Böcker i Penguin Poets-serien

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler's new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler's abiding interests-in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic-are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler's reputation as an important contemporary poet.

"A memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets In a New York Times review of Alice Notley's 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that "the radical freshness of Notley's poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet's restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next." Notley's new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, "stream-of-consciousness" teasing out a lived physics or philosophy"--

"In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being "trouble"-difficult, unruly, powerful, defiant-is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting, spellbinding, and strikingly original collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood"--

"Taking its title from Darwin's On the Origin of Species, this debut collection investigates the theoretically vestigial parts of our psychologies-residues of first impressions, thought spirals to nowhere, memories that persist despite outliving their usefulness. Chung collects and preserves psychological debris as one would care for precious heirlooms, revealing their surprising potential as sites of meaning and connection"--

"A suite of poems that channels the legendary singer-songwriter Ritchie Valens to examine and question mid-twentieth-century conceptions of race and art, identity and desire"--

"From an acclaimed and wildly imaginative poet, a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is a work of art history and a coming-of-age story. Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses-parasitic wasps-in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world"--

"A new collection from a poet whose "celebrations of science and approachable yet profound spiritual connection to the Earth delight, entertain, and elevate" (The Poetry Foundation) Denise Levertov has called the poet Pattiann Rogers "a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed." The consistent theme In Flickering, her new collection, is the very breadth and prodigiousness of the universe itself. These wise poems, many inspired by various kinds of flickering actions in plants, animals, and natural processes, move nimbly between inner and outer worlds as Rogers addresses themes ranging from beauty, resilience and creation to the tensions and relationships between humans and wildness"--

"In Ann Lauterbach's eleventh collection, the image of a Door recurs across several poems, as she considers the perpetual dialogue between what is open and what is shut for each of us. The Door is a threshold between the inner landscape of memory, thought, imagination and dream and the outer so-called real world, which increasingly comes to us through technology's lens, displacing and distorting our sense of intimacy, presence and relation. What is near, and what is far away? She asks about the efficacy of language itself, when confronted by the urgent uncertainties of contemporary experience"--

A collection of haunting, image-rich poems about isolation, captivity, and vanishing.The poems in Paige Ackerson-Kiely's third collection are set primarily in the rural northeast of America, and explore rural poverty, entrapment, captivity, violence, and a longing to vanish. Ranging from free verse to a long noir prose poem, they examine who her, or our, "captors" might be. Ackerson-Kiely is interested in characters who are aware of their foibles, and who find ways to turn away from those problems in search of connection and freedom.

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes. Lauren Berry's bracing and emotionally charged first collection of poetry delivers visions of a gothic South that Flannery O'Connor would recognize. Set in a feverish swamp town in Florida, The Lifting Dress enters the life of a teenage girl the day after she has been raped. She refuses to tell anyone what has happened, and moves silently toward adulthood in a community that offers beauty but denies apology. Through lyric narratives, readers watch her shift between mirroring and rejecting the anxious swelter of her world, until she ultimately embraces it with the same violent affection once tendered to her.

Mark Yakich is an original... In the unabashedly unwieldy title and in each poem, there are no borders drawn between the commonplace and the metaphysical. There are journeys, crossings, and departures-all evocative of the loneliness, alienation, and desire for identity with another (person or place), which, formalized, makes this work recognizable as art of a very high order." -James Galvin, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment of the Arts Fellow

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature PoetryPattiann Rogers, one of America's finest contemporary poets, has won a reputation for densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one's place in it that are informed by a broad knowledge of science. In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and A. R. Ammons, Rogers's wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine, exuding much observational care and descriptive panache. Her new collection, Generations, consists of fifty-four poems that concern themselves not just with the notion of the generations of life, but "generations" in the sense of energy, change, replication, and continuity-the entire process of coming or bringing into being.

The New York Times has called Carl Dennis's poetry "wise, original, and deeply moving." A poet with a growing audience of admirers, Dennis writes in a clear, classically simple language that is both personal and universal. Making use of a rich variety of genres-advice, meditation, elegy, and prophecy-his poems take unexpected turns as they explore their subjects, catching the reader off balance in a way that is liberating. This new anthology gathers the best of his eight previous books along with a generous sampling of new poems.

A resonant new collection of poetry from Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke, a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Map to the Stars, the fourth poetry collection from National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka, navigates the tensions between race, geography, and poverty in America during the Reagan Era. In the time of space shuttles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, outer space is the only place equality seems possible, even as the stars serve to both guide and obscure the earthly complexities of masculinity and migration. In Matejka's poems, hope is the link between the convoluted realities of being poor and the inspiring possibilities of transcendence and escape-whether it comes from Star Trek, the dream of being one of the first black astronauts, or Sun Ra's cosmic jazz.

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level—these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night.". . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. --from "Reign of Snakes"

"Kill Or Cure,” a bold prescriptive for these apocalyptic days, brings together substantial new work as well as the best of Anne Waldman's previously uncollected poetry. It includes credos, manifestos, dreams, homages to literary predecessors, "Shaman Hisses You Slide Back Into The Night” (the journal poem written during Bob Dylan's historic Rolling Thunder Revue), witty political diatribes, travel vignettes, incantations, and a new section of the ongoing epic poem "Iovis,” a powerful meditation on male energy.

"Your thoughts become fluid, volatile; their aroma fills the room. This is a nerve storm." In her first collection since Bitter Angel, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, Amy Gerstler explores themes of suffering and redemption through a heady blend of folklore, popular culture, and the natural world in Nerve Storm. The poet Eileen Myles has said that "the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply [Gerstler's] materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art." A crackling wit and whimsical instinct guide this collection as Gerstler traipses through humanity's triumphs and blunders, effortlessly revealing the surreal and surprising possibilities inherent in everyday life.

Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America's greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement … Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in "Red Trousseau," "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal," to the sun in "Unsent letter." in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins" In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red-the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros it self, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft."With Red Trousseau, Carol Muske achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation with its humanity: terror, sometimes courage, excessive need, and the stubborn twin habits of hope and representation. This is urgent and beautifully confident work.'-Jorie Graham

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature PoetryA new collection by an award-winning poet who “presents her apprehensions of the natural world with striking accuracy and emotional impact” (Orion Magazine)Denise Levertov has called Pattiann Rogers a “visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed.” Quickening Fields gathers fifty-three poems that focus on the wide variety of life forms present on earth and their unceasing zeal to exist, their constant “push against the beyond” and the human experience among these lives. Whether a glassy filament of flying insect, a spiny spider crab, a swath of switch grass, barking short-eared owls, screeching coyotes, or racing rat-tailed sperm, all are testifying to their complete devotion to being. Many of the poems also address celestial phenomena, the vision of the earth immersed in a dynamic cosmic milieu and the effects of this vision on the human spirit. While primarily lyrical and celebratory in tone, these poems acknowledge, as well, the terror, suffering, and unpredictability of the human condition.