"From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to...

A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty. "Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--And very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that...

"Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something...

Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying--from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science...

"In her remarkable and assured debut, Alexandria Hall explores the boundaries and limits of language, place, and the self, as well as the complicated space between safety and danger, intimacy and isolation, playfulness and seriousness, home and away. With a keen eye for the importance of place, Hall shows us daily life in rural Vermont, illuminating the beauty and difficulty inherent in the dichotomies of human language and experience. Incisive and...

"Jenny George's debut showcases an astonishing poetic talent, a new voice that is intensely focused, patient, and empathic. The dream of reason explores the paadoxical relationships between humans and the animals we imagine, keep, fer, and consume..."--Cover unnumbered page 4.

Selected by 2011 National Book Award winner Nikky Finney as the seventh annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Hold Like Owls is the first book-length collection from Julia Koets. Full of imagery deeply embedded in memories of growing up in the American South, Koets explores what it means to hold-to carry memories-and what to hold onto and what to let go. Birds turn into paper, a voice fits inside a chestnut shell, and moths eat stars...

Deborah Brown's second collection looks with imagination to the limitless possibilities of language, following surprising associations to find that which feels deep and true. Threaded with echoes of familial trauma--a sister's battle with cancer, a brother's struggles with depression--these lyric poems reveal an open-hearted speaker who finds solace in the beauties of celestial navigation, the flowers along the railroad tracks, and the brushwork of...

David Bottoms explores otherness, the death of parents, and private spirituality. Images of rural Georgia confront the changing landscape of his memories where he searches for refuge in quiet places of prayer. Rooted in nature, Bottoms' poetry affirms the "tenuous ways tenderness seeps into the world" and the loneliness inherent in memory. Memory is "smoke off a damp fire" as Bottoms explores absence, a contemplative inner life, and changing landscapes.From...

In his second collection, Christopher Kondrich navigates the link between what we see as our inner value and the external world that supplies it. Valuing's deeply personal poems explore faith, love, ethics, and mortality from a variety of angles and through a variety of poetic forms as a means of questioning the origination of one's own value system. Does it come from the belief in a god, from the love one gives or receives, or from the diminution...