life: from the comforts and questions of childhood; through the audacity, heartbreak and yearnings of young adulthood and middle age; to the awakening of acceptance and, perhaps, some insight in later life.
Written at various times over the course of 40-plus years, the poems in this collection present moments remembered, and realizations arising, over the course of the poet's life so far.
Alive at the End of the World
Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses.
In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.
Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what's within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we've been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America's existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here--and the apocalypse is a state of being.
All Heathens
Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization.
--Largehearted Boy
All Heathens is a declaration of ownership--of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan's voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker's Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve ("I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons"), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said "when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino," Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it.
America That Island Off the Coast of France
American Parables
the internet your high schooland find rubble. Your daughter
has the flu. We are sickwith disappointment but
everyone is fine.
--Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide
And Yet: Poems
The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman.
Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.
Kate's second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer and an artist working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way.
Intimate, evocative, and bold, Kate's beguiling poetry firmly positions her in the company of Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Maggie Nelson, and other great female poets of our time.
Apricots of Donbas
Apricots of Donbass is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk's voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems' artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control.
Arrows of Light
In Arrows of Light, Andrea Potos lets us dwell in those fragile moments between day and night, love and loss, living and death. In the stillness of of a blue scarf lake, the pale ochre walls of Van Gogh's rooms, the light that pours through her Yaya's kitchen windows, Potos takes us to the cusp of the unknowable. Pulled through by the thread of her mother's illness and eventual death, this small, elegant collection shines its gold light on those stunning, ephemeral details -- her mother's coral lipstick, blueberries like small sapphires, laundry flapping on the line like angel wings -- that seem to give us tidings of the world beyond and its fluid relationship with what we know now and will always remember.
Arrows That Choose Us
In The Arrows That Choose Us, Marilyn Annucci's poems of quiet observation startle with their precision: a curmudgeonly crow trapped in a yard "opens his wing like a set of black cards"; the knife at the bottom of a dishpan is "a mute battleship gone down on its side"; Houdini is "holding his breath at the bottom of your bathtub." Metaphysical in scope, this collection offers meditations on intimacy and mortality, technology and luck. Annucci finds humor even in places of loneliness or disappointment, reminding us how "the arrows that choose us" never fail "to tear us awake."
Artemis Made Me Do It
Backwater Sermons
Jay Hulme is an award-winning transgender poet, performer, educator and speaker. In late 2019, his fascination with old church buildings turned into a life-changing encounter with the God he had never believed in, and he was baptised in the Anglican church.
In this new poetry collection, Jay details his journey through faith and baptism during an unprecedented world-wide pandemic. As he finds God in the ruined factories and polluted canals of his home city, Jonah is heckled over etymology, angels appear in tube stations, and Jesus sits atop a multi-story car park. Cathedrals are trans, trans people are cathedrals, and amidst it all God reaches out to meet us exactly where we are.
Jay's poetry explores belief in the modern world and offers a perspective on queer faith that will appeal not only to Christians, but young members of the LGBT+ community who are interested in faith but unsure of where to start.
Balancing: Poems of the Female Immigrant Experience in the Upper Midwest, 1830-1930
The poems in Balancing were inspired by the experiences of women who, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sought new homes in the Upper Midwest. The first waves of pioneers, predominantly Yankees from Northeastern states, were soon followed by European immigrants. Few women recorded their struggles and satisfactions, but by juxtaposing research and imagination, Kathleen Ernst breathes new life into their forgotten stories.
Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family's Journey of Gender Transition
"Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family's Journey of Gender Transition," a collection of poems by Annette Langlois Grunseth, shares the parental experience of an adult child transitioning from son to daughter. Through understandable poetry, information is woven around one family's story to provide awareness about the journey of gender identity. Narrative poems explain changing avatars, using bathrooms, selecting clothing, grieving, passing as a woman, job discrimination, unique health issues, what happens to marriage and family, along with the joy that comes from seeing a child transition into living an authentic life.
Best American Poetry 2022
Bloodroot Poems
Blue Dress
In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend meditates on loss--childhood bereavement, depression, divorce--to arrive at the realization that it is through loss that we come to possess some of life's most profound gifts.
The project of Alison Townsend's poetry is to chart a course through the deepest of losses--to attempt some safe passage through a lifetime's erasures. Intimate, warm and observant, this book involves us in the inscription of a life.--Mark Doty
Alison Townsend was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and spent her childhood in North Salem, New York. She received a B.A. at Marlboro College in Vermont, an M.A. at Claremont Graduate School in California, and an M.F.A. at Vermont College in Mont-pelier. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.
Bright Dead Things: Poems
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."
A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and "effortlessly lyrical" (New York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Call Us What we Carry
The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.