Undone is the long-awaited first collection of poems by Kim Bridgford. Combining formal mastery with an ear for the nuances of intimate human speech, Bridgford's work is breathtaking in its emotional richness, linguistic dexterity, and wit.

Undone

Literature & Fiction

Bridgford, Kim

Contemporary

David Robert Books

This is formalist, metered poetry at its finest. The masterful forms of Rough Translation by John Talbot press their sculpted angles against, around, and through the rough experience of the world.

Rough Translation

Talbot, John

Poetry

The elegant sonnets of Arthur Brown's Duration and the Second Hand ring a wide range of experience within their taut form, marking the passage of time with precision.

Duration and the Second Hand

Brown, Arthur

Zara Raab's poems evoke the rainy darkness of the remote northern California coast where she and her family have lived for almost two hundreds years. They are collected in The Book of Gretel and Swimming the Eel, and now in a third book, Fracas & Asylum, which continues her journey through inner and outer landscapes characterized by alternating moods of storm, seclusion and reverie. A fourth book, finalist for the Dana Award and based on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, is due out in 2013.

Fracas & Asylum

Raab, Zara

Many of the poems in To See the Sound explore notions of perspective, the shifting ways we see the world, the interplay of our ideals and senses as we negotiate our lives--and our deaths. Many also wrestle with constructions of ethnic and national identity, the speakers as heritage tourists, their own identities becoming increasingly intangible and remote. The collection is an example of postmodern formalism, in which historical forms like the villanelle and sonnet are simultaneously revered and deconstructed. Here, conservatism is not the driver of the formalism. Instead, the engine seems to be Degher's awareness of poetry's historical nexus to song, his commitment to maintaining aural and oral foundations, to keeping music in the poem.

To See the Sound

Degher, Darius

The classical formal sensibility of Larry Johnson's Alloy is no indicator of antiquated, old-fashioned verse; these poems are utterly contemporary in their strong, sharp language, and timeless in the themes they evoke.

Alloy

JOHNSON, LARRY

The past becomes present in Ann Eichler Kolakowski's rich collection Persistence. The community of Warren, Maryland is not simply "gone but not forgotten" here; Kolakowski's poems are an act of restoration.

Persistence

Kolakowski, Ann Eichler

The flesh of Tayve Neese's poems, their sensuous surfaces, yield fruit indeed, and their thematic resonance is their very lifeblood.

Blood to Fruit

Neese, Tayve

The lyric poems of Neva Herrington's Open Season, grounded in specificity, face the world, open in all seasons.

Open Season

Herrington, Neva

The fine lyric poems in Terra Infirma traverse interior and exterior spaces-- from grief to joy, from Tuscany to Orkney to "the changed place we call home." We cannot know which plates will shift under our feet, says poet Carol Westberg, "Whatever has been taken from us, whatever comes next...."

Terra Infirma

Westberg, Carol

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Books by David Robert Books