Daring, tender, truthful, the poems in Blizzard, Henri Cole's tenth book, build on a reputation for quiet mastery. Whether he is wrestling with the mundane, history and its disasters, or sexual love, he can sound both classical and contemporary, with the modern austerity of Cavafy and Bishop. Often exploring the darker places of the heart, his sonnets do not lie down obediently, but spark with an honest self-awareness. Cole's lucid, empathetic poems,...

"A collection of poems by Natalie Shapero"-- "The poems of Natalie Shapero's third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers, be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. "Why even / look up, when all we'll...

"In Shangyang Fang's debut Burying the Mountain, saturated images of longing and loss rush through a portal of difficult beauty. Exiled begonias are "lit huge like eyes," as absence is translated into fire ants and snow, and a boy's desire is transfigured into the indifference of mountains and rivers. Lapping and twisting dimensions between a Song Dynasty ink-wash painting and a makeshift bedroom in Chengdu, the poems meditate, breach, and weave the...

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away-- loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it -- that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard.

""Shapero writes in an urgent vernacular that flirts, stings, implores and demands with apparent abandon."--Houston Chronicle "Shapero's poetics has real-world import for the way we use language to talk about messy things."-Volta Thought-provoking and sardonically expressive, Shapero is a self-proclaimed "hard child"-unafraid of directly addressing bleakness as she continually asks what it means to be human and to bring new life into the world. Hard...

A searing new collection from one of our country's most important poets Memories mercies mostly aren't but there were I swear days veined with grace -from "Memory's Mercies" Once in the West, Christian Wiman's fourth collection, is as intense and intimate as poetry gets-from the "suffering of primal silence" that it plumbs to the "rockshriek of joy" that it achieves and enables. Readers of Wiman's earlier books will recognize the sharp characterizations...

"Her rivers are urgent witnesses; her rivers sing truths, shimmer in the darkness. Here are songs pure as water to nourish and cleanse us in the season of lies."-Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

"A new collection of poetry by Hoa Nguyen"-- A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-"Fall-of-Saigon" with verse biography on the poet's mother, Dißp Anh Nguy¿n, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen's...

"Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive....

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world's factual darkness into precarious splendor. "Each hour teems," Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world's miraculous and mundane-a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed-into a moving, visionary journey....