Poetry
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Dog Songs: Poems
Doll Collection
Why do dolls compel us so much? What are their meanings? What lessons do they have to teach us? The Doll Collection explores these questions. This wonderful anthology of poems asks us to rethink dolls. Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood. Dolls shape our thinking about the female body, about race and class. Dolls influence our understanding of childhood. Symbols of perfection, they both comfort and terrify. Dolls represent, as Freud would say, the "uncanny." They are replicas, simulacra, souvenirs and secrets. They are objects we recall with intense nostalgia but also bodies we dismember and destroy. They might be made of cornhusks, clay, rags, paper, cloth, wood, porcelain, celluloid, bisque, plastic, or metal. For centuries, dolls have taught us how to understand our world and are windows to other worlds. Dolls are portals to our pasts and to ourselves. Dolls open the doors to our imagination. (from the Introduction, by Nicole Cooley)
The Doll Collection, the first anthology to focus on dolls, includes 88 poems by such poets as Michael Waters, Cecilia Woloch, Alice Friman, Lee Upton, Chana Bloch, Kelly Cherry, and Jeffrey Harrison.
Dove Tail
Duino Elegies: Deluxe Edition
Floaters: Poems
Martín Espada is a poet who stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness, says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.
Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the I'm 10-15 Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.
The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question.
Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.
Garden Physic
"At the center of the garden the heart," she writes, "Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff." As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris's poems map the garden as body and the body as garden--her words at home in the phytological and anatomical--like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky's "80 Flowers." In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation--spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.
Gatekeeper: Poems
Winner of a Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. "An emptying drain, driven by gravity." And in Patrick Johnson's Gatekeeper--selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.
So we learn as Johnson's speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom "nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going," his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror--human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson's map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world.
Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.
Geosmin
The poems of Geosmin (the scent of soil) are celebration of the startling and shimmering earth, praising creatures of soil, sky, and in-between. Ecologist, farmer, mother, and poet Catherine Young honors land and what it means to be human in this world. Her poems journey through earth, water, tree, and stone, the heartbreak and beauty of seasons across a rural year, and take a panoramic view of aging. Young paints a deep map of Wisconsin's Driftless region while evoking a place found within regions of the heart.
Heart of American Poetry
part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations."
Heart on a String: poems
The poems in Heart on a String feature acute observations and tender reflections. They explore the mysteries of love and the end of love, of life and mortality. With clear language and vivid images, Tom Boswell takes the reader on a poetic journey not soon to be forgotten.
Hunt and Gather
Hurting Kind
Imaginery Baritone
In a Time of Distance: and Other Poems
Last Days
Last Shift: Poems
Loose Strife
Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle
Contributors:
Ned Balbo, Mary Jo Balistreri, Melissa Balmain, Kate Bernadette Benedict, Margaret Benbow, Bruce Bennett, Jerome Betts, Meredith Bergmann, Kim Bridgford, Debra Bruce, Michael Cantor, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Maryann Corbett, Paul Creswell, Barbara Crooker, T..A. Cullen, Thomas O. Davenport, Laurel Devitt, Moria Egan, Martin Elster, Anna M. Evans, Annie Finch, Claudia Gary, Taylor Grahm, Emily Grosholz, Catherine Abbey Hodges, Jeff Holt, Paul Hostovsky, Nancy Jesse, A.M. Juster, Julie Kane, Karen Kelsay, Brian Jerrold Koester, Amy Lemmon, Barbara Loots, Eileen Mattman, Janet McCann, Susan McLean, Richard Merelman, Mary Meriam, Leslie Monsour, Burt Myers, Chris O'Carroll, Angela O'Donnell, Jennifer Reeser, Richard Roe, Jane Satterfield, Wendy Sloan, David Southward, Susan Delany Spear, Andrew Szilvasy, Judith Terzi, Pat Valdata, Kathrine Varnes, Lisa Vihos, Ed Werstein, Lesley Wheeler, Gail White.EDITORS:
Marilyn L. Taylor former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin is the author of six poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Able Muse. Measure and Light, among many other journals and anthologies. She was recently awarded the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for verse in forms, and was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Parody Contest, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet award, and the 2018 Lascaux Review prize. She currently serves on the editorial staffs of Verse-Virtual and Third Wednesday.
James P. Roberts, Editor Author of 16 books in the fields of fantasy & science fiction, poetry, literary biography and baseball history. James is a regional Vice-President for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin where he has a passion for women's flat-track roller derby and is very much involved in the Little Free Library movement. (You may even find a Little Free Library in the Villa Nelle!)