Bøger i Penguin Poets serien

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for PoetryWatch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle AwardWatch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates theprinciple of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

Selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Robert WrigleyRose McLarney has won acclaim for image-rich poems that explore her native southern Appalachia and those who love and live and lose on it. Her second collection broadens these investigations in poems that examine the shape-shifting quality of memory, as seen in folktales that have traveled across oceans and through centuries, and in how we form recollections of our own lives. An opening sequence presents contemporary ghost stories: men who gather at dawn in the gas station parking lots of small towns; the mountain lion that paces the edge of a receding tree line. A middle section draws connections between Appalachia and Latin America, places that share qualities of biological and cultural richness-places that are threatened by modernization. A final sequence retells the stories of earlier poems, posing questions about how we construct our landscapes and frame our views.

"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"--

"Rose McLarney's fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, with the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated, with absences and the silence of women's voices left out of accounts of the past. McLarney elegizes stories from her girlhood and memories of her mother, considers omissions from Appalachian cultural history, and offers a series of poems presented as caretaking instructions for a house, for animals, for other humans, for her future self, and for the earth"--

"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"--

"These wondrous poems are lyric germinations of the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Terrance Hayes shapes language into figures of music and music into figures of language"--

"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"--

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity"Marvelous, argumentative, and curiosity-provoking" --The New York Times Book Review The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial narrative. Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a racializing aesthetic gaze. Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through visual perception of that body, hypothesizing the corporeal as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. Museum of the Americas' poetic revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the appropriations that render it an art object and, therefore, diposable.

A suite of poems about a percussionist in 1970 Spanish Harlem music circles, from the author of The Crazy BunchA National Book Critics Circle 2014 Finalist for Poetry Through dream song and elegy, alternate takes and tempos, prizewinning poet Willie Perdomo's third collection crackles with vitality and dynamism as it imagines the life of a percussionist, rebuilding the landscape of his apprenticeship, love, diaspora, and death. At the beginning of his infernal journey, Shorty Bon Bon recalls his live studio recording with a classic 1970s descarga band, sharing his recollection with an unidentified poet. This opening section is followed by a call-and-response with his greatest love, a singer named Rose, and a visit to Puerto Rico that inhabits a surreal nationalistic dreamscape, before a final jam session where Shorty recognizes his end and a trio of voices seek to converge on his elegy.