Whether about the moon or hotel sex, politics or poppy seeds, Alan Michael Parker’s poems are always tender and eccentric and nuanced. In his eighth collection, with metaphysical fortitude the poet continues to deliberate—in all sorts of poems, some unpunctuated, some in prose, and some the first-person lyrics well loved by his longtime readers—upon what our daily lives mean. And how do we sing and praise and grieve all at once?

The poems in Mario Chard’s first collection follow three entangled strands — a contemporary immigrant story, echoes of the Fall in Paradise Lost, and meditations on fatherhood in the shadow of Abraham’s command to sacrifice a son. The poet speaks from the American hemisphere, immersed in histories of loss from long before Magellan first glimpsed his tierra del fuego. This Land of Fire is close at hand though we try and insist upon its distance, like the sun, like Milton’s Pandemonium, like the wars outside our borders or within.

The personal, historical, and artistic are all in dialogue in David Mura’s daring collection, The Last Incantations. In a variety of poetic modes, Mura harmonizes and contrasts multiple voices to form a powerful meditation. Certain poems speak from his experiences as a third-generation Japanese American and his family’s struggles to prove their "Americanness." Others speak from the intersections of our multiracial society—an Asian teenager in love with a Somali Muslim girl, an apostrophe to Richard Pryor, poems about a Palestinian American friend, Abu Ghraib, the hapa sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The result is a sustained multifoliate poetry, bursting with elegance, heartache, and truth.

Joe Bolton studied universal connections—the tension between the transitory beauty of the physical world and a yearning for the eternal. He turned his eye to the world, to the cultures and the people around him, and saw reflections of himself. In this collection, he works in both free verse and traditional forms, rendering scenes of exquisite detail that pry into the hearts of his characters and reveal the contradictions that bind father to son, lover to lover, and person to person. From the broken hills and drowsy river valleys around Paducah, Kentucky, to Houston diners and Gulf Coast shrimp boats, to the tropical cityscape of Miami, Bolton creates vivid scenes in which his characters confront the loneliness and the "little music" of their lives. With a richly musical voice and an ear for the cadences of everyday speech, Bolton gives his readers not the trappings of love and grief, but the very things themselves, rendered in lines that reverberate with the authority of sincerity and truth.

The hard center of The Law of Falling Bodies bears down on the twin enmities of pain and loss. But the book ranges over a broad field, with poems covering everything from the inundations of summer rain ("It's like living in the spit valve of a big trombone") to a lovesick drunk listening to Patsy Cline ("My drink's on the rocks, and I am, too.") Glaser begins with the quirks and revelations of nature, shifts to those difficult adjustments we make as the body breaks down, modulates to a series of scenes imbued with music, and ends on an elegiac note in memory of his late wife ("Grief follows me like a dog behind the butcher's truck"). Along the way, the poems touch on a restless scale of tones, as light as the indignant comedy of "It Ain't the Heat, It's the Stupidity" and as heartbreakingly dark as "Autopsy." At the core is the constant interplay of an agile mind and rich language--what Ezra Pound called "the dance of the intellect among words"--always feeling out what it is to be human. The Law of Falling Bodies is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry series, edited by Enid Shomer.

Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as “riding on dragons.” Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of “leaping” as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Tranströmer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.

When the manuscript that became Lise Goett’s new book Leprosarium was chosen for the Winner Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, judge Toi Derricotte’s citation said, “This is dangerous art, as serious as a heart attack, unsparing mostly of the poet herself, and as intensely rewarding as it is unsettling.” Goett’s poetry, infused with a bountiful vocabulary, is rife with extravagantly dramatic forms that take in the sweep of western art and religion via relationships between those with power and those who’ve suffered their commands.

Letters of Transit is a passport to the space between: prose and poetry, reverie and memory, death and fecundity. Its invitation is a journey without destination, a ramble, a thrill ride, an open-ended ticket. But it maps an uncanny territory, populated with ominous doctors, proctors, theorists, forgers and game show hosts, whose agendas seem no less threatening than the intrusions of red spitting monkeys, biting spiders, monster hornets, unseen shrieking creatures. One ranges through its pages with an electric sense of visiting places impossibly recognizable—the dream realm of a collective unconscious. Its attractions are part freak show, part museum, part mausoleum. Theodore Worozbyt brings a rich and intricate vision to a world both gorgeous and grotesque, where one must suspect every detail of being a crucial clue.

