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Saga / Circus brings us two distinctly different long poems

"The narrator of Anon opens the sluice gates of embittered confession and philosophical reproach to release a deluge of wildly extravagant lyricism, at first submerging its readers in the ecstatic rhythms of its music, then leading their pursuit of the behemoths of the human condition in turning its gaze upon the storm-tossed tropes of the narrative itself. Seidenberg engages his characteristically aphoristic style to manage multiple lines of inquiry at once. The resultant fragments navigate between testament and treatise, storyline and system, in a manner only echoed in the speculative vehemence of Beckett, Lispecter, and Blanchot"--

"Both Apollo speaks from inside the bodies and binaries that are felt as constraints. Sometimes it tries to negotiate. It laments, celebrates, reasons, jokes, and occasionally begs. It runs into a wall and hugs it, offers it pizza, and speeds through the rotary of grammars and cities until dizziness catapults it from the grid. It tries to queer the echoes of its language in the hope that a queer rhyme might break the logic of either/or and give rise to both/and. It would rather evade than refuse. It would rather embrace than hold. It's basically a love poem to whatever has the grace to appear. But the battleground is not all battle, even if there is no safe place above the fray. Moments of humor and tenderness accompany the speaker with each act of crossing and circling back. If the poems hope, this is where and how they do it: quietly, at the boundary"--

A collection from celebrated poet Martha Ronk considering the relationship between person, body, and place.  The Place One Is explores the intersection of person and place, the ways in which changes in the tangible world alter one‿s vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern for‿to take one example‿the dwindling water supply in California. The body‿s position, its geometry, and the topography of the surrounding land become less and less recognizable as body and world blend together. Gravel giving way underfoot mirrors the way that words dissolve into mumbles, and the skeleton of a rusty car on the sand appears like one‿s own skeleton. Ronk shows that disintegration here is disintegration there. These poems also wonder at interdependence, considering how lines intersect and continue to connect us to the sea‿and to islands, lagoons, greenery, sky, and space.    In the first part of the collection, the poems focus on a rural landscape, and in the second part, they consider the overly bright urban world of Los Angeles.  Â

"Wind moves through this book. Wind opens the poems: to the dying beauty of the natural world; to the weathers inside the psyche and without; to the connections between father and son, husband and wife, the speaker to his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert"--

"This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's exuberantly lyrical collection, entitled in English Distantly, is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates in Distantly an intimate series drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems are linked by their city settings, drawn from a woman's observations, emotions, perceptions, and dreams as she wanders the streets of her world. The cities of the individual poem titles are evocatively conjured rather than realistically described. Taken together, these poems distill postmodern urban life through their sharp flash sketches of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty, personal and shared struggles for survival and intimacy. Distantly expresses a redolently postmodern sensibility, at once utopian and real"--

"The typingspawning in IMPASTORAL is not in The Human, not in a human, but it flies through the possible voices of other outside-insides-slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language isn't human or not human, it undoes that very idea, so these beings-slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode mammaltexts-aren't on the outside anymore. Letterwords are cells or flummoxing quanta, particulate and mutating, waving about. If you follow science all the way around it passes through a pagebrane. Boundaries get slimed. A synthetic, nonce, and hyperpossible poetry. Your experiences are deformed into the experiences of other beings. We can hatch into a world we're not eating up. We are going to hear many faroffs very near"--

"At once comic and cantankerous, tender and discomfiting, piercing and irreverent, Genghis Chan on Drums is a shape-shifting book of percussive poems dealing with aging, identity, PC culture, and stereotypes about being Chinese via a wide range of surprising forms (pantoums and sonnets) and unlikely subjects, including the 1930s Hollywood actress Carole Lombard, the Latin poet Catullus, the fantastical Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's imaginary sister, and a nameless gumshoe. Seemingly without effort, Yau can go from using the rhyme scheme of an Edmund Spenser sonnet written in the 16th century, to riffing on a well-known poem-rant by the English poet Sean Bonney (1969 - 2019), to limiting himself to the words of condolence sent by a former president to the survivors of a school massacre. Yau's poems are conduits through which many different, conflicting, and even unsavory voices strive to be heard"--

"Amanda Larson's Gut interrogates the agency of a young, female speaker in the wake of trauma and desire. Larson places feminist theory in conversation with personal experience in order to examine the impact of such forces on traditional ideas of logical agency. The book moves through Larson's recovery while questioning the limits of the very term, and of language as a whole. She employs a variety of different forms, including prose, Q&A poems, and a timeline, to do so, that reflect both the speaker's obsession with control, and her growing willingness to let it go. In this way, Larson's measured voice paves a way for how we can continue to live despite what happens to us in the process"--

