What Jennifer Michael Hecht manages to accomplish, in poems that demonstrate a mastery of craft and a uniquely voiced understanding buoyed with an air of brilliance, is astonishing. Her introduction explains - in her endlessly appealing half-outrageous, half-conspiratorial voice - her purpose: to offer a guidebook for those that come after. We are the next ancient world, and Hecht chronicles our motivations, our interactions, our dreams and half-remembered thoughts with wit, aching romance and savvy intuition.
Out of the quotidian, Hecht manufactures something mythic. It is an unparalleled view that confers on the human condition an aspect of the eternal, that locates the momentous in every moment. In short, one cannot read one of her poems without an equal measure of relish and envy.
The Next Ancient World offers a unique voice and vision, informed with full measures of play, wisdom, and the sheer joy of invention.

The Next Ancient World

Self-Help

Michael Hecht, Jennifer

Relationships

Tupelo Press

I Want This World explores what it means to be human and in danger across many landscapes: the costs of World War II to family-forced labor in Siberia, the Italian Campaign, prison camp in Murmansk, as a hostage in Africa and in the muddied politics in the Rio Grande Valley. We feel the complexity, terror and beauty inherent in each of these domains.If I Want This World is about moments that overcome as well as those that make us shudder, it is also about delight and irresistible love. The poet laughs herself to collapse seeing the roseate spoonbills, the great crater, Ngorogoro, the immigrants' shrine in the Rio Grande Valley, the way Poles crowd Chopin's house every Sunday for concerts as if Chopin were still playing his Polonaise.Margaret Szumowski challenges us to experience the ineffable. Reading about Bronislaw, Czechek, Victor, Christine, and Jan Szumowski, we wonder how to measure ourselves against the previous generation without feeling inadequately endowed with courage. To understand the effect of war on the human spirit, the poet gently brings us to enter the minds of another generation.

I Want This World

Literature & Fiction

Szumowski, Margaret

Poetry

What falls from the sky? What, exactly, is it crows say when they gather together? Should you trust a snake with a monocle? What does the poet see in her sleep? Read on. On The Flute Ship 'Castricum', the muse is a library is a man in a white shirt, the mud tablets of the law are still wet (there's time!), but hurry, the tourists are out in force. In these richly-imagined poems, Amy England quite literally recreates the art form, showing us in poem after poem new ways to dazzle. Yet she makes us, somehow, perfectly comfortable, right at home. Endlessly smart, sensuous, funny, these poems make us gasp with recognition and pleasure. They won't sit still: they perform for us.

The Flute Ship "Castricum"

England, Amy

In this stunning follow-up to her prizewinning debut collection (At the Site of Inside Out), Anna Rabinowitz has created a braided and woven language from the turbulence of multiple voices in the act of finding themselves.Darkling is a book-length acrostic sequence a poem of accretion, of fragmented self and culture. Seeking its own process and form, it assembles narrative by way of antiphony, counterpoint, meditation, chant, repetition and epistle.How does a contemporary poet speak in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Is it possible to evoke, perhaps even reactualize, through language, rhythms, and imagery, intimations of the past when factual details are largely lost? Can new constructs of language be generated within the constraints of a received form?Anna Rabinowitz unflinchingly takes on these questions as she looks back on the ruptured history of the 20th century. Drawing on literary roots of Thomas Hardy's ""The Darkling Thrush"" and the ancient acrostic form, she has shaped an utterly original, deeply personal work which is both armature and repository for an emotionally charged language called upon to articulate that which cannot be fully spoken.With Darkling, Anna Rabinowitz brilliantly demonstrates that one can, indeed, write poetry after the Holocaust.

Darkling

Rabinowitz, Anna

In The Mynah Bird's Own Words is a remarkable volume. An assemblage of lined poems and prose poems, it is a compact and concentrated, lyrically delicious collection that comes very close to having the sweep of a novel. The long, central sequence, 'Rosary,' is astonishing. It builds a powerful narrative arc, and yet its each part, each impeccable verse paragraph is discrete and beautiful. Things in these poems take on symbolic values that loom ever larger as we see how each connects and returns us to the larger story. And yet, even the poems outside the centerpiece sequence are part of that same whole, so that by the time we reach the concluding poem, Art,in which a woman practices the craft of what one might call seductive invisibility, we are made to see that poem, and that woman's craft, as very like this poet's art. This collection is part sleight of hand, but all highly crafted. It is, in a word, magic.""Robert Wrigley, Judge, First Annual Tupelo Press Chapbook Competition

In the Mynah Bird's Own Words

Tran, Barbara

Fiction. Walter Job, college professor and family man, has undeniable talents. The professorial life is a natural for him, but so is the art of murder-and it's so much more remunerative. Outwardly serene, he pursues both vocations, has an affair and avoids pursuit. Inwardly his life comes more and more undone. The character of Walter Job is keenly etched on a mirror that reflects his search for what drives him and our violence-prone society. This literate, layered, intriguing novel is a dark tour de force for Alvin Greenberg.

TIME LAPSE

Greenberg, Alvin

Here is poetry at once intense and resolute from a poet who captures the language of speech and gives it back to us matter-of-fact dressed in cruelty and kindness. In these poems, nothing is what it seems. Rather, things are what they are, beneath the camouflage. Here are poems about shared memories, common experiences and everyday conflicts, presented with startling clarity. Nobody has made our language speak in quite this way before not with this keen a sense of attention and always with that rare power to upend the way we experience even the most recognizable emotions, which is a way of talking about discovery. Her vision reminds us who we are with each new gasp of recognition. If the poems of Melissa Hotchkiss were clothes, they would try you on for size and later, without quite knowing how it happened, you would find yourself wearing them: spare, subtly woven, delicate, thoroughly sophisticated. It seems more than hours and hours the tide takes to go completely away far as the moon allows some things turn kinder as they leave.

STORM DAMAGE

Hotchkiss, Melissa

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

Miracle Fruit

Nezhukumatathil, Aimee

United States

Poetry. It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. "Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity"--Dean Young.

American Linden

Zapruder, Matthew

Annie Finch's wide reputation precedes her. Her first full book of poems attracted the notice and glowing approval of Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Kizer, the Bloomsbury Review and the Washington Times. Her poems are resonating, musical celebrations of life. Through mastery of rhythm and poetic patterning, this wonderfully gifted poet liberates and illuminates the sacred in the mundane, and gives voice to the earth-centered spirituality of our era.

Calendars

Finch, Annie

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