Written during the last five years of the poet’s father’s life, Creature is a book about love, destruction, and the self, all standing in relation to family and the natural world. The poems themselves try to move toward what can’t be said by finding connection with other life forms: hawks, hummingbirds, pelicans, lizards, horses, ravens, squid. By moving past linguistic walls into otherness, words become proximate to mystery and inhabit territory where expanses open and embodiment is always on the verge of transformation.

In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker’s decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways we become with all humans and nonhumans, all of us—past, present, and future—intimately entwined with others.

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.

Incantation and elegy shine through one another in this extraordinary poetic memoirWhen poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.[sample poem]When we are. When we are there, we lay togetherand cover ourselves with our voices. When we areten, we are also twenty-one. We speak of breathing,but this is a thing we cannot do. When we areseven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen,we begin our bodies. But we are unmappable,unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, thecrystalline frequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lyingdormant within you. We are the oldest dialect. Asound the voice cannot make but makes.

The definitive guide to a major African American poet. This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography. [sample poem] The Distant Drum I am not a metaphor or symbol.This you hear is not the wind in the trees.Nor a cat being maimed in the street.I am being maimed in the streetIt is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy.Speak this because I exist.This is my voiceThese words are my words, my mouthSpeaks them, my hand writes.I am a poet.It is my fist you hear beatingAgainst your ear.

A Black poet performs a shamanic soul retrieval of the seven-hundred-year-old diasporic Black arts traditionContinuing her search for a neotropical mythos in this brilliant second collection, poet fahima ife articulates various scenes of subduction. Spoken in quiet recognition and grounded in desire, Septet for the Luminous Ones imagines a lush soundscape textured in oblique spiritual fusion of the Taíno and Yoruba. Or, what it sounded like coming together for the first time, and what it sounds like ever after, breathless, diaspora calling. Similar to the incidents in Maroon Choreography, what resounds in these poems is an ecstatic love song of the Caribbean Americas, of the main lands and islands, shaped and reshaped as breathwork, ritual, communion, and fantasy. In essence, the collection speaks to raise the vibrational frequencies of all beings on Earth through a pulse of Black English.[sample poem]preface to a twenty-volume spiritual ascentneoromanticismthe seven players, and our consortsi am like a radio, channel of my own

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in a new tide of European immigrants to the United States. These populations, which hailed primarily from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, were largely adrift in America's cultural melting pot. Laden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home. In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back. Through themes of domestic abuse, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, and the search for cultural identity, the poems in this collection transcend the borders of language and nation-states. As a Bulgarian immigrant, Stoykova weighs the differences between safety and captivity, exploring how one can feel sheltered yet still not feel at home.Through a series of addresses to her new domestic partner, America, the speaker in this collection expresses gratitude while simultaneously interrogating the landscape that has come to "home" her. With every line of verse, Stoykova's unique grasp on the turns of the English language brings a fresh perspective to immigrant identity and lays bare the terrifying and thrilling duality of living between two cultures.

Amy M. Alvarez explores the cultural, spiritual, and place-based experiences of Afro-Caribbean and African American diasporic peoples in this haunting and emotionally charged collection of poems that meditates on the meaning of home and existence. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, Alvarez draws readers into a journey of self-discovery and identity, connecting the past with the present while highlighting the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American. The musicality of her language weaves together themes of environment, family, and migration, as well as her own ancestry as a Black Latinx woman. Makeshift Altar is an intimate collection that explores identities forged by colonialism and displacement and shaped by individual choice and collective power.

A chapbook from Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout on climate change.Notice is the product of a life-long interest in natural sciences by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout. The collection draws poems from her previous books calling our attention to how language frames and shapes our relationships to climate and kin. The title is a call to take heed of the signs coming to us daily. "Notice" can be read as a noun or a verb. As a noun it might be thought of as a public warning. The author has selected poems that respond in various ways to the environmental crisis which we all see developing and about which we don't seem to be able to take appropriate action. The poem "Preparedness," for instance, hazards a wild guess about the cause of this failure to act. Some of the poems here address the problem directly. In others the focus is broader or the approach more subtle. There are even a few poems in which the author allows for something like hope.

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend - one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination - all the while breaking records on the ball field. Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson's life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination. Emotive, prescient, and absorbing, these powerful poems address social change, culture, family, race, death, and oppression—while honoring and giving voice to Gibson and a voiceless generation of African Americans.

The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.

Octobers traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language - as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American masterBe Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Much of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy."When your body brushed against me. . ."When your body brushed against me I rememberedHow we used to catch butterflies in our handsDown in the garden.We were such patient childrenFollowing them from flower to flowerWaiting and hoping.With our cupped hands we used to catch themAnd they answered us with a soft tickleFor they never stopped flying.In bed I remembered them and cried forThe touch of their fast wings, the impatienceOf their bright colorsI am too old for such gamesBut even tonight, now your body has reminded me of butterfliesI lie here awake, pretending.

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also - as it has been for centuries - a work of loveIn Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection, we find, in the poet's words, that "the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. One of our foremost practitioners of the lyric, Gizzi here extends his mastery of the form. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also - as it has been for centuries - a mode of love poetry as well. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature - the time & details of the world - meaning the space(s) in which we live - defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope."[sample poem]Creely Songall that is lovelyin words, evenif gone to piecesall that is lovelygone, all of itfor love andautobiographyas if I werewriting thishello, listenthe plan isthe body andall of it for lovenow in piecesall that is lovelyechoes stillin life & deathstill memorygardens openonto windowslovely, the charmthat mirrorsall that was, allthat is, lovelyin a song

mahogany is about the passing of time and unimaginable loss, strength, humor, and lovemahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.