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The Present State of the Garden

By Heather Sellers

Winner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

In The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of loss: the dissolution of a...

Little Mirror

By David Weiss

You could say that Little Mirror is a book-length conversation with an inanimate object. Or you could say it’s a monologue in forty-seven fragments told to a different kind of fragment—a piece of mirrored glass....

The Many Beds of Martha Washington

By Nance Van Winckel

“There is so much unpredictability and surprise in Nance Van Winckel’s poems that they seem to hover, sometimes tremble, slightly ahead of the reader and writer, yet all the while rewarding anyone who cares to...

Osage Elegy

By Carlos Reyes

“This sequence of 30 fierce, lovely poems is set in the 1940s and '50s at the edge of Greater Appalachia, in west-central Missouri, a world at once exotic and familiar. The poems provide a border...

A Drunken Man on a Bicycle

By D.S. Butterworth

A lyrical exploration of the dysphoria of our current social reality, A Drunken Man on a Bicycle focuses on the intersection between personal and communal experience as authoritarian national leadership overwhelms the individual consciousness. These...

Long Coordinates

By Christina de Villier

“Christina de Villier’s Long Coordinates is an old-time book of mountain tunes, of blues, of songs sung by a soul deeply enmeshed in place and trying to reckon love and all its complications. The language...

The Long Embrace

21 Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine

By Christopher Buckley

Philip Levine is one of the foremost poets of the last fifty years, but moreover he is a master and unparalleled practitioner of the long poem in our time. No recent poet has written as...

From the Annals of Kraków

By Piotr Florczyk

Born of hours spent watching and listening to the testimonies of Polish Holocaust survivors and those who came to their aid, these poems by noted Polish poet Piotr Florczyk document the unspeakable evil unleashed by...

Bread Crumbs

By Cynthia Tremblay

These are poems of the garden and house, of dreams lost and fulfilled, and of children and struggle and love. They are poems that occur at the exact point where the inner life and the...

Explain This Corpse

By Kirsten Kaschock

Winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

“Sophisticated and cerebral gymnastics of language sway with gravity through the poems and poetic sequences of Explain This Corpse. Throughout, Kirsten Kaschock’s gestures are contemporary, jagged, and stop-start,...

Every Waking Moment

By James Crews

In Every Waking Moment, James Crews plumbs his past and family life for insights, yet always returns to the moment at hand, approaching the world with mindfulness, openness, and clarity. He finds the miraculous in...

Mother Water

Poems

By Emily Banks

Mother Water centers on maternal inheritance in literal and figurative forms. Through its water motif, the book traces the speaker’s transformations as she absorbs, and often resists, lessons from the women who guide her. The...

Blue Nude Migration

By Laura Stott. Illustrated by Kathryn Stott Buxton

By means of exceptionally concrete and direct language, Laura Stott’s poems lift dark matter up out of the shared unknown and give it shape. They have the simplicity of blue shadows and bells, the curiously...

Thieve

By Joe Wilkins

Thieve is a pointed, political book, though the politics here are local, particular, physically felt. The central sequence of poems—subtitled “Poem against the Crumbling of the Republic”—was written in direct response to the poet’s own...

Agnostic

Poems

By Christopher Buckley

Specters as various as Vallejo, Szymborska, Neruda, Fidel Castro, and Groucho Marx guide and support the elegies in Christopher Buckley’s new collection. A god that may or may not be there as well as politics,...

The Lord of Everywhere

By John Hodgen

The poems in The Lord of Everywhere are about strength and courage and the will to hold on, about home and homelessness, and the tension that floats like Emily’s feather between knowing what home means...

Long Day

Poems

By Peter Sears

The poems in this volume bring us a taste of Peter Sears’ unique range of sensibility. Entertaining, somberly hilarious, exquisite and filled with refreshment, these are poems for all seasons, reasons, purposes, and tastes. This...

The Appointment

The Tale of Adaline Carson

By John Keeble

The action of this novel takes place in the West, but it is not a “Western”; and though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, daughter of the famed frontiersman Kit Carson, it...

The Knowable Emotions

Poems

By Heikki Huotari

Heikki Huotari’s poems oscillate between intense moments of scientific clarity and absurdist pirouettes that remind us that, while the “world” may be a dance of entropic chaos screened by a thin veneer of rational apology,...

God's Laughter

By Thomas Brush

Thomas Brush’s new collection is about memory, aging, dive bars, love, and the struggle to keep nostalgia from turning life into an elegy for itself. As usual in his work, the poems contain a wild...