Hallowed features selections from Patricia Fargnoli’s four previous books along with twenty-four new poems. Here is a celebration of poetic endurance, filled with quietly distinctive cadences and images closely seen, now freshly understood.

Kristina Jipson’s Halve peels away the layers of orderly narrative with which we try and tame the chaos of mourning. At once frank and elusive, Jipson’s poems resist the pull of storytelling and personal confiding, instead using formal variation to embody emotion and memory. These poems lay bare the experience of losing a brother and evoke the haunting that results as language fails to contain either grief or the love that precedes such a loss.

In his foreword to Stone Lyre, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s previous collection of René Char translations, Ilya Kaminsky praised “the intensity, the dream-like language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames.”

Stone Lyre was a selection of poems from Char’s numerous volumes of poems; Carlson’s new Hammer with No Master is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Char’s Le marteau sans maître, first published in 1934 — a time of rumbling menace that our time resembles.

Marc Gaba is from Quezon City, Philippines, where he continues to live. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Also a visual artist who has had solo and group exhibitions, he is curator of the art gallery Krem Contemporary Art. Previous publications include two chapbooks and Atomic Neutral, a single-edition collection of poems published as part of an exhibit, Birdsounds.

David Huddle’s twenty-first book, Hazel is a portrait of a woman both ordinary and exceptional, composed in glimpses of her life from child to elder. Hazel is a loner and somewhat of a pill. Although she’s not likeable in the regular ways, she’s rigorously honest in the way she examines her world, and in relationships with a few other people. Hazel’s nephew John Robert is captivated by the mystery of such a uniquely serious person. He assembles episodes from Hazel’s life, and the novel reveals a lifelong struggle by someone whose integrity is absolute. Huddle proves the complete life of almost anyone would be profoundly complex if seen whole.

On a crisp April day in Philadelphia, Poppy Starkweather, in her mid-twenties, begins the rounds of her clients—Penelope, Fauna, Horatio, Bliss, and Chutney, accompanied by her own hound, Spock—assuming that this will be another ordinary day. Since abandoning a Ph.D. program in literature, Poppy has stumbled into walking dogs as a stopgap while she figures out what to do with her life. Although happy in a steady relationship, Poppy is leery of further commitment while in career limbo, fearing she might commit the age-old error of hiding from herself inside marriage. Shouldn’t she get it all figured out first? By noon her day will be careening off course, diverted by an unexpected visit from her brother, a scary medical appointment with her boyfriend, and an urgent request from a client. By the small hours of the night, Poppy will be questioning her assumptions about what it means to be truly adult.

“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.”
—Joan Wickersham