"A kind of translation of a thousand-year-old poem, "Earth took of Earth," this book is an attempt to restate in personal, emotional terms a sense of both danger and of consolation from earth itself. Many of these poems arose during a collaboration with the ecologist-ceramicist Mia Mulvey: her work with earth, clay often extruded through digitally guided machinery, continually rhymes with Ramke's attempts to understand damages done, but also to celebrate the facts of earth-as, for instance, that geosmin, the scent of wet soil, is so recognizable even in trace amounts. The title of this book is a play on the phrase "heaven on earth": no, the very best-and it is a lot-to hope for is earth on earth"--

"Often, Common, Some, And Free is a book about transformation. Moving across varied formal and aesthetic terrain, these poems take on the subject of literal change: constructing and tearing down physical buildings, roaming between cities, and drawing together an image of a world in flux. The speaker is in movement: walking, flying, swimming, taking the train, while also constantly twisting in his sentences, turning into different versions of himself, and braiding his voice with others. These poems are interested in subjects that encompass creation and loss from Robert Moses to the Gardner Museum robbery, but they aim ultimately to resist destruction, to be in the particular, and to hold still their world and their ever-shifting speaker"--

Poems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls.   This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn‿t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them. Â

"Boyish engages what once thought impossible: a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, of upbringing, rebellion, and revival. The coming to Jesus moments of looking back, of liberation & reckoning. Each page exterior & interior revolutions. To carve space between. To cut-up the absence. To find oneself carried over graveled creekside into the first mouth's babble. As much subconscious as embodied desire, change holds within the white space and the formal play-language twisting the unspeakable alongside dense sonnets, a thicket of warmth & dissonance that holds a mirror up to puddled overpass & river. The landscapes of city's dystopia meeting the queer pastoral, where conservation often means what must burn down"--

"Agnes has been drifting away from herself. People look through her, her husband doesn't understand her and lately, she's begun losing the sensations in her body. When a tube of shoplifted lipstick awakens her back to life, an impulse for stealing emerges that leads her to a court-ordered service at a camp for grieving children. Hopeful the time there will help make the stealing stop, when the spirits of the campers' parents realize Agnes can act as a conduit to their children, she has to navigate using her compulsion to either feed herself or help the bereaved. Luminaries is about the things we take and the things that are taken from us. It asks what it means to exist in lives filled with loss and to reach for the things we hope balm us-both in our material lives and the ones we pass through"--

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time. A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson‿s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California‿with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn‿t wish for? A narrator‿s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.â€?

"Written as a conversation engaged over the course of 100 words. It is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens and ideals between someone Brown and someone White. It is an attempt by one to put the weight down and another's willingness to pick it up. It is a private conversation made public. It is an exchange, a negotiation, discoveries. I did not know this about myself. You crossed the street or was it I? We walk and this weight, we are still carrying it together"--

"Train Music chronicles the 2017 four-day railroad trip (New York to California) of poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis, old friends. Giscombe was returning home to address an all-white audience on white supremacy; expatriate Margolis, usually solitary and itinerant, was visiting the country of her birth, drawing scenery and collaging insomniac night visions. Journeying, conversing, arguing, sharing memories, they document a complex and volatile American landscape, one at once geographical and historical, one holding specific implications for the lives of both. Margolis and Giscombe chart their own passage through all that, through a dangerous and puzzling world that-too often-"passes as normal." Train Music is the insistent and unlikely shape that the two sensibilities achieve"--

"These are writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a new homeland of Panamâa that can be transmitted through the quantum martyrs beyond life and death, and/or a new homeland of the Tecumseh Republic, where technology grows to be necessary in understanding the ancient as well as then becoming erased and transcended by a now ever present electronic circle. It is a book brought close to the earth in its symbolic springs, to the light filled mystery that began with countering disassociation and by repairing a devastating explosion of interior structures necessary to being a person in the most foundational ways. It is where the screen removes itself by song as we move toward kinship beyond color mark"--

The first U.S. translation of the award-winning Galician poet

"With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win's second full-length book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House use physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and "show dogs with bejeweled collars" crowd into Win's real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family's homeland of Burma, haunt the book's six sections, as forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father's cigarette smoke. The artful assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon "a circle of drums and copper bells" to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This carefully curated collection of unlikely objects and images creates an act of ritual that uses language to interrogate how pain can transform into a nat or a siren. The minimal line length belies maximal imagination in this remarkable new book"--

