Bøger i Phoenix Poets serien

This volume brings together James McMichael's poetry and includes works that have previously remained unpublished. James McMichael is the recipient of a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award.

"Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction. Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them"--

"Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, documents a life in which even the most intimate experiences are mediated by the flattening interface of technology and a world in which language is no longer produced solely by humans but by artificial intelligences as well. The poems circle the topics of replication, reproduction, and inheritance, and the way these processes are born out in language, history, and biology. In these poems, a baby is born; the world shrinks into tiny pockets under the new logic of contagion; two people are wed; the roses which washed up ashore centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. All of this is set against a backdrop of ecological ruin, of decimated chestnut trees and a beached baby whale. The collection mirrors the restless spirit of the present, shifting between voices and forms. At times the poems take the form of experimental essays, and elsewhere the sonnet is reimagined and reinvented as a disembodied voice from the distant future. A portal can be a way out or a way in-or a website at the center of many networked websites. These poems take delight in the strangeness of contemporary life, even as they grieve something intangible which has been lost"--

"Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, roadside goldenrod and toxic chemicals in the watershed, The Upstate is a collection of poems about southern Appalachia in its contemporary moment of change. Layering a personal lyric voice with an awareness of social, political, and ecological crises, Lindsay Turner redefines regional poetics as necessarily, inextricably attuned to global structures. These poems both observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation while also raging in their own quiet way against the continuation of such devastation. Arising from moments of darkness and desperation, the poems in The Upstate nevertheless affirm poetry's role under the conditions they describe. Turner's words weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield such treasures from the forces that amass against them. An elegy for pastoralism in a time of disaster, The Upstate is buoyed by a restless sense of discovery and the call to chronicle a world that has all but given itself over to instability and flux"--

"Negro Mountain is the name of a ridge in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania-its summit is in fact the highest elevation in the state. Named for a Black man who was killed fighting on the side of his white masters against Indigenous peoples during a scouting expedition to the region in the mid-eighteenth century, this mountain ridge is also the metaphorical center of C. S. Giscombe's sixth full-length book of poetry. Negro Mountain is a subtle, erudite interrogation of the contact zones where Blackness, white supremacy, Indigeneity, and endangered animal populations enter into complex and multifaceted dialectics of survival and erasure. From the vantage of this ridge, Giscombe maps the psychogeography of surrounding region and the tangled human and nonhuman forces that have shaped it. To say that such work is strictly "regional," however, is to underestimate Giscombe's commitment to and deep engagement with the archive, and his poetry deftly connects relevant points across time and space, from the mid-Pleistocene period to nineteenth-century Jamaica to the vilest corners of the internet. This saturation of sources, voices, and modes yields a parallax synthesis of the personal and the historical-all filtered through the singular voice of a poet who has been honing his craft for decades"--

"Viewed from a distance, interdisciplinary artist and poet Annelyse Gelman's Vexations could be described as a long poem-a book-length narrative work in the tradition of epic or romance. Vexations is fragmentary and dreamlike, however, chipping away over time at the very foundation on which such a narrative tradition typically rests. The central drama of Vexations is centered around the journey of a mother and her daughter through a speculative world that seems utterly contemporary and, at the same time, indexical of alternative unsettling futures. Threats and anxieties are inextricable here: environmental disaster, medical treatments, medication, motherhood, grasshoppers, horses, shopping malls, evolution, inheritance, advertising. "There was no other world to bring a child into," Gelman writes. Endlessly, intoxicatingly inventive, nearly every line of Vexations is worthy of independent attention, even as the work as a whole advances its tragic narrative on multiple fronts. As the work traverses scales from the dramatic scope of its quest narrative, on one hand, to the miniaturist phenomenological precision of its lyric progression on the other, Vexations balances affective intimacies with dystopian political vision, and the result is a singular, genre-warping work of contemporary poetry"--

"Comprised of a series of long, lyrical narrative poems, Dong Li's debut collection of poetry braids forgotten histories, family sorrows, and political upheavals into a panoramic view of China and the people who embody it across generations. The Orange Tree navigates the personal and the political, grounding its abstract meditations in the raw, worldly experience in characters whose lives bear striking affinities across disparate eras. Cycling between mythological time, ancient history, and modern memory, Li offers unexpected perspectives on epochs that resemble our own-not the least of which are the poems' unflinching meditations on the brutality of war. Throughout the book, images and phrases are compressed into portmanteaus of premonition, signaling as nouns the metaphoric inventions that one will come to find-"the anguishednight," "the farawayorangetree," "the launderedyears," "the drifteddream." Like the legend of a map or the runes on a relic, these puzzles invite us to parse the words of The Orange Tree, breaking them apart and creating entrances that lead deeper into the elaborate architecture of Li's poetic world-building"--

Whether charting the moments before or after work, the unspoken emotions accompanying separation and reunion, or the necessity of a grocery store as a "last place" for people to engage publicly, Laton Carter's poems attend to the parts of our lives that are easiest to ignore, like solitary highway drivers passing in their cars and the unspoken link binding people together. In poem after poem, the speaker relentlessly pulls the reader to spaces, both physical and emotional--fearful of the inability to bridge the gap between ideas, places, and individuals, yet unable to avoid trying. Mining the territory of responsibility and longing, these poems remind us that the minutiae and variation in our private lives combine to serve up a larger public identity. An impressively mature first collection of poems, "Leaving" is a bold book that eschews the superfluous, leaving only that which is most essential and meaningful.

