Poetry. "Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book'll make you bloom"--Graham Foust.

The Trees Around

Literature & Fiction

Tonelli, Chris

Poetry

Birds, LLC

Poetry. "What a complex and lovely book this is! Reading Elisa Gabbert's obsessively interior, technically rigorous poems is like listening in on the thoughts of a mind so fiercely observant and subtle that I find in them always some new twist, some surprising layer I hadn't noticed before. By turns moving and witty, sharp-eyed and impressionistic, Gabbert writes with technical sophistication and keen intelligence. This is a terrific book"--Kevin Prufer.

The French Exit

Gabbert, Elisa

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect--I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode."--Jameson Fitzpatrick

Pricks in the Tapestry

Fitzpatrick, Jameson

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Studies. Film. SAVAGE PAGEANT recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, SAVAGE PAGEANT reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.

Savage Pageant

Stark, Jessica Q.

Poetry. Art. Images by Jonathan Marshall. "I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl's poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it's always too late—that our adventure is a constant failure—their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough"—Zachary Schomburg.

Kings of the F**king Sea

Boehl, Dan

Whether a traditional lyric, a section-length love poem about cage fighting, or a collage of prose and fragments meditating on a haunted and haunting domestic architecture, the poems in Sommer Browning’s Either Way I’m Celebrating share the same DNA base pairs of humor and sentiment, skepticism and humanism; the source of their integrity is how Browning combines and recombines them. Complemented throughout by her sardonic comics, this collection stubbornly celebrates, if only our own absurdity.

Either Way I'm Celebrating

Browning, Sommer

Poetry. "Emily Pettit has included a number of 'how to' poems in her nimble and dazzling first collection, such as: 'How to Make No Noise,' and the especially useful 'How to Avoid Confronting Most Large Animals.' Her kindness is always ahead of us, anticipating the problems we will or won't run into, and we always end up in a different, precise place than the one we started out from, as she reassuringly tells us: 'You know / you know you know. It's all uncertainty / and your neck. You walk slowly / in a calm voice.' GOAT IN THE SNOW is multicolored, ever-changing, a delight to try to clasp."—John Ashbery "GOAT IN THE SNOW is like a taste test between an etch-a-sketch and a spotlight, a race between a wind-up beetle and an idea. The certainty of Pettit's 'I know,' and 'I think' quickly turns into a quicksand of questions. Perceptive, jumpy and perfectly odd, this book encourages you to 'try to maneuver like a spacecraft / passing sufficiently close to a planet / in order to make some relatively detailed observations / Without landing.'"—Matthea Harvey "The poems in GOAT IN THE SNOW often ask odd, penetrating questions. 'What do you call a field of black telephones ringing?' 'Where did you find such a stunning embankment?' 'Is this what loving someone is like?' 'Do you remember the basement?' 'In what direction do you look when someone says something true?' These poems are full of mortal awareness, and are sophisticated without being ornate or 'poetic.' When the poet says, 'Once in modest and murky water, I had a very disturbing conversation with a boat,"' I don't feel as if she is writing in metaphor. I feel like something real has happened."—Matthew Zapruder

Goat in the Snow

Pettit, Emily

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Ana Božičević is both a poet's poet and the people's poet. RISE IN THE FALL, her second full-length collection, is a revolutionary book and an ars poetica for the polis in which she excludes nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family and friends, she is at ease employing both the universal political statement and the lyric "I." A Croatian émigré, Božičević approaches the English language with a playful objectivity, bouncing back and forth from the conversational to the grand: "This is the whitest shit / I've ever written" she notes in her half-myth "About Nietzsche." Her critique of our time and place is at once empathetic and crude, tender and grotesque. Lucky for us, "beauty [wins] in all its casual terror and pain." "This is more the work of an ancient waterfall than a human. One that told stories, broke dishes and wept. Got drunk rode a horse to the city in the moonlight shouting songs. No matter what the radiant, brilliantly unbalanced work of Ana Božičević always feels right. She's a bit of a colossus. It's stuck, it's in motion. It's absurdly enough."—Eileen Myles

Rise in the Fall

Božičević, Ana

Poetry. As Jared White points out in his introduction to THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER, "We live in an era when a book of poems is often a 50-80 page manuscript bound with a thin mustache of a spine." THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER seeks to "upend this orthodoxy."Distinct but kindred, these books are like four ecologically diverse quadrants of one realm, in a Disneyworld of poetry's possibilities. The poems themselves are invested in the purity of experiences and the varieties of contemporary language—news reports, video games, WWF wrestling, Mike Tyson. These poems are, as White puts it, "a phantasmagoria worthy of Arthur Rimbaud but a 'Rimbaud chugging Robotussin®.'"THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is no less than this: a book of books about the lonely yearning to be transformed by poetry, and through poetry, transform the world.THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER are King of the Forest, La La La, The Waters, and Self Help Poems.

The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather

Starkweather, Sampson

Poetry. Browning follows up her sold out debut, EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists." Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element—a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I'm here! I didn't run!"

Backup Singers

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