In Rachel Zucker's re-imagining of the Greek myth, Persephone is a daughter struggling to become a woman. Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds-light and dark, innocence and power, a mother's protection and a lover's appeal-Persephone describes the strangeness of the Underworld and the problems of transformation and transgression. The arrangement of Zucker's poems reflects Persephone's travels between the Underworld and the Surface. Both spare and lyrical, they are written as entries in Persephone's diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. The language-strange, urgent, direct-is pulled and changed as Persephone journeys from one world to another revealing the struggle of unmaking and remaking the self.

Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.

Edited and with an Afterword by David St. JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as \u201cthe most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. .

In his Rider trilogy, Mark Rudman perfected a mixed genre form - combining dialogue, lyric and prose. While employing some of the same techniques that have become "signature Rudman" - the compact, colloquial line, dazzling shifts from popular culture to classical history - The Couple also breaks new ground. This new book is a collection of discrete poems organized around four poem sequences, "Long-Stemmed Rose," "The Shallowness of the Lake," "Perseus Surprised, Andromeda Unbound," and "Fragile Craft. " As the title suggests, the theme of relationships, both dark and erotically-charged, emerges here as Rudman's focus. The couples in the book include parents, lovers, a young boy and girl in elementary school, Perseus and Andromeda, Mary Ure and Robert Shaw, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

A collection of seven pre-Islamic Arabic poems, the Mu`llaqat form the most celebrated forms of poetry. A tool for students of Arabic literature, this book gives the Arabic text, a literal translation of these poems, and a commentary.

Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem PrizeSelected by Marilyn NelsonFinalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize"Imagine Leda black—" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.In Van Clief-Stefanon’s powerful voice, last night’s angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits. " She remembers a child’s innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.

Best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative on nature and eternity, Annie Dillard writes fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry, that explore abstract and sensory phenomena, the role of the artist in society and the creative process. The poems gathered in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, first published in 1974, show us that the concerns of the author have not changed since she was in her twenties. Hers is a poetry of fact - of science and nature, eternity and time, and how we know what we know. Often commended for their precise imagery, these poems speak of the love between people, storytelling and poetry's form.

Rouge Pulp explores notions of body and beauty, birth and death, in a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.

Winner of the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeRunner-up, Society of Midland Authors 2002 Poetry PrizeGabriel Gudding’s poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid.In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow. Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an innovative writer unafraid to attack the unremitting high seriousness of so much poetry, laughing with his readers as he twists the elegiac lyric "I" into a pompous little clown.

In this exquisitely coherent new collection of poems, Ellen Hinsey explores the boundary between poetry and metaphysics, and the intimate bonds between morality and mortality. Drawing on philosophical and spiritual readings, The White Fire of Time displays a breadth of cultural knowledge and a deep understanding of the wisdom of the body. The poems in this book-length sequence are gorgeous, brooding, musical, elegant and serious. The work is composed in three sections: The World, meditations on the ordinary, the daily life of the body and its place in nature and time; The Temple, investigations into language and the ethical life; and The Celestial Ladder, in which poems trace the soul's spiraling journey through desire, love, grief and endurance. Each section mirrors the structure of the whole, with poems following specific forms, serving to create a symphonic rhythm in which details, metaphors and meanings build and interweave.

Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice.Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces - personal, aesthetic, political - informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process.CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist’s eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp’s "terribly surreal" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover’s—or a mother’s—secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.

This extraordinary poetic voyage uses explorations of the material culture of our past and present as points of departure. Sandra McPherson succeeds in drawing us into her examination of objects from the 20th and late 19th centuries through her weaving together of images both familiar and startling into deeply satisfying poems. She is especially interested in articles that might seem useless, extinct, or "irrelevant" to us now, such as children's military playthings, diaries and scrapbooks of unknown and unfamous people, quilts from people of Mennonite and Amish convictions, "primitive" utilitarian wooden objects, telegrams and curious photographs. These poems are characteristically simple and unadorned, bringing readers closer and closer to a physical world we often overlook, but which is filled with sensation and meaning. From traditional stanzaic poems to collages and prose ghazals, the author embraces "civilization" by visiting the spirit of the secret voices of its people.

Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.

Donald Revell's new work, Arcady, draws its inspiration from Charles Ives and Henry David Thoreau to create a distinctly American poetic music. Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet's intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet's awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons' passage and seasonal rituals. Revell's sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives's notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell's words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.

Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.