Attempts to reach the moon, metaphorically and otherwise, are an ancient element of human imagination. With intrusions from mathematics and science, these poems are elegiac celebrations of various ambitions that miss the mark, but matter anyway. The poems sometimes center on events in the life of the poet or members of his family; sometimes on the geography, geology, and the histories accrued by local communities, human and otherwise; sometimes they center on historical figures reimagined―from Giacinto Scelsi to Alan Turing. But these poems are always about boundaries and barriers, crossed sometimes, ignored at peril. They are about distances that must be travelled.

Missing the Moon

Literature & Fiction

Ramke, Bin

Poetry

Omnidawn

Essay: A Critical Memoir is an experiment of the old school and of revived delight in the pleasures of close reading. What if all the poems are true? What if the allegories of a man or woman's life are in every way, and always, the actual shape of that life? To read is to find oneself again and again at the center of a pageant. To write is to call the pageant home. Essay is a memoir of Dante and Beatrice in New York circa 1968 and of an anti-war movement in something very much like Paradise.

Essay: A Critical Memoir

Revell, Donald

History & Criticism

Truth of My Songs is a translation of poems written by the women troubadours, known as trobairitz, whose poems disappeared after the Albigensian crusade of 1129. Together, the poems present a profound argument―for and against―the notion of fin’ amor, the pure or fine notion of love, invented by their male counterparts. Tragic, raucous, vulgar, silly, and strange, the poems of the trobairitz prove that women’s history has been recorded since the first woman raised her voice and lifted a pen.

Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz

Keelan, Claudia

Laodicea speaks English sympathetically at the edge of sense, where this world reveals another latent; and this world remains ordinary, just like we like it. In a time when we are told, amazingly, the universe is math, what does this mean for our friendships, for our language? Laodicea reminds, laughingly, that “The mind and the world / together are a Co-Cathedral”―the impulse for love and play.

Laodicea

Ekstrand, Eric

From the author’s “Memo to the Reader”: “if you open this book and expect to / know me you will find both truth // and lie all poets lie and lay and have / lain so discover inside what’s mad // or curious yet beware ye who enter / for you may see yourself herein”

Memos

Terris, Susan

Shields call out to the violence from which they also protect us, a paradox that belongs as well to the images etched upon them. In these poems seven shields each suffer a process, one of wounding, and of healing the wound back to song. Shards are what remain of shields, fragment words relict from the first poem. Shards become stitches, barest suture of meaning made only from what language in the shard remains. Last, built upon the stitches, keeping intact what letters and words there remain, seven songs to replace seven shields, born out of a violence they seek only to sing themselves past.

Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs

Beachy-Quick, Dan

This is a book about deciding not to die―about the obstinacy of being. And it’s a book of craft, in which steadiness of presence generates the illumination that flickers through states darkened by steady crisis. The world is blurred, not broken. And a lyric I comes to rest in the world.

Each Thing Unblurred is Broken

Baker, Andrea

<ul>
<li>One of Publishers Weekly's 2015 "Poetry Torch Carriers"</li>
<li>One of Lit Hub's "Best Poetry Collections of 2015"</li>
</ul>Cal Bedient in Lit Hub writes: Douglas Piccinnini's first collection of poems, Blood Oboe is poetry as pumped-up kicks. It transforms English the way a rope burn changes the way you feel about rope. Andrew Joron brilliantly reviewed the book in the journal Lana Turner, and I wrote the introduction, but it may not receive much attention, and not just because few books of poetry do, but also because it is rare, ferociously accomplished, difficult, aggressive, and crack-throated; it's not for sissies. "A sort of storm / verbs the air"; "the center is closed"; "To wait out / the lozenge of spit"--it's in that line, bitter as Rimbaud. Piccinnini may be a child of the internet age, but he's not buying it: "'I come out' / to you thru websites. / Websites? Websites"). He's not buying anything, not now, not with "everything titted up--unrhymed." His short lines elbow away comforting concepts. Life? "Our timed something." To me, his existential toughness is refreshing. No bullcrap. Like Ashbery he sees the basic insufficiency, the crying shame in the peculiar anti-phenomenon called time and in what still receives the name of "self": "my property of cells / my 'my' / . . . decharmed / . . . blood in the hopper." With his kitchen-Spanish inserts (Piccinnini is a New Jersey chef), he mouths "the air big air" in more than one language, but still comes away starved: "Life is 'terrible.' I get hungry: / it's time to punch everyone." Clearly the man can communicate and has humor. That he is difficult in askew, gnomic statements and abruptness I lack the space to illustrate. If anything suffices in or near the Piccinnini ex-world, suffice it to say that each of his poems is something to marvel at. He has arrived complete, "already late, dismembering."

Blood Oboe

Piccinnini, Douglas

u&amp;i is a meditation on the imaginary―what exists and what doesn’t, how does something exist when it knows it is imaginary, how is it to be reckoned with. u&amp;i asks what exists when a book is written. u&amp;i is telling a story to the things that are actual loss. Things that are gone become further proof of existence and not. u&amp;i asks what are the can and can’t of existence, as well as the cant of existence―the domestic and repeating cant, as things circle themselves until they think they exist a little more. There is, in u&amp;i, cant as incantation.

Smith, Cassandra

Every Day But Tuesday is a book of lyric experiments amassed from a space beyond ordinary time, where “this is tomorrow and the sun” stands, reverberating both as precursor and postscript to the apocalypse. The extraordinary world of these poems, coming from the sea, forests, islands, mountains, and rivers, form an utterly new logic of sound patterning and metric sense-making, colliding a series of gorgeous associations with a suite of prepositions forever reconfiguring.

Every Day but Tuesday

Freeman, Barbara Claire

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