No One Leaves the World Unhurt


Book Description

John Foy's newest collection is a tour de force of formal poetry, offering a blend of wit, cleverness, and deftness. Working in the lineage of poets like Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Frank O'Hara, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, Foy probes everyday experiences to generate compassionate, clever, and deeply knowing verse. While moments in No One Leaves the World Unhurt may appear absurd or even funny on the surface--such as a psychological exploration of the Lord of the Rings character Gollum--beneath this lightheartedness lies a tone that is grim and foreboding. Foy satirizes various elements of contemporary society, reflecting on war, wandering through the Museum of Sex in New York with his wife, and plucking apart idiomatic speech, which he breaks down, saying "It is what it is. / It's not what it might have been." Influenced by pop art and fine art and his New York home, which forms the backdrop of many of these poems, Foy's vibrant collection is simultaneously philosophical, whimsical, serious, and searching.




Outer Space: 100 Poems


Book Description

Poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Throughout human history, poetry has provided stories about what people observe in the sky. Stars, planets, comets, the moon, and space travel are used as metaphors for our feelings of love, loneliness, adventurousness, and awe. This anthology includes poets, astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today, from all around the world. Sappho, Du Fu, Hafez, and Shakespeare are joined by Gwyneth Lewis's space requiem, Tracy K. Smith on the Hubble telescope, and Charles Simic, whose poem accompanied a NASA mission. Astronomers Tycho Brahe and Edmund Halley accompany modern scientists including Rebecca Elson, Alice Gorman on the first woman in space, and Yun Wang's space journal on travel to Andromeda. This collection reaches across time and cultures to illuminate how we think about outer space, and ourselves.




Now We're Getting Somewhere: Poems


Book Description

A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world. Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more. Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf. Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar. A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, "if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming."




Manufactured Insecurity


Book Description

Manufactured Insecurity is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth investigation of the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents. Drawing on rich ethnographic data collected before, during, and after mobile home park closures and community-wide evictions in Florida and Texas—the two states with the largest mobile home populations—Manufactured Insecurity forces social scientists and policymakers to respond to a fundamental question: how do the poor access and retain secure housing in the face of widespread poverty, deepening inequality, and scarce legal protection? With important contributions to urban sociology, housing studies, planning, and public policy, the book provides a broader understanding of inequality and social welfare in the United States today.




The Book of Deacon


Book Description

The Book of Deacon is the first book of The Book of Deacon series by Joseph R. Lallo. Myranda Celeste’s world has been built on a legacy of bloodshed. For more than a century, her homeland the Northern Alliance has fought the Kingdom of Tressor in what has come to be known as the Perpetual War. While her people look upon the conflict with reverence, Myranda’s hate for the war has made her an outcast. When she finds a precious sword among the equipment of a fallen warrior, she believes her luck may have changed. Little does she imagine that the treasure will draw her into an adventure of wizards and warriors, soldiers and rebels, and beasts both noble and monstrous. The journey will teach her much about her potential, about the origins of the war, and about the threat her world truly faces. Will Myranda unlock the secret of bringing peace once and for all, or will the world be lost to the Perpetual War?




Out of Order


Book Description

A debut collection featuring formally diverse poems that address topics from misogyny and mental health to race and identity. Alexis Sears's debut collection, Out of Order, is a collage of unapologetic intimacy, risk-taking vulnerability, and unwavering candor. A biracial millennial woman, Sears navigates the challenges of growing out of girlhood and into womanhood with its potential dangers, interrogating the male gaze, beauty standards, and confidence and identity. Pop culture references run through the collection, with rock icons David Bowie and Prince and poets like Kenneth Koch offering windows into desire and adaptation. In these poems, Sears works through heavy topics, such as loneliness, mental illness, chronic pain, the legacies of race and racism, and the aftermath of a father's suicide. As she writes, "I'm learning something every ravishing day / and none of it is easy." This young poet demonstrates an uncommon mastery of craft, writing in forms including the sonnet redoublé, sestina, canzone, and villanelle. With all her linguistic skills, Sears's work remains approachable, offering readers a striking blend of honesty, humor, anguish, joy, and surprise. Drawing influence from contemporary poets like Mark Jarman, Erica Dawson, and Tiana Clark, Sears cuts a path of her own. Out of Order was the 2021 winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize.







Drinking Coffee Elsewhere


Book Description

The acclaimed debut short story collection that introduced the world to an arresting and unforgettable new voice in fiction, from multi-award winning author ZZ Packer Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream. With penetrating insight, ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Fresh, versatile, and captivating, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking and unforgettable collection, sure to stand out among the contemporary canon of fiction.




The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets


Book Description

The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets gathers the work of thirty–five of the most compelling and talented new poets writing today. Groundbreaking anthologies of this kind come along once in a generation and, in time, define that generation. The Swallow Anthology identifies a group of poets who have recently begun to make an important mark on contemporary poetry, and their accomplishment and influence will only grow with time. The poets of The Swallow Anthology do not constitute a school or movement; rather they are a group of unique artists working at the top of their craft. As editor David Yezzi writes in his introduction, “Here is a group of poets who have, perhaps for the first time since the modernist revolution, returned to a happy détente between warring camps. This is a new kind of poet, who, dissatisfied with the climate of extremes, has found a balance between innovation and received form, the terror beneath the classical and the order underpinning the romantic. This new unified sensibility is no watered–down admixture, no easy compromise, but, rather, the vital spirit behind the most accomplished poetry being written by America’s new poets.” Poets include: Craig Arnold, David Barber, Rick Barot, Priscilla Becker, Geoffrey Brock, Dan Brown, Peter Campion, Bill Coyle, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Ben Downing, Andrew Feld, John Foy, Jason Gray, George Green, Joseph Harrison, Ernest Hilbert, Adam Kirsch, Joanie Mackowski, Eric McHenry, Molly McQuade, Joshua Mehigan, Wilmer Mills, Joe Osterhaus, J. Allyn Rosser, A. E. Stallings, Pimone Triplett, Catherine Tufariello, Deborah Warren, Rachel Wetzsteon, Greg Williamson, Christian Wiman, Mark Wunderlich, David Yezzi, and C. Dale Young.




Song of Myself


Book Description

One of the Greatest Poems in American Literature Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was considered by many to be one of the most important American poets of all time. He had a profound influence on all those who came after him. “Song of Myself”, a portion of Whitman’s monumental poetry collection “Leaves of Grass”, is one of his most beloved poems. It was through this moving piece that Whitman first made himself known to the world. One of the most acclaimed of all American poems, it is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style, without a regular form, meter, or rhythm. His lines have a mesmerizing chant-like quality, as he sought to make poetry more appealing. Few poems are as fun to read aloud as this one. Considered to be the core of his poetic vision, this poem is an optimistic and inspirational look at the world in 1855. It is exhilarating, epic, and fresh in its brilliant and fascinating diction and wordplay as it tries to capture the unique meaning of words of the day, while also embracing the rapidly evolving vocabularies of the sciences and the streets. Far ahead of its time, it was considered by many social conservatives to be scandalous and obscene for its depiction of sexuality and desire, while at the same time, critics hailed the poem as a modern masterpiece. This first version of “Song of Myself” is far superior to the later versions and will delight readers with the playfulness of its diction as it glorifies the self, body, and soul. “I am large, I contain multitudes,”




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