Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

There is a proverb in China, hu kou ba ya, literally “pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth,” used to describe any extremely difficult task. When Shao Wei first arrived in the United States at age thirty-one, her desire to write poems in English seemed almost impossible. Pulling a Dragon's Teeth, a first stop on the successful journey toward that goal, is filled with the rhythms and visions of this exciting young poet. Shuttling between her childhood in a small mountain city on the shores of the Yangtze River (soon to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam Project) and adulthood in Manhattan, Shao Weicaptures the pains and joys of tradition and displacement familiar to any immigrant. Blending fairy tales, New York images, family stories, and the universal rites of passage associated with growing up, she paints a vibrant canvas of passion and imagination.

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway presents both new works and twenty-five years of celebrated verse and illustration in her latest volume, Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems. The poems mine common speech, folklore, film, the grotesque and the ordinary with unapologetic candor and ferocious intimacy. They are a testament to the power of contemporary monologue, filled with surprising inversions and unique takes on the risk of opening the front door. Cutting musically to the quick of a situation, each is filled with surprise, horror and, as they add up, moral consequence.

In a poetic voice that is at once reflective and lively, Sandra Kohler explores the patterns of everyday life and the inner drama of imagination. Though these poems are mostly set amidst the familiarity of a suburban household and the family garden, this environment appears far from mundane as Kohler peels away the veneer of domestic tranquility to reveal a world busy with human passion and the rhythms of the earth. Nature is present at every turn, an ethereal twin, as the narrator’s emotions take the form of cardinals in flight, a rushing river, or a potato sprouting from the dark.

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts-history, power, the personal and the social-that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching vision. From racehorses to waterwheels to great cities, Bogen illuminates "things that go," in both their dynamism and their inevitable decay. Luster traces the sheen of human activity that clings to the world around us: imperfect, irrevocably marred by time, but always gleaming.

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They challenge us even as they reward us for seeking the truth.

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

Contains in English translation over one hundred quatrains derived from the works of the medieval Arab poet Abu'l-Ala of Ma'arri. The quatrains are a joy to read, and serve as quotations for various religious and secular topics.

Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled "Zither." Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In Autobiography, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood-especially of years spent in Asia-experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion. " Zither opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes,''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.

Sin puertas visibles is a fully bilingual anthology that features emerging women poets whose work provides a taste of the adventurous new spirit infusing Mexican literature. All eleven poets represented have had at least one book published in Mexico, yet none of their work has been translated into English until now.Featuring the work of: Cristina Rivera-Garza, Carla Faesler, Ang\u00e9lica Tornero, Ana Bel\u00e9n L\u00f3pez, Silvia Eugenia Castillero, M\u00f3nica Nepote, Dana Gelinas, Mar\u00eda Rivera, Ofelia P\u00e9rez Sep\u00falveda, Dorantes, and Laura Sol\u00f3zano. Mexico poesses one of Latin America's most important poetic traditions, but its depth and range are virtually unknown to readers north of the border. Reflecting the diversity and complexity f contemporary mexican poetry, the poems presented here are by turns meditative and explosive, sensuous and inventive, ironic and tender--in short, they are subversive, provocative, and bold.

The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times--his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness. Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventheenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.

Long for This World features the best of Ronald Wallace's work from his previous collections of poetry--Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks , Tunes for Bears to Dance To, People and Dog in the Sun, The Makings of Happiness, Time's Fancy and The Uses of Adversity--along with a generous selection of twenty-six new poems. If Wallace's recent poems sometimes seem darker and deeper, more meditative and complex, less sanguine about the tragedies of daily life, they never sacrifice the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become his hallmarks.

A mixed-media tour de force, Alphabet Theater breaks open the page to extend poetic practice into the realms of visual art and performance. Its complex and innovative format layers poetry, video stills, drawing and collages in pieces that range from performance art to opera and political theater. The book's four distinctive sections encompass four separate performances. In "The Poor Body," first performed in collaboration with choreographer Elizabeth Lahey, the text alternates with video stills of movement. "The Lightning Hive" is a "semiotic opera" swarming with letters and bees in motion, accompanied by staging notes and drawings. The performance space "The Still Place" is the page itself, exploring the fragile border between the "I" and the "not-I." Finally, "Read My Apocalypse," is a performance that tracks the months preceding the Gulf War in a kind of desperate vaudeville with material and references ranging from Milton and apocalypse psychology to Pat Robertson, Love Canal and W.C. Williams. This book is a thoroughly engaging transit through the landscapes of contemporary culture and relationships.

Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.