Ranging from love song to train song to jump rope rhyme, the poems of Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country are voiced by perpetual outsiders searching for a sense of place from small Southern towns to the tunnels and tracks of the urban North. Personal and regional histories blur through the intimate paths of tornadoes, guns, suburban sprawl, and the ongoing quest to escape where we come from.
The Nomenclature of Small Things explores grief through the language of science, history, and art. From Charles Darwin to Carl Linnaeus, from the passenger pigeon to fossil ammonites, each poem seeks to name, to enumerate, to order--to claim a particular place for the human creature in a catalog of extinction and loss.
In Rachel Richardson's second collection of poems, she juxtaposes the grand quests of Ahab and Melville with the quotidian journeys of contemporary life. Hundred-Year Wave launches stories of marriage and motherhood over the currents of a nearly mythological ancestry: women and men who built their possessions out of iron and flour and whalebone and wool. If reaching back into the past is akin to plumbing a depth, then Richardson exhibits the rare abilities of craft to build, from our language, vessels light enough to travel on that element, but sturdy enough to weather the storms we are likely to find there.
"Deborah Pope's poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized, whose very personal visions yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry's fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope's skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given"--
"Dan Rosenberg's third collection of poetry moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it"--
"Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin's "A priori" and "A posteriori" as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature's permanence and nature's solid independence from our attachment"--
"The poems in Internal West practice a careful empiricism, offering a science of the human, a way to understand the world through watching and listening. Becker's poems are as much in the Eastern European tradition of Daniel Simko as the American tradition of George Oppen. As the poet herself has stated, her main themes are the complete truth of what her life has been; of feeling alone even in supposed relationships"--
"Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar's finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don't favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery-instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions"--
"Mangrove forests grow on coastlines, with root systems that hold them upright in the unstable grounds where land and water meet. That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove draws on the in-between nature of these trees to explore spaces between-between a foot and the floor, a cup of coffee and its dish, a face and the shoulder of a couple on a motorbike. These are poems that dwell in the tidal movement between saying and what's left unsaid"--
"Yes and No is a book about looking back and looking forward. Many of the poems deal with the loss of friends and relatives whose spirits remain in the poet's life in memory and even apparition. As the title connotes, the collection is about affirmation and negation: there are love poems and poems of the devastating loss of love and poems of passion and the dwindling of it. A spiritual thread runs through the book as well, as seen in the opening poem, "Prayer at the Masked Ball," and in the question asked in the title poem: "are we connected to the infinite, or not?"--
Reissuing as a Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries selection, The Autobiography of a Jukebox (previously issued in 1997 as a Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series selection) is a book of lyrics about cultural aspects of African-American life.
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