"Winner of the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Novelette Prize, selected by Meg Ellison. This magical realist tale follows the travails of a burnt-out Queens' teacher who spends his time obsessing over the fact that he has been cheated out of living in his Grandma Rose's Lower East Side apartment, and is thus priced out of his 'More Recent Ancestral Home', Manhattan, that is. Rothman weaves a rich story about real estate and memory. Daniel, our protagonist, is haunted by the remembrances of his childhood experiences in his grandmother's apartment. One day he discovers a hidden relic on Rivingston Street, a tenement reclamation office run by an eccentric centurion named Hannah. When Daniel inquires about the chances of his reclaiming his grandmother's old tenement, Hannah is not impressed. "Things don't work like that, you rude, young schlub!" And so begins Daniel's journey to reclaim his past and to land an affordable space for his family in downtown Manhattan. This is a journey full of twists and turns, ups and downs, and an ending that would make even the most thick-skinned NYC real estate agent shake"--

"wyrd] bird grapples with the impossibility and necessity of affirming mystical experience in a world fraught with ecological and individual loss. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, fragmentary notebook, collection of poems, and scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as a guide through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by figures from Milton's Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats's hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition's central poetic texts. Refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches out an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love"--

"Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation, part prayer, elevating the confessional by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. A pop surreal romp reckoning with lyric buoyancy through a mythic apocalypse, mysteriously stark and playful. We meet voices trying to survive, reconcile their own belonging, maybe, that drop in and out of a mystic narrative. What happens in the aftermath of brutality? What do you do? The poems begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape is itself too unsettled; the form varies and reflects this endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. What can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language-an unbroken attention to the speaker's own authority. Creating an architecture and landscape that expresses both a ruination of cultural time and an eternity of interior time, confession and lyric become as much about the I as the you/we"--

"The "breathing place" - individual, bespoken - is where the world enters uninvited, where "fair is only an experiment," where poetry's resistance has "slackened, gray, with some rain," where "the garden is a gulf in the intercom, where "today's word from Delphi / is delphinium, expensive / blue word, dust payment due tomorrow," where "seven of my sweet loves drove off of cliffs . . ." - in short, a place of jolts and wrongs, if also of opportunities: "Engage / Lower your oars for the recommencing." It is met here by a style of nervous immediacy, a style built for alertness, not comfort, ready to shove the English language around Americanly, as Gertrude Stein encouraged and Dickinson mastered, and, further, to break out of reality, that already known"--

Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.

"Inspired by Lorca's passionate cante jondo or deep song, and the artist author's family history with Andalusian flamenco, Raft of Flame's poems weave together in a time-travelling epic that searches myth and nature for identity, personal and cultural. Imagining when Cortâes lands in Mexico, the collection includes conversations between a conquistador and an Olmec sculpture, Frida Kahlo and Velazquez, Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch. Navigating her Latina and European heritage through art made by artists of the ancient Americas and Spain, Alvarez maps intersections between personal and political history. Vivid lyrics interrogate the complexities of mixed race. Vital to its narrative is how nature continues to be trapped in the violence of colonization"--

"Native Pacific Islander writer Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry comprised of free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a form he calls "recycling." Habitat Threshold begins with the birth and growth of the author's daughter and captures her childlike awe at the wondrous planet. As the book progresses, however, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinctions, water struggles, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, Perez mourns lost habitats and species and faces his fears about the world his daughter will inherit. Yet this work does not end at the threshold of elegy; instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected--a future in which we cultivate love and "carry each other towards the horizon of care.""--

"The addiction of devotion to proper names is a perennial problem and it will be going nowhere. Against Heidegger is a collection of poetic meditations on that precise and, possibly, eternal addiction. LM Rivera continues his idiosyncratically lyric argumentation against grounded, so-called straight forward, naive, sentimental, easy narratives-opting instead for improvised, collaged, bursting, experimental formations of thinking through a concept to its (im)possible end. The grand philosopher, Martin Heidegger, acts as guide and whipping boy (and well deserved), as the author of this collection attempts to sever many troubled but lasting attachments to myriad traditions-be they overt, canonical, hidden, esoteric, forbidden, or downright disgraceful"--

"La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living runs a bow across physical and mental planes to reveal the kingdoms inhabiting them. From the small towns strung along the coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i to the land-locked landscapes of Paraguay to the volcanic surface of Venus, this is a field guide to flora, fauna, and mineralia encountered, real and imagined. Packed tightly into exploratory rocket segments, these poems ignite our gravest flaws to send our grandest potentials into orbit, showering us all in an antidotal salve to viewing any life as ordinary. Banzai has a literal translation of "10,000 years" and was used by the Japanese as a rallying cry in imperialistic and militaristic contexts. Today, the word has a comparatively neutral translation of "Hurrah!" in Japan and beyond. In La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living, Hasegawa aims to reclaim banzai, recasting the language of war and blind loyalty into the language of a life and poetry created against racism and harmful norms, and toward tolerance and self-acceptance"--