Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as \u201criding on dragons.\u201d Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of \u201cleaping\u201d as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.

Love on the Streets is a selection from two of Doubiago's book-length poems, Hard Country and South America Mi Hija and from the collections Psyche Drives the Coast and Body and Soul, plus new poems. Hard Country takes place in 1976, on a journey across the U.S. with a lover, climaxing on the lake where his mother drowned herself when he was ten. South America Mi Hija is a journey the poet made with her 15 year-old daughter to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Psyche Drives the Coast are poems written while Doubiago lived mainly on the road, and in diverse, passionate communities of poets from Mendocino to the Canadian border. Body and Soul was written while she was a resident of Oregon, and the new poems are written from her present home in San Francisco.

WINNER OF THE 2007 DONALD HALL PRIZE IN POETRYSelected by Bob HicokBurn and Dodge is part serious/part serious play and opens with a frank and occasionally antic exploration of contemporary vices, such as Guilt, Envy, and Regret. Some poems \u201cdodge\u201d such preoccupations by playing with a nonce form called sonnet/ghazal. The collection contains a sequence of poems called \u201cCurrent Events,\u201d based on newspaper stories. that is also a playful meditation on the nature of the interrogative pronouns (Who, What, Where, When . . . ) as well as another series of homophonic sonnets called \u201cClare-Hewn,\u201d which are aural \u201ctranslations\u201d of John Clare.

WINNER OF THE 2007 CAVE CANEM POETRY PRIZESelected by Claudia RankineProse poems that profile the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking deeply into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity.

For a Limited TIme Only, Ronald Wallace's eighth collection of poems, is perhaps his darkest and most meditative to date, focusing his experiences with illness, old age, and mortality; his father-in-law's death after a long bout with Alzheimer's; his step-father's death after a painful struggle with esophageal cancer, his own bout with prostate cancer. These personal experiences form the core of the first three sections of the book, but are mediated by theological and philosophical speculations that find further voice in the character of a \u201cMr. Grim,\u201d whose angry, self-pitying, gruff, comic, self-depreciating, nostalgic, defeated, and hopeful riffs on the human condition provide a bridge to the affirmative, often comic, close. In the final two sections, in poems in praise of his dentist, his barber, his wife, his grandparents, the morpheme, Mr. Malaprop, Pluto, tattoos, hamburger heaven, sex talk, and poetry itself, Wallace once again proves the resilience of hope and humor in what is, for him, finally a world of wonders.

In painting, a “domestic interior” depicts the inside of a house and its inhabitants going about their daily lives. The poems in Domestic Interior describe the private and sometimes secret spaces in our places of residence and the interior lives of those who live there. Marriage and parenthood, grief, spiritual renewal, community and country are subjects addressed with a satirical eye and emotional insight.

The poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque ‘academicisms,’ McDaniel is an intro to a new world.

In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the “romantic” “and the “brutal” and how they exist within us and between us.

The Floating Bridge, David Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, transports its readers over the chasm between the mundane and the enchanted. We traverse one bridge and find ourselves eavesdropping on Gertrude Stein and her gardener. We take the night bus to Gomorrah to have a look around. Halfway across, each bridge vanishes beneath our feet. Our world shifts. The commonplace begins to glow. We turn the page. Another bridge awaits.

The ninth collection for this Pulitzer Prize finalist, who remains as entertaining, imaginative and inventive as ever.

Winner of the 2008 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence "Weaver has crafted a virtual planet in this book with plenty of alternate geographies for readers of all flavors and stripes. Marvelous. Huge. Prodigious.” —North American Review

After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.

Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry Selected by Terrance HayesWinner of the 2008 Poetry Award from Mississippi Institute of Arts and LettersAngela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.

These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss—the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time—and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy.

Velocity time travels through memory and conjecture, yet Krygowski's poems--often sad, sometimes humorous, always generous--return us continually to the beautiful and difficult here-and-now. Lovingly grounded in the ordinary, these are thinking poems--tightly crafted, accessible inquiries more interested in exploring stark and complicated knowledge than in proclaiming it. The poems, which use a sister's death as a touchstone, dwell in the overlap of emotions. Loss touches happiness, desire touches fear, love touches futile knowing. Krygowski's unstoppable energy for seeking and revealing disparate thoughts and emotions makes the collection wholly human. This fresh, surprising voice speaks for the intelligent heart in each of us.

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Su\u00e1rez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its forty-year history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style. American Poetry Now is a true representation of contemporary American poetry. Ed Ochester, series editor for nearly thirty years, has assembled a quintessential selection-along with biographies and photos, an enlightening introduction, and a suggested list for further reading, all in a highly accessible format. American Poetry Now is a sweeping anthology that will delight poetry fans, students, teachers, and general readers alike.