Poetry. This new edition of UNSELECTED POEMS--a consistent SPD bestseller since its original publication--gathers the poems left out of SELECTED POEMS and NEW SELECTED POEMS. I really think he is extraordinary, a visionary of our dense, troubled, mysterious times. The grittiest and most brutal of his poems I would not hesitate to call ineffable--Joyce Carol Oates.

Unselected Poems

Literature & Fiction

LEVINE, Philip

Poetry

Greenhouse Review Press

Poetry. Asian American Studies. The poems in GATHERING THE PIECES are remarkable for their quiet insight and humility, for their keen attention to and transformation of the small details of a life. Carol Lem's is a true voice in sure command of her craft, and her clear and accessible vision gives us poems that reveal profound and essential understanding. Her themes are the transience of our lives and at the same time the beauty of nature that sustains us. Carol Lem's poems seem to rise from love of friends, teachers, the art of teaching, the art of learning, and music, the bamboo flute, the notes, the silence between them, the hush at the end. Philip Levine, in a lovely tribute poem, tells the poet she "knows what work is. You know . . . and you do it." Writing poetry is as ordinary as a day shift and, at the same time, fundamentally mysterious. Carol Lem knows how to do it.

Gathering the Pieces

Lem, Carol

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. 41 American poets respond to the poetry and life of the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. This anthology includes poetic homage, variations on a theme and imitations of this seminal 20th century master by such poets as Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Luis Omar Salinas, Pamela Stewart and Charles Wright. Each poet has also written a prose complement in which they discuss Vallejo's influence on their own work and on contemporary American poetry. In his introduction, Christopher Buckley discusses Vallejo's unique influence on contemporary American poetry, and expresses the hope "that this collection of poems will be, in some small part, a witness to the great and enduring life, poetry and soul of Cesar Vallejo."

Homage To Vallejo

Poetry. BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC features poems from ninety poets, including Killarney Clary, Wanda Coleman, Peter Everwine, Richard Garcia, Amy Gerstler, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy, Jane Hirshfield, Garrett Hongo, Mark Jarman, Dorianne Laux, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Morton Marcus, Czeslaw Milosz, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Joseph Stroud, Amy Uyematsu, Diane Wakoski, Charles Wright, and Al Young, among many others. This great anthology also includes twenty-two essays from poets, including Robert Bly, Maxine Chernoff, Mark Jarman, Diane Wakoski, Charles Harper Webb, and more. "Speaking is natural; writing is not. Prose and poetry will forever combine and recombine to express what utterly needs to be told"--Al Young. "A prose poem has the shape of water; it spreads out. Some poems are that expansive, that open and fluid, and their shape needs to reflect their nature..."--Marsha de la O.

Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California

History & Criticism

Arrows in Hand

McKown, Derek

Fiction. At the dark end of the 1960s, a young poet is launched on a bizarre odyssey that leads him from the ill-fated gathering of rock-and-roll tribes at Altamont through San Francisco City Prison to various psychiatric hospitals up and down California in search of his role in the Revolution. An anti-nostalgic, at times terrifying, often comical exploration of a period largely misremembered in the collective imagination, this picaresque narrative is a vivid evocation of a tumultuous moment in American cultural history, an intimate account of acute psychosis, and an archetypal tale of artistic initiation.

The Mental Traveler

Kessler, Stephen

Genre Fiction

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBT Studies. "Like Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion—journeying to the center of the US, where the traditions and innovations of first-generation Americans traverse the meditative starbursts of hills; ford rivers; cross prairies; and seek out 'the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.' From Costa Rica to Los Angeles and across the continent, Quesada's poems chronicle one family's history: from the courtship of his parents to their separation, from his childhood struggles to awakening desire from his mother's lottery winnings to his own personal losses, Ruben Quesada carries us toward 'that seam in space' where dream and experience intersect. This isn't the story of what it means to come to this country. It's the story of what it means to belong here"—D. A. Powell.

Next Extinct Mammal

Quesada, Ruben

Literary Nonfiction. In these hybrid writings—a mixture of memoir, prose poetry, personal essay, travel journal, and spiritual meditation—Stephen Kessler synthesizes a lifetime of experiences in language of extraordinary concentration, vividness, and lyricism. The stories he tells and the visions he evokes of places and people he has known could be anyone's, but they are the distillation of a singular personal history in a voice uniquely his own. "Stephen Kessler's WHERE WAS I? consists of brief meditations, musings, and reminiscences on place, presence, and the passing of time. They are astonishing reflections on how the past resurfaces in the present, lending a new dimension for which we have no name, where the here and now is framed by what was, where memory is transposed by imagination, and where experience through the spell of art is alchemized into eternal moments. In page after page of this amazing book, Kessler celebrates and mourns our mortal world. These pieces re-vision a lifetime of luminous and fugitive experiences; they are a thanksgiving and praise to a life well-lived coupled with an artistic intelligence that appreciates and celebrates its wonders."—Joseph Stroud

Where Was I?

In MEMPHIS SHOALS, the second volume in Brad Crenshaw's extravagant epic poem that began with his book Genealogies, we return with Bartlett Smith, narrator of both books, to Memphis, Tennessee, where Smith confronts his personal demons and those of his long-lived extended family. Like his adoptive father, John Elam, a sixteenth-century privateer rendered immortal by his Native American wife, Sarah, Bartlett Smith circumnavigates the world's seas, only to return to the place his journey began. There he confronts the murderous tempests of passion and desire, and the faulty, but enduring consolations of kinship, forgiveness, and love. Poetry.

Memphis Shoals

Crenshaw, Brad

Parenting & Relationships

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