The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous "technology culture," even as it's a time when the urge to memorialize the past—to sing elegiacally—seems more important than ever.Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in time: the ever-shifting "now."

Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, Darryl Dawkins (late NBA star), saltine crackers. While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.

From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.

A tour de force, Aaron Smith’s fourth collection of poetry, The Book of Daniel, resists the easy satisfactions of Beauty while managing the contemporary entanglements of art, sex, and grief. Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning, these poems depict not only the complications of representation in the age of social media but a critique of identity. Taking on subjects as diverse as the literary canon, his mother’s incurable cancer diagnosis, gay bashing, celebrity gossip, bigotry, violence on TV, and Alexander McQueen’s suicide, Smith proves that the confessional lyric is not dead. In tangents as wild as they are reigned, with his characteristic blend of directness, vulnerability and humor, these poems take on the world as it is, a world we love even as it resists all intimacy.

Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet’s husband during the six months following his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet’s grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.

Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.

The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.

Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.

A new collection of poetry from a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.

Author of two previous collections of poetry: BLACK HOPE (1997) and ANTIDOTE FOR NIGHT (2015). de la O is also the publisher of the journal ASKEW.Keats at Fourteen She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen’s border,a hectic rose flaming each cheek. Her lips move, no words. The boy is guardian spirit, no one but he enters this sickroom where his mother fades, home finally after six years—failures,disgrace. Scarlet daughter, neighbors hiss, slave to appetite, but John is single-minded—she will live. No one but he gives her the tincture of mercury—one tenth of a grain daily, dabs the sweat of her fevers away, a basket of withered poppies at his feet. He pierces each capsule with a needle, drops it in a small glazed crock to warm near the stove, sweat out the opium. Then he’ll add wine, saffron, nutmeg. It takes time, the hour darkens. He cups his hand to light the votive. She moans a furred voice from webbed lungs, a cup of black blood brimming, the pilgrim is fleeing the City, he leans in closer, the City of Destruction, takes her clammy hand, that place also where he was born, so close now he’s breathing her, “Johnny,” she cries, “lift me up, Johnny, your father is here in the room.

11 / 22 / 17A good day for a drive to the country underneath the apple tree with Carmen McRaeproving you can sing and talk at the same time“and hear the bluebirds sing” she sings as if there were a hyphen separating “blue” from “birds”and we “shoot up” with summertime

In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016–2018, try to find out just how changed my dear city and how troubled my days.”

Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject -- Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself -- that is unwilling to fall under his spell.

With eleven full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has gained national recognition as a writer of poems that are complex yet reader-friendly. Sidebend World shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, and psychologically astute poets writing in the U.S. A. today, as well as one of the most entertaining. Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best humor must, from serious concerns. Powered by an uncompromising but compassionate intelligence and an abiding wonder at the beautiful strangeness of the world, Sidebend World explores with clarity and vividness a wide range of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality; yet, above all, Webb is a poet of praise. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a distinctive voice at once provocative and endearing, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Sidebend World "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

The poems in Plasma, Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of plasma: an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch thousands of electronic images, sounds, and stories.