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Poetry
Selected verse from the poet who expanded the scope of lyric poetry (Rafael Campo, The Washington Post).
The work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's greatest modernist poet, has long been admired for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. The revised Selected Verse, which incorporates changes made to García Lorca's Collected Poems, is an essential addition to any poetry lover's bookshelf. In this bilingual edition, García Lorca's poetic range comes clearly into view, from the playful Suites and stylized evocations of Andalusia to the utter gravity and mystery of the final elegies, confirming his stature as one of the twentieth century's finest poets.
In her latest book, LIFTED TO THE WIND, Susan Gardner brings us a four-decade retrospective of her poetry, some composed originally in Spanish as well as in the language of Japanese calligraphy. In addition to being a poet, literary editor and the co- publisher of Red Mountain Press, Ms. Gardner is a well-established painter and photographer. Her aesthetic sensibilities in the visual arts are easily evident in her poetry. She gives us a true reckoning of what is and an artist's look at what might be.
"Gardner, a writer and visual artist based in New Mexico, presents a sonically and linguistically rich set of verses... Fresh metaphors and vivid images linger... Precise language and imagery reinforce the conclusion that noticing leads to enlightenment: 'a few things / unremarked / awaken us to this life.'"-- Kirkus
"LIFTED TO THE WIND is artist and poet Susan Gardner's sixth book, a rich collection of poems from over four decades illuminated by seven pages with original brush-and-ink work and one photograph. Her mostly short poems, some in Spanish as well as English, probe the complexities and contradictions of human experience--art, love, loneliness, eros, even war--even as they portray the natural world with vividness and precision: 'Thin ice cracks in tatters' in 'Nebraska Sunrise'; 'Thunder rolls its baritone song' in 'Rain in Santa Clara.' Yet they don't stop there--as we see the girl in 'August' 'listening to the shadows,' and as 'Galaxy' concludes, there's 'Still a trace of red sky beyond the grounded world,' these poems take us to another dimension: they lift us to the wind.--Gordon Ball
2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner
2022 Over the Rainbow Short List
2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist
2021 Bookshop's Indie Press Highlights
You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection.
The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between.
One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.
Spawn is a braided collection of brief, untitled poems, a coming-of-age lyric set in the Mashteuiatsh Reserve on the shores of Lake Piekuakami (Saint-Jean) in Quebec. Undeniably political, Gill's poems ask: How can one reclaim a narrative that has been confiscated and distorted by colonizers?
The poet's young avatar reaches new levels on Nintendo, stays up too late online, wakes to her period on class photo day, and carves her lovers' names into every surface imaginable. Encompassing twenty-first-century imperialism, coercive assimilation, and 90s-kid culture, the collection is threaded with the speaker's desires, her searching: for fresh water to "take the edge off," for a "habitable word," for sex. For her "true north"--her voice and her identity.
Like the life cycle of the ouananiche that frames this collection, the speaker's journey is cyclical; immersed in teenage moments of confusion and life on the reserve, she retraces her scars to let in what light she can, and perhaps in the end discover what to "make of herself".
Praise for Spawn:
"Spawn is an epic journey that follows the ouananiche in their steadfast ability to hold: rigid, shimmering, hardened to the frigid waters of winter, in all of its capacities of and for whiteness. Here, poems summon a spawn of wonderworking dreams: 'a woman risen up from all these winter worlds, heaped with ice [and] ready to start again'." --Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
"Spawn is unforgettable poetry of the highest order." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
"Gill's poems are like small treasures clutched in buried tree roots, preserving 'the chalky veins' of ancestral memory pulsing just below our modern hustle." --Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood
Since 2020, Tyler Gillespie has spent a lot of time online and in other landscapes devoid of humans IRL. While undergoing quarantine with his grandmother in Florida, he began expanding his writing practice with new forms of media expression, going as far as recording snippets of a comedy album and creating a pop diva robot persona through text-to-talk technology. Although he eventually abandoned these projects, traces of them can be found in the nature machine! Throughout this collection, Gillespie merges poetic forms with interstitial moments of sound and visual technologies to playfully theorize the now and to seriously contemplate the future. With dexterity, he threads ideas on cybernetics, pop music, the environment, desire, and recovery to examine how technology has transformed our natures. But ultimately, full of warmth and wit, this book reminds us why, despite everything, we're still not-yet-machines.
A wondrous new collection by Dana Gioia, "one of America's premier poets and critics" (Julia Alvarez).
Dana Gioia has been hailed for decades as a master of traditional lyric forms, whose expansive and accessible poems are offerings of rare poignancy and insight. In Meet Me at the Lighthouse, he invites us back to old Los Angeles, where the shabby nightclub of the title beckons us into its noirish immortality. Elsewhere, he laments the once-vibrant neighborhood where he grew up, now bulldozed, and recalls his working-class family of immigrants. Gioia describes a haunting from his mother on his birthday, Christmas Eve. Another poem remembers his uncle, a US Merchant Marine. And "The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz" tells the story of his great-grandfather, a Mexican vaquero who was shot dead at a tavern in Wyoming during a dispute over a bar tab. "I praise my ancestors, the unkillable poor," Gioia writes. This book is dedicated to their memory. Including poems, song lyrics, translations, and concluding with an unsettling train ride to the underworld, Meet Me at the Lighthouse is a luminous exploration of nostalgia, mortality, and what makes a life worth living and remembering.
A new edition of the Nobel laureate's searing sixth collection of poetry, about "the myth of a happy family" (The New York Review of Books).
Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an era-defining poet, one who was innovative, brave, and wholly individual. Her work has left an indelible mark on the literature of our nation and of the world. As Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker, "This voice is not going to go away." Ararat, the great poet's sixth collection of poetry, was originally published in 1992. Now, in this new edition, the impact of the work is felt anew. Glück created a ruthlessly probing family portrait, and these poems confront, with devastating irony, the difficulties and intricacies of a daughter's relationship to her father and mother. The result is a "blinding and subtle" collection in which "the wonder comes silently, quick as an electric shock from a broken cord; we hardly know what's hit us."
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The collected works of the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning poet It is the astonishment of Louise Glück's poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape--Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain--persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.From the outset ("Come here / Come here, little one"), Gluck's voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we "do not see the intervening fathoms." From within the earth's
bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness my friend the moon rises:
she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?
To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.