Those who have traveled know the experience of extended time and sharpened perception. Muriel Rukeyser's account of Puck Fair — the last existing pagan festival of the goat — captures just that state of consciousness. Set in County Kerry, Ireland, The Orgy evokes this great American poet's journey of sensual and psychological transformation in the midst of a lush account of Irish culture and tradition. With a preface by Sharon Olds.

The Falling Hour is the fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. It is a fiercly elegiac and even apocalyptic book, culminating in a series of blistering elegies written after the sudden death of Wojahn’s wife, the poet Linda Hull. In these poems, the process of mourning and lamentation is examined in all of its intricacy, rage, and sorrowful ambivalence.

Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossãand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native -- and feminine -- language.

Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic juxtaposition between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century. Don Bogen calls the work an archeology, and uses details f life in past eras as a way of penetrating the surfaces of history. In his account, everything known is both encumbered with and defined by the past. Short poems in this collection cohere around the long title poem, which explores the nineteenth century through more than thirty sections in different voices and styles, including lists, mock letters, brief narratives, and lyric passages. The result is lively and illuminating.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

Adrian Oktenberg breaks the media-induced numbness that surrounded the war in the Balkans, and makes it impossible to resist or deny this genocide. Echoing the voices of Charlotte Delbo, Walt Whitman, Cavafy, Tory Dent, Carolyn Forche, and many others, this collection presents the duality of the brutalities and experiences of war beside life in an American landscape marked with the ripening tomatoes of summer and news of devastation in foreign cities with unpronouncable names.

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Muriel Rukeyser explores the vital force of poetry and the arts in American culture. She opposes elitist attitudes and addresses Americans’ fear of feeling, which contribute to a devaluation of poetry and the arts in the U.S. Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this collection of essays makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life.

The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.

Peter Meinke is one of the most readable poets. The surface clarity of his lines and his aptness for metaphor make these poems accessible and mysterious. They have real subjects - Dessert Storm and acorns, coffee and Tolstoy - but at the same time give entry to that interior world where all feelings and moralities grow.

Edge Effect is Sandra McPherson's most original work to date. Constructed in two parts, the collection embraces secretly related worlds: the poetics of natural history and artistic discoveries of self-taught folk artists. Throughout, waves from one poem mark the shores of others. In natural history, an edge effect occurs where two communities, such as land and sea, overlap, that zone becoming more diversified than each of them. McPherson explores this effect in nature and art, questioning our notions of inside and outside, center and margin. Profound and moving, she recasts the very premises of formal understanding in poetry, accommodating at once the arts of nature and the nature of art.

Leslie Scalapino is widely regarded as one of the best avant-garde writers in America today. This extraordinary new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, "a serial novel for publication in the newspaper" that collapses the distinction between documentary and fiction. Loosely set in Los Angeles, the book scrutinizes our image-making, producing extreme and vivid images-hyena, Muscle Beach in Venice, the Supreme Court, subway rides-in order for them to be real. Countering contemporary trends toward interiority, Scalapino's work constitutes a unique effort to "be" objectively in the world. The writing is an action, a dynamic push to make intimacy in the public realm. She does not distinguish between poetry and "real events": her writing is analogous to Buddhist notions of dreaming one is a butterfly, and becoming aware that actually being the butterfly is as real as dreaming it.

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.\u201cWith poignancy, honesty, and grace, Becker contends with the messy implications of her lesbian sexuality, Jewish identity, and sister's suicide. .

Winner of the 1997 American Book Award for Poetry and Nominated for the 1997 Poet’s Prize, The Post-Rapture Dinner is about finding hope, about confronting and overcoming cynicism by discovering a spiritually grounded in the things of this world.