Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Miriam Bird Greenberg's stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth ("I'd spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling," she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg's experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society's edges. Beneath their surface runs a current of violence, whether at the hands of fate or men: she writes "Everyone knows // what happens to women // who hitchhike, constantly // trying a door to the other world made of lake / bottom or low forest, abandoned house // even wild animals / have rejected. " The result is a queering of On the Road, a feminist Frank Stanford at once vulnerable and canny. Richly textured, In the Volcano's Mouth is an extraordinary portrait of life on the enchanted margins.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief? Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive. Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world. The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980-2014.Past praise from Philip Levine: "The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. .

“These poems erupted in the East Greenlanders heart–the human sea at the outer limit of the north–on Earth's most desolate and rugged shores. They were found in the living tradition of a small, recently discovered Eskimo people that I (Thalbitzer) had gone to study. For the first time I heard their language as it sounded on people's lips, as it must have sounded through many generations. I understood that this was part of the Inuit people’s ancient poetry, and these songs and poems deserved to be written down for greater humanity.” —from the introduction

Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one’s emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: “poetry, like music, is not just song. ” It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “into transient examples of shaped behavior.” Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns. An online reading companion is available at petergizzi.site.wesleyan.edu.

The Little Edges is a collection of poems that extends poet Fred Moten’s experiments in what he calls “shaped prose”—a way of arranging prose in rhythmic blocks, or sometimes shards, in the interest of audio-visual patterning. Shaped prose is a form that works the “little edges” of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten’s poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader’s companion is available at http://fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.

One of the most notable members of the New York School—and its best-known woman—Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest’s poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest’s remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing—seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

First published in 1979, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald’s work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable. An online reader’s companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu.

This collection of Ted Greenwald’s poetry, edited by Miles Champion, is a sampler of some of Greenwald’s most breathtaking work. A New York poet with close ties to the New York School and the Language poets, Greenwald has written daily since the early 1960s, and none of the poems in this book are included in any of his books to date. These discrete works were written in advance of or alongside the extended explorations of a mutated triolet form that increasingly occupied him from the late 1970s on. This book can be seen as a companion to Common Sense, and provides further evidence of Greenwald’s ability to think with his ear, to hear what’s said as it arrives as a fresh sound or shape in his head. This work is singular in its pattern-making, its music-making, and its ability to simultaneously follow multiple paths. An online reader’s companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu

Praise for Martha Collins: "A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century . .

Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant. That dilemma of human fertility and love facing ultimate destruction is orchestrated by the author's provocative voice and coiled lines, which fondle and handle the reader's heart and mind in a bright light. The book insists on connecting the three eras of human experience – Then, Now, and When – at every turn. Orbit continues the unique aesthetic of Vogelsang's first five award-winning books through its "oddly direct original persona," its "mind – prophetic, wild, loony," its "language of surveillance and trembling," and the poems' ability "to find and magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously" (comments draw from other poets' reviews.) Vogelsang's new book Orbit is a dialogue between daily life and transcendent vision, insisting on the reality of each.

The Book of Landings brings together the second and third parts of Mark McMorris’s visionary trilogy “Auditions for Utopia,”—initiated in Entrepôt—and marks two stages in the evolution of the poet’s conception of space. The first stage of the collection is the entrepôt, a space where disparate vectors of identity congregate, come into conflict, and finally merge into hybrid forms. The poetry follows a trajectory of diaspora, or exile, instigated by conquest, colonialism, wars, and political defeat in the search for Utopia. In The Book of Landings the promised dwelling has been removed from the realm of physical geography, and there is only transition—fragmentary episodes of arrival and departure, in transit from one entrepôt to another. These episodes of transit do not only compose a linear sequence only. Instead, they define a space or surface marked by repeated traversals over time—tracings and, importantly, re-tracings, by explorers, conquerors, migrants, merchants, slaves, refugees, and exiles—a city of palimpsests. An online reader’s companion will be available at markmcmorris.site.wesleyan.edu.

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world's wealthiest nation. It is easy in America to do nothing and suckle the trickling down of the rich, but these poems urge that we have a community responsibility to alter the way we act. Through varied lenses, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, from Goethe to contemporary electronica, from the 1982 Tylenol Murders to the Stanley Cup, these poems assemble the rhetoric of our cultural landscape into a call to arms. We must change our ways.

In this sixth collection by award-winning poet Sharon Dolin, Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. With a fresh slant on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the title section offers a part-serious, part tongue-in-cheek series of advice poems. An ekphrastic sequence based on the "black paintings" of Goya follows, as a darker meditation on life. The final section, "Of Hours," is a contemporary sequence of psalms where the possibility for redemption in prayer exists. As in all of her work, Dolin's lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

David Hernandez's Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez's voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division that separates one from the other.

We'd not slept in days, or else we were/ still sleeping—who could tell?" someone asks in the opening poem of Eternity & Oranges. The voices we encounter in this book speak on the verge of disappearance, from places marked by disintegration and terror. Christopher Bakken's poems are acts of conjuring. They move from the real political landscapes of Greece, Italy, and Romania, into more surreal spaces where history comes alive and the summoned dead speak. In the formally diverse long poem, "Kouros/Kore," but also in this book's terse and harrowing dream songs, Bakken writes with devastating force, at every turn "Guilty of the crime of praise" while "begging for an antidote to beauty.