The Occupant isa collection of persona and prose poems that explores the “inner lives” of common household objects, along with that of “The Occupant” of the house, their human keeper. Taken together, their shifting perspectives engage questions of time, mortality, and the nature of consciousness itself, reminding readers of the beauty and strangeness that lurk under the surface of ordinary thought—the “other world” that, as Paul Éluard noted, “resides in this one.”

Playful love poems to kids, coral reefs, and crowsWinner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry PrizeFive-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us. [Sample Poem]Love Poem With Dereliction of DutyIt's true—I like you more than I like the Marquis de Sade; God that mid-April afternoon in 1995, when I said, "let's take a walk" and you said "sure" and we circled the New Haven Green saying who the hell knows what because if we had seen all this falling in love stuff coming, we would have paid more attention; I just know it took two hours, past the churches and the porn shop and over to the cemetery with all those skull-topped slabs leaning memorially against the brownstone wall; round and round we went like marbles dodging the traps in a game of labyrinth; and finally back to campus through that big stone gate which we entered just as the prof of the philosophy class I was skipping came out and I said oh the pain the pain I can't take it any more and doubled up laughing

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museumThis extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup's poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in "an authorial reckoning//with what remains." Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena'ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Every artifact contains competing stories, while some display cases are left empty.Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and class: "Always, I've known I embody that which harms me." At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard.Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to "decide/who you must become."[Sample Poem]Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking LotI watch her crow. Not as a crow crows but as herself. She's not here for the art. She's here for the minivans that devourdiaper bags, car seats, children. She waits for the doors to retract and expel fruit, Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps. Like me, she won't appear human here. While her legs bring her from one deliciousscrap to another, I work my own inventory. Once my parents named me Swift Raven— a real Indian Princess name.I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly, more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curvecalling for carrion. I'm not here for the art. I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beakready to unbind carapace from quiver. Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger lurching from one disaster to another.See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath. While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story. Once, my grandfather said, a long time agothere was a raven. He opened a door and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut. What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: oncehe closed the door and it was night. Today I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,my mouth is my body holding open the door. Witness my body create day. See how the light appraises my collection. See how the sunlight exposes how shadow bleached everything white.

New Playlist holds a variety of poetic forms: odes, found, haiku, prose, list, collages, one-liners, sonnets, and more. With his trademark wit and inventiveness, David Trinidad “plays” with these forms as if they were toys. He creates a Wikipedia cento in which each line illustrates how little is known of sixty-five ancient Greek poets. He gives us an itinerary of “Things to Do” in ten 1970s disaster films. He catalogs Sylvia Plath’s recipe cards and all the references to beer in a book by Bernadette Mayer. His subjects are as “fun” as his forms: pop singer Dusty Springfield, Marcel Proust, Bashō, Hollywood movies and actresses, old cartoons, a prom dress thief loose in a girls’ dorm. But “play” does not preclude seriousness, as Trinidad addresses physical scars, encounters with homophobia, and the wonders and wounds of childhood.

"A new edition of Ronald Johnson's masterpiece ARK is a metaphysical poem that could only have been written in our time, of which it displays a new vision. It is a late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."—Guy Davenport

Winner of the 2023 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from the 2023 AWP Award Series.

A new collection of poetry from Jan Beatty, author of Body Wars.

Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us /> />The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with "this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world" in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who "check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked" to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: "We name things/ to know where we are. " Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout's work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. "It's true things fall apart." Armantrout writes. 'Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up." /> />Sample Text /> />HYPER-VIGILANCE /> />Hilarious, /> />the way a crab's slender />eye-stalks />stand straight up /> />from its scuttling />carapace— /> />the way vigilance />takes many forms? /> /> * /> />That bird check-marks morning />once more /> />like someone who gets up />to make sure /> />the door is locked. /> /> * /> />I sound />like I know />what I'm talking about. /> />I sound like a comedian.

Purchase is for those who are grieving, who feel frightened by the world’s meanness, who are solitary. It is for those who, even in the midst of mourning, find themselves distracted from despair by the natural world. It is for everyone looking to find comfort and understanding. From a hidden river in upstate New York to a massive flood in Kentucky, currents of all strengths run through these poems, taking the reader through grief, estrangement, and the too-often unseen interiority of Black women, landing at a new perspective, the light of faith dawning.

Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Northern Voices: Forty Years on the Poetry Beat, tells the story of journalist, Mike Pride’s relationships with several poets who lived and worked in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont from the 1970s through the present. Mike transformed the New Hampshire newspaper The Concord Monitor into a prizewinning paragon of regional journalism, mentoring generations of reporters and editors, defying the trope about the dying small-town newspaper and exerting an outsize impact on his profession. He carved out for himself, “The Poetry Beat,” befriending poets including Charles Simic, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Maxine Cumin, Hayden Carruth, Wes McNair, and Sharon Olds. among many others, whom he wrote about with regularity. Sadly Mike died before his “poetry memoir” Northern Voices was published. But in true Mike-style, he completed the manuscript and readied it for press.

A chapbook of love poems from Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa /> />I Said That Love Heals From Inside: Love Poems is a small treasure featuring five decades of love poems by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa is a poet whose work aches with a longing that is rarely easily resolved but rather burns fiercely in each line. Every poem in this collection longs for life, for passion, for a different history, a past long lost, and ultimately to love and to be loved. This selection of poems captures a broad understanding of the love poetry category–there is love and the lack of it everywhere: in the bedroom and on the basketball court in the Jazz club and on the battlefield. As Komunyakaa writes, "Hard love, it's hard love."

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. From choosing not to have children to wrestling with a left-hand stick shift in Johannesburg traffic to braising a camel loin for friends in Damascus, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poems transport us into unexpected depths of feeling with language that is scintillant, luxurious, and wise.

New poetry by John Paul Davis.