Finalist for the New England Book Award in Poetry and the Vermont Book Award As heard on NPR Morning Edition A New York Public Library Best Book of 2022 A searching, startling new collection of poems from the author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows Written in four sections with incisive and vivid lyrical language, Bianca Stone’s What Is Otherwise Infinite considers how we find our place in the world through themes of philosophy, religion, environment, myth, and psychology. “I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues,” writes Stone. “I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort.” Populated by Archangels, limping in paradise; by allergies of the soul; the intimacy and danger of motherhood; psychic wounds; and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake, What Is Otherwise Infinite deftly examines our inherent and inherited ideas of how to live, and the experience of the Self—which on one hand is so intensely personal, and on the other, universal.
The much-anticipated debut collection from a celebrated young poet, Someone Else's Wedding Vows marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American poetry. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.
Franz Wright was recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation even before he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. His voice and sensibility are distinctive, and the places he goes are ones where not many writers are able or willing to venture. The dark world of his poems, which face many of the hardest truths we must learn to live with, is lit by humor, tenderness, compassion, and honesty. For this edition, the poet has selected from the best of his previous collections, in some cases making substantial revisions, and has added his newest poems. The resulting collection is exciting in its breadth, consistency, depth, and distinction.
Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar--a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised. In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow--antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter. This self-described "sentimental bird," at once wild and tender, who "finds humans dull except in grief," threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow's efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up. Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. Full of angular wit and profound truths, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a startlingly original and haunting debut by a significant new talent.
Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts: These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place therein, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own lives. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips's A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, Stone's comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely her own. Her watercolor panels are filled with anthropomorphic horses and baffled ballerinas that guide the reader through the poet's graphic dreamscape: "I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years... And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand." This book, its own small universe, erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities.
Expertly and sensitively selected by her granddaughter Bianca, The Essential Ruth Stone bears witness to a vivid fifty-year career of one of America’s most influential and pioneering poets. Distilling twelve books into a single volume―from the wild formalism of her early work to the science-filled cosmic intellect of her final collection―The Essential Ruth Stone shows a visionary poet with a physical grasp on language. Dazzling, humorous and grief-stricken poems explore the continuity of loss and love, in the spectral appearances of the dead husband, to portraits of an American childhood, life during wartime, and complex metaphysical inquiries into consciousness itself. Ruth Stone’s feminism, mysticism and overall fierceness shine through her wit and passion. Moving gracefully between the loneliness of grief and loss to the fullness of life and love, Stone approaches all her subjects with a profound humanity, an understanding born from her own lived experiences.
Winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world. In Liz Howard’s wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds – even our direct intimate experiences of it – come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity and apocalypse. The waters of Northern Ontario shield country are the toxic origin and an image of potential. A subject, a woman, a consumer, a polluter; an erotic force, a confused brilliance, a very necessary form of urgency – all are loosely tethered together and made somehow to resonate with our own devotions and fears; made “to be small and dreaming parallel / to ceremony and decay.” Liz Howard is what contemporary poetry needs right now.
Not Even Then, the debut collection by Brian Blanchfield, introduces a poetry both compressed and musically fluid, beseechingly intimate and oddly authoritative. Blanchfield conducts readers through a unique, theatrical realm where concepts and personages are enlivened into action: Continuity, Coincidence, Symmetry, and Shame keep uneasy company there with Marcel Duchamp and Johnny Weissmuller, Lord Alfred Douglas and "Blue Boy" Master Lambton, Juliet’s Nurse and Althusser’s Moses. With its kinked and suspensive language, Not Even Then draws on the lyric tradition, even as it complicates that tradition’s dualism of self and other. Likeness is always under investigation in the book’s irreducible arrangements of alterity. From "Red Habits": "I imagine the interferences explained / in don’t-think-twice and reverse advice / and by habits for both head and breast / hers and hers as red as mine at chamber check. / We are each herself a further interference." No answer rests unquestioned in its turn; even the book title’s cynicism is challenged by a poetics alive to possibility, where Possibility is—impetuously, ecstatically—companionable. "The listener you are," writes Blanchfield, "the less alone."
A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
"These poems know a great deal about beauty and violence: 'twenty years / was about as much good as / circling / a black eye'. Kylie Gellatly shows us what vividness is, how it lives in our shapes, our pain, our imaginary (and real) selves: 'man taken / to be a trench / that might have been a cannon ball'. This poetry composes musics with silences. It is both a song and whisper, an erasure and exhalation. It is both a journey across us, and inward: 'the ship was the rib of reason / [...] the ship was beginning to be an alarm / the ship was right there on the floor while this book was written.' Herein history is envious of a dreamscape. And yet: the dream aspires to be dailiness, and fears it. Which is to say: this is a book of fevers the likes of which you feel most familiar with, yet have not seen before. Recognize yourself in them." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic "Musical and deeply felt, these poems-untitled and running wild-chase down the heart. No tangible space is without the immaterial here. The Elements are resilient, and I feel pushed and pulled by them. Gellatly's debut book is beautiful, haunted and mystical. Her poems are like 'the strange contrast between death and dawn, ' and 'the fool's divine spark / forever coming loose' in the reader's hands." -Bianca Stone, author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief "In Kylie Gellatly's The Fever Poems, water is silk that rubs against the night. Events are figments of the speaker's imagination and graves shape time. Extremely contemporary in their fixation on illness, isolation, and anxiety, these poems spill down and across the page like slate off a cliffside. There is an unwavering generosity to the introspection of this speaker: through her eyes, floating ash becomes 'hundreds of baled papers, bent up like two bears dancing.' This is a collection that understands and beautifully, painfully relays that what we have-with each other, with the land-is 'the last of the last.'" -Taneum Bambrick, author of Vantage "'I was sore at heart, ' writes Kylie Gellatly in The Fever Poems, and the reader is invited into a sprawling, curious, visionary, deeply empathetic, epic debut. Her poems shine goldly in the space between elemental earth-salt, rock, wind, weather-and the human, conscious choice of living. With echoes of Jorie Graham and W. S. Merwin, Gellatly navigates the complexities of language, 'a pledge made / into paper / weathered / in our hands, ' 'choked with the monsters of parentheses'. This is a collection for our time of pandemic, uncertainty, and an urgent need for a revision of our relationship with the natural world-Gellatly recognizes the swinging pendulum of power between the earth's force and human interference, and, without castigation, illuminates us." -Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal "Kylie Gellatly's The Fever works like a ship, navigating the tempests of our fragile moment. The poems enact a wandering/wondering through fire and fog, investigating meaning through a naturalist's lens, balancing an elemental pull with the fierce heat of being human. This collection is an invitation to a sensorial meditation, one where fever is less a symptom of sickness than a door to discovery." -Erin Adair-Hodges, author of Let's All Die Happy
