Winner of the Tupelo Press / Crazyhorse First Book Prize

Under the influence of broadcasts such as public radio’s “Marketplace” (a daily roundup of stock reports and business news), Daniel Khalastchi composed a series of character-driven poems whose recurrent narrator is physically and mentally manipulated while the world around him takes little notice. Through their chaos and horror, these poems ask a reader to question the ways in which our careening healthcare system, crumbling financial/housing/job markets, and war on multiple fronts are actually affecting us — both inside and out.

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry. Because the details of his death were (and are) terribly unclear, part of how the family reconstructed him was to share the different accounts heard over the decades, and this collection attempts to pin down these shifts and contours through destabilizing form and genre. Each speaker reconfigures a past mysterious and tenuous, clouded by distance, language, and time in order to demonstrate how Inocencio Rodriguez defies a single narrative.

In this award-winning debut collection, the smallest things of the world bear enormous emotive weight. For Jenny Molberg, the invisible and barely visible are forms of memory, articulations of our place in the cosmos. Parsing the intersections between science and personal history, and contemplating archival letters from 17th- and 18th-century scientists along with new studies in biological phenomena, Molberg’s poems examine complexities of relationships with parents and the faultiness of certainty about earthly permanence. In the title poem, a child begins by looking at an ant through a microscope, and later, as a husband and father, with the same discerning eye he recognizes the cancer in his wife’s breast. Marvels of the Invisible sounds the depths of both grief and amazement, two kinds of awareness inseparably entwined.

“Riven by the events of the first decade of this century and shot through with grief and a bird-like wonder, Mary Molinary uses the space of the poetry collection to experiment with a form—and therefore invent a mechanism—to reckon with this ‘marked little bird of a heart’ that must live each day with the knowledge of the ongoing torture, war, and violence performed in one’s name. Perhaps in imitation of a complicity alternately figurative and real, the poet situates commonplaces hard by the nearly indescribable: a borrowed ornithology joined to an ancient illumination, ‘a speaking self’ beside ‘a seen other,’ elegy followed by apology followed by ‘what will emerge.’ Through her thousand fresh images and tender elisions we are asked to look and finally see. To read Mary & the Giant Mechanism is to revisit our common history with an open, lyric heart.”— Carol Ann Davis, judge’s citation for the Tupelo Press First Book Award

This book is full of the questions and uncomfortable uncertainties that grief and the body bring; it is also full of speakers who are determined, and then unsure. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power to survive; they want to control and to correct the suffering they witness and withstand. But wanting can lead to suffering, too, and make speakers like Burroughs ask: “Why / should I have wanted so much / as to threaten my being?”

A meditation on the death of a mother, Meridian measures the hours and reflects on how experience collapses and elongates time, creating a lens through which we can look at how we’re connected and separated. And the poet asks: Is music our best refusal to accede to the irrationality of death?

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

“Pretend that these poems by Lawrence Raab have come to you from very far away. Think of them as written by Poet Z, a heretofore-unheard-of Eastern European poet, a Kafka-Andrade-Calvino character from Serbo-Chechnya-Lithuania. What’s in his poems? Angels and human monsters, decades and generations, universities turned into ashes, the consolation of philosophy, despair in the middle of the night, a tutorial in lucid dreaming. Only his poetic humor gives away his American citizenship. His poems lead you into, then trap you, in strange worlds, boxes constructed of story, logic, and aphorism, which then are revealed to be exactly like life itself. Now, these poems by Z have finally been translated into an American idiom that is canny, sly, defeated, pessimistic, resilient, and perplexingly knowledgeable about the human predicament. They are also often beautiful, bewildered, disquieting, and full of paradoxical laughter and contemplative solace. Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts is a tender, lonely, deeply intelligent tour of that distinctive country of the soul.”

Willis Barnstone’s new volume of poetry offers two sequences paired, pivoting on lunar and solar consciousness and comprised mostly of multiplying sonnets, two per page and mirrored typographically across the page-spreads. Elegant in erudition but always fluently conversational, this book is an homage to the poet’s father and moving proof of an astonishingly productive life in letters.

Trekking from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Canada— wind at their back, ear to the ground, listening for “the logos of what trembles underfoot”— the poems in Music For Exile syncretize a host of lyrical, received and invented forms to beckon a “mythic assemblage,” an aggregation of personal and historical losses, intimate and en masse. From walking up Canefield River to hearing a thief on the stairs in Philadelphia, from dredging the voices of New England’s enslaved to confronting familial grief, these poems trouble the ache, that “ironic hunger for home” when home is itself a vortex of violence. In poems of place, poems of encounter, domestic epics and epistolary calls, deGannes allows both the narrative and associative to limn the caesurae in one immigrant woman’s arc. The poems trace and retrace, they crossover, they “draw poison out” they “fissure desire” and proclaim “no one can say gone is gone,” enacting and inviting an expansive reckoning of all that has brought us here. From this, might be salvaged a radical sense of belonging, Glissant’s “knowledge of the Whole, greater for having been at the abyss.” Music For Exile is Nehassaiu deGannes’ first book-length collection of poems.

Maura Nelson, who has a sophisticated background in science, medicine, and programming, has stumbled upon a way to execute someone using only the computers in her home office—silently, anonymously, leaving no trace of violence, so that her target appears to have died of natural causes. Maura tests her method by eliminating Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, but this experience affects her so deeply that she doesn’t want to continue alone. She entices Jack Plymouth into a partnership to rid the world of those they decide “need to be dead.” Both a steamy romance and a cyber-thriller, My Immaculate Assassin raises disturbing and timely questions about the technology and morality of “idealistic” murder, carried out remotely.

In 2007, the Tupelo Press Poetry Project was established to provide poets and creative writing teachers with engaging, challenging prompts or provocations for writing new poems. Contributors include Cynthia Rausch Allar, Michelle Bitting, Lisa Coffman, Amy Dryansky, Li Yun Alvarado, Paula Brancato, Gillian Cummings, Darla Himeles, Joel F. Johnson, Christopher Cokinos, Amy MacLennan, Stephen Massimilla, Barbara Mossberg, Susanna Rich, Aubrey Ryan, Anna Claire Hodge, Janet R. Kirchheimer, Conley Lowrance, Lea Marshall, Mary Ann Mayer, Steven Paschall, Liz Robbins, Jo Anne Valentine Simson, Jeneva Stone, Molly Spencer, Judith Terzi, Gail Thomas, Kim Triedman, Bruce Willard, P. Ivan Young