From migrations to pop culture, loss to la dérive, Life in a Country Album is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. These poems are about the dialects of the heart—those we are incapable of parting from, and those that are largely forgotten. Life in a Country Album is a vital book for our times. With this beautiful, epic collection, Nathalie Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets.

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

The poems in Light As Light travel far across both space and memory, landing everywhere from the New Mexico of the speaker’s childhood, to California, Tucson, and present-day Beijing, and many airports, highways, and way stations in between. The central concern uniting this collection is language itself: the weight and significance of English and Keres, as well as the nature and power of poetry as a way of life. No collection of Indigenous literature is complete without the work of Simon Ortiz, and this book is a powerful journey through the poet’s life—both a love letter to the future, and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.

Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive—wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world—a world that is both bright and dark.

Winner of the seventh annual Arkansas Poetry Award, William Aberg presents in The Listening Chamber a gallery of poetic forms, from short free-verse lyrics and crafted prose poems to original forms skillfully matched with their subjects. He writes comfortably of cats or derringers, the idylls of childhood, or of patients in mental hospitals. Throughout his poetry there runs a proletarian strain of dissatisfaction, an unrest coupled with dexterous wit and a remarkable sense of wonder. Convincingly, he populates these poems with farm workers, romantics, fugitives, lovers, beeches, elms, and constellations. With influences as wide ranging as William Stafford, Miklos Radnoti, and René Magritte, Aberg has fashioned a first collection in which every poem is a unique and haunting experience.

It is our everyday explorations—the small explosions within life, family, and “ordinary” survival—that make up Gregory Fraser’s fourth collection of poetry, Little Armageddon. Fraser writes at eye level, detailing the experiences of fatherhood, love, and the quiet of daily life, poised at the brink of abrupt upheaval.

These poems are an exercise in precision and reflection. Free verse and prose show readers the life within the landscape. In “My Daughter and the Lizard,” the speaker reflects on grace, meditating on the reptile his child is inspecting: “I scissor-jab three holes through the lid / of a Mason jar and tell her to be gentle, / ‘It’s a living thing,’ I say, ‘not a toy.’”

We are how we live. These poems balance imagination and truth telling with rich verse that brings the reader’s ear closer to the quiet—and how intense it truly is.

In his tenth book, Michael Chitwood describes hard, often dangerous labor, but renders also the quietude of housekeeping and office routines. We call this “making a living,” the way we move through our days, to pay for the roof over our heads. Raking autumn leaves or drilling a dynamite hole to clear rock for a house foundation, we construct our lives. Chitwood knows that what we do today roots us in the past and becomes our future. Here is praise, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, for all our gear and tackle.

The third collection of poetry from Thea Brown, author of Think of the Danger

In Loner Forensics, Thea Brown dreams up and dissects a city beset by unexplained disappearances, roving silences, and climate collapse. This sprawling collection comprises a series of interviews with denizens of the shifting city, each mediated through the lonely lens of the Detective, a character whose refractive investigation atomizes the scene. As much a study of complicity as a critique of capitalism’s distortive effects on human emotional response, Loner Forensics questions what happens when our innermost terrains become newly unfamiliar in an unraveling natural world.

Dark, fractured, and canny, Brown’s shimmering third collection draws on parallel universes, 1980s video games, social media pop-speak, and ghost towns to immerse the reader in grief, utopia, disaster—and, ultimately, love.

Danielle Cadena Deulen's debut collection, Lovely Asunder, is filled with beautiful dangers. These poems, sharp and graceful, brutal and vulnerable, create from language a kind of chiaroscuro-both light and dark made more vivid by their juxtaposition. Throughout the collection, the poet appraises ancient myths through a feminine and feminist perspective, evincing the ways in which narratives transform personal experience and vice versa. The figure of the fruit, in all its implied and literal lushness, recurs like a chorus, and the speakers of these poems are haunted by the Fall-confined by the body, the mind, and the irrevocable past.

This darkness is not the scary one, 
it’s the one before the sun comes up, 
the one you can still breathe in.