Set in a castle and on its grounds in Brittany, The Little Field of Self is one long poem comprised of individual poems that articulate the essence of devotion and the conflict within the devoted. With surprising inventiveness and technical skill, and without ornamentation, self-consciousness, or self-display, Doreen Gildroy has forged an original poetic style that renders inner being authentically and convincingly.

The poems in Bat Ode speak to the way we live today and how it feels to occupy such a mongrel, fast-changing, postmodern world. Yet rather than breaking with the linguistic or poetic past, these poems seem to renew and reinvigorate it with a fresh vision. Jeredith Merrin's sense of humor, formal poise, enormous heart, and disarming wit, situate her as one of our most convincing social poets.

Holiday is a book of poems chiseled into public and private calendar markers, where the unfinished self seeks resolution, desperately and defiantly, through either completion or negation. The poems are filled with unflinching irony and an intelligence that both celebrates and laments personal, mythic, biblical, and historical events.

Alan Williamson's beautiful Love and the Soul explores the vicissitudes of desire with eloquence and subtlety. Few contemporary poets have dissected either psyche or eros so truthfully, so incisively--and so poignantly.

Redolent of Chicago's ethnic culture, Susan Hahn's intensely personal lyrics emerge from the world of an extended Jewish family and its neighbors. The voices of these immigrants are imbued with the profound effects and memories of the journey 'From a patrolled town in the Ukraine/to Baltimore on a boat, then a train to Chicago.' Hahn's poetry is about love and the lack of love, about rejection, and about other forces-generational, political, social, and sexual-that overwhelm individuals and cause them to limit themselves both physically and psychologically.

The poems collectively build up a novelistic world even as they individually retain all the intensity of focus associated with lyricism. Hahn's fevered book of human emotions becomes a powerful rumination on love, aging, and mutability in general.

A great book, astonishing in its range of language and invention, and utterly enthralling in it combination of irreverent humor, linguistic play, and deadly insight. Feldman's sensibility combines and integrates in remarkable ways intellectual suspiciousness and lyric, almost visionary, reach.

"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.""--

"In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--

"Peter Balakian's "No Sign," the centerpiece of this book, is the third multi-sequenced long poem in a trilogy begun in "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy" (2010) and "Ozone Journal" (2015). The three poems follow a persona whose journey is informed by a series of experiences set in New York and the surrounding Jersey Cliffs from the 1970s to the present. In the mix of a dialogue between two lovers over decades, reminiscent of an eclogue updated via the film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), we see an evolution of kaleidoscopic memory-from the haunted history of the Armenian Genocide to the AIDS epidemic, to climate change and the erosion of the planet-that gives the trilogy a unique historical power and psychological depth. The poems in the trilogy are defined by inventive collage-like fragmentation and elliptical, granular language. In the tradition of the American long poem from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to Charles Olson, Balakian has created something new, what one critic has called, "a panoramic work of contemporary witness...of an unprecedented magnitude of violence and dissociation, as well as transcendent vision." Balakian rounds out this new collection with his signature lyrics and narrative poems, where seemingly minor, personal moments in one life expand into the vastness of our messy, shared history"--

A collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier.

New and selected poems by renowned poet Lloyd Schwartz.

Poems that address interpersonal connections while navigating life and care amid disease and disaster.

The poems in No Chronology offer lyrical meditations on our shared experiences, illuminating life's deep discomforts and peculiar joys.

Taking cues from medieval sea charts-portulans-the poems in Jason Sommer's collection bring a fresh variation to the ancient metaphor of life as a journey.

Blending styles, voices, and settings, Campion's poems show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are.

"'Land's End' promises to be the crowning achievement of this master of the descriptive-meditative narrative poem. Here Gail Mazur powerfully evokes the past, while still writing from the firm ground of the present. In the book's title poem, a beautifully crafted elegy to poets who have passed on, Mazur also charges us with the responsibility of nurturing art and artists of the future, especially in the face of the absurdities of contemporary politics. Throughout the New Poems section, Mazur continues to write with the kind of lyric authority, emotional range, and intellectual and social scope that we have come to expect from her award-winning poetry, and this new and selected volume offers Mazur's very best poems from her seven previous books"--