The pitch

Urban experience drives the savvy, energetic lyrics of Tom Thompson's impressive second collection.

Slamming open the door

Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's heartrending autobiographical collection inspires both compassion for and awe of the human spirit.

The moon reflected fire

Parable of hide and seek

Chad Sweeney’s imaginative poems embark on a tour of magical realism both breathtaking and slightly awry.

Pier

Called ‘a truly masterful first book’ by Cole Swenson, Pier is the inaugural winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Beloved idea

Ann Killough's insistent debut is a quest to lovingly deconstruct, and construct anew, a nation ideal.

Sudden dog

This post-modern Romantic struggles against the frenetic torpor of modernity and gives us poems that make us feel more alive.

The captain lands in paradise

The world in place of itself

This neo-baroque, hypnotic debut reads like transcribed fever dreams, employing elements of film noir and surrealism.

The usable field

The poems in Jane Mead's musical, meditative third collection yearn for acceptance as they struggle with loss.

Dark elderberry branch: poems of marina tsvetaeva

Two of America's most passionate poets work magic to unearth the true voice of Tsvetaeva, to "open [her] veins."

King baby

This award-winning poet's third collection tells a quasi-creation story through petitions, addresses, and conversations.

Live feed

The poems in Live Feed examine how we live our lives on-screen. The commerce machine often assumes the persona of "the city," a place where the speaker seeks an accommodation between urbanicity and organicity, attempting to make some sort of whole of our fractured society, sensibilities, and lives.

A thief of strings

Acclaimed poet's tenth collection chronicles our seeming, and apocalyptic, liberation from conscience and consciousness itself.

Lit from inside: 40 years of poetry from alice james books

This distinctive anthology from a foremost American literary press is a must-have for all serious readers of contemporary poetry.

Father dirt

This courageous autobiographical collection disarms us, exposing cultural oppression and igniting compassion with honest, enchanting language.

Begin anywhere

Beleaguered, appealing self-as-persona wades through crowded, messy rooms of adulthood in this unpredictable debut.

Take what you want

This spirited debut applies the analytic and somatic to realities and mysteries of love and motherhood.

Black crow dress

Ghosts of American slaves have much to teach us. Johnson, in her second collection, summons all ghosts, even our own.

The temple gate called beautiful

An erudite, fast-talking, visionary, myth-busting black comedy of the afterlife narrated by a hopeful non-believer.

Panic

Laura McCullough’s silent scream challenges conventional responses to tragedy with deft lyricism and almost ancient eyes.

Equivocal

Author's second collection explores elements of chance and mystery that determine human identity and relationships.

Lie down too

Here, the very small becomes our very center. Paradoxical and associative, the cracking of each poem’s hardened chrysalis enlightens us.

Door to a noisy room

This pithy debut collection negotiates, through playful meditations, our uneasy coexistence in the marketplace and home.

The wanderer king

Landscapes i & ii

The whimsical, highly animated landscapes of Lesle Lewis' second collection will surprise and delight.

Rough cradle

This acclaimed poet's seventh collection entreats us to love everything before we lose everything.

Phantom noise

A soldier struggles to reintegrate, exploring the foundations of the psyche and how history instructs identity.

Here, bullet

A first-person account of the Iraq War by a solider-poet, winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Western practice

This debut collection radiates post-WWII California art scene cool as Motika obsesses artfully on the likes of Diebenkorn and Partch.

The devotion field

This lively fourth collection should excite Keelan's fans and earn her new ones.

Milk dress

Compelled by rhetoric of disaffect and detachment, Milk Dress uncovers the fatigue of too much wanting.

Forth a raven

Christina Davis' deeply-felt lyric poems will seduce the reader with their spare elegance.

Pageant

Fuhrman charms, letting us in on the joke with a brazenly critical and warmly intelligent voice.

The case against happiness

In this wide-ranging debut, likeable characters in postmodern America argue a case against happiness.

Winter tenor

Tightly wrought lyric exploration of the severities of farm life, where doom and grace are one.

Hagar before the occupation / hagar after the occupation

Iraqi author Amal al-Jubouri contextualizes America's occupation of Iraq through a Qur'an parable, portraying life before and after the war.

Me and nina

Experimental, stylistically diverse, and musical, me and Nina reflects an intimate conversation between the author and Nina Simone.

The art of the lathe

The next country

Richly metaphorical debut examines what it means to inhabit a world of "losses that outnumber us."

The bitter withy

Donald Revell's eleventh collection courageously seeks enlightenment and the ethereal, crafting a world where environment informs action.

Granted

This superb first collection is the winner of the 2001 Beatrice Hawley Award.

How to catch a falling knife

Daniel Johnson's debut is a praise song for the Midwestern steel towns sinking into their own history.

Shelter

Heartrending, but absolutely necessary and enlightening, this lyric debut is beautiful in its courage and honesty.