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The Pact
Jennifer Militello
Tupelo Press, 2021
In her newest collection, award-winning poet and memoirist Jennifer Militello confronts obsession, intimacy, and abuse. Through love poems inspired by such disparate spaces as a British art museum and the reptile house of a local zoo, poems comparing a romantic affair to the religious cult at Jonestown and a mother’s role to a Congolese power figure bristling with nails, The Pact offers an indictment against affection and a portent against zeal. This book places pleasure alongside pain, even as it delivers Militello’s trademark talent for innovation and ritualization of the strange.
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The Pages of Day and Night
Adonis
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Calling poetry a "question that begets another question," Adonis sets into motion this stream of unending inquiry with difficult questions about exile, identity, language, politics, and religion. Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry.

Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.
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The Painted Bunting's Last Molt
Poems
Virgil Suarez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
The Painted Bunting’s Last Molt explores fatherhood, parenting, and separation anxiety; and the ways in which time and memory are both a prison and a giver of joy. Fifteen years in the making, Virgil Suárez’s new collection uses his mother’s return to Cuba after 50 years of exile as a catalyst to muse on familial relationships, death, and the passing of time.
 
Moon Decima

If it were the Eucharist, it’d be hard to swallow,
this moon of lost impressions, a boy in deep water,
something tickling his skin.  This memory of weight-
lessness—a kite that somehow still manages to hover
in the dog mouth blackness of sky.  This is a cut out
moon of lost children, or is it a savior’s moon?
This boy will float on home, or be swallowed
by the water.  Above the pines and mangroves,
this moon hangs unrelenting.  Is it the one eye
of an indifferent God that remains open just so?
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The Palace of Bones
Allison Eir Jenks
Ohio University Press, 2002

The Palace of Bones by Allison Eir Jenks is an often stark and startling vision of the way we live, the places we inhabit, and the relics we make to comfort ourselves.

Haunted by a quiet, unquenchable longing, Jenks expertly and calmly guides the reader through a vivid dreamscape in this first full-length collection of poems.

The Palace of Bones was selected by final judge and Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Kizer. At once dark in its vision and light in its tone, this remarkable book is its author’s self-confident invitation for us to join her in a world she knows intimately and has made almost familiar if not entirely safe.

The Palace of Bones is a stunning debut.

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Palace-Burner
The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt
Edited and with an Introduction by Paula Bernat Bennett
University of Illinois Press, 2001

The unique and powerful voice of an extraordinary nineteenth-century woman poet

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the strongest American woman poet of the nineteenth century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. This selected edition reveals Piatt's other side, a side that contemporary critics found more problematic: ironic, experimental, pushing the limits of Victorian language and the sentimental female persona.

Spanning more than half a century, this collection reveals the "borderland temper" of Piatt's mind and art. As an expatriate southerner, Piatt voices guilt at her own past as the daughter of slave-holders and raw anguish at the waste of war; as an eleven-year "exile" in Ireland, she expresses her dismay at the indifference of the wealthy to the daily suffering of the poor. Her poetry, whether speaking of children, motherhood, marriage, or illicit love affairs, uses conventional language and forms but in ways that greatly broadened the range of what women's poetry could say. Going beyond and even contradicting the genteel aesthetic, Piatt's poetry moves toward an innovative kind of dramatic realism built on dialogue, an approach more familiar to modern readers, acquainted with Faulknerian polyvocal texts, than to her contemporaries, who were as ill at ease with complexity as they were with irony. 

This astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work--much of it never before collected--explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they offer such fertile ground for study today. Illustrated with engravings from Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar, both periodicals in which Piatt's work appeared, Palace-Burner marks the reemergence of one of the most interesting writers in American literary history.

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Palladium
POEMS
Alice Fulton
University of Illinois Press, 1987
          Alice Fulton's writing has been characterized by The New Yorker
          as "electrifying," and the poet herself, according to Publishers
          Weekly, "may be Dickinson's postmodern heir."
 
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Palm Crows
Virgil Suárez
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Hibiscus, banyan trees, and royal palms. Mango jam, white slices of sugarcane, and oxtail stew. Childhood games with fireflies and snail shells. These are images of a Cuba that many remember and others have never known, captured here in the powerful poems of Virgil Suárez.
 
Born in Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Suárez is now one of more than a million Cubans living in the United States. In Palm Crows Suárez offers a compelling canción of loss, longing, and memory as he explores the meaning of exile. In poems that range from playful and fantastic to elegiac and meditative, he writes about “the in-betweenness of spirit” of those who have left their home and must try to forge a new one in the United States.
 
Palm Crows shows us an almost mythical Cuba, offering a compelling testament both to the immigrant experience and to our own search for home.
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Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut
Vickie Vértiz
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.
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Palma Cathedral
Michael White
University Press of Colorado, 1998
Winner of the 1998 Colorado Prize for Poetry
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"Pamphilia to Amphilanthus" in Manuscript and Print
Lady Mary Wroth
Iter Press, 2017
Lady Mary Wroth’s private manuscript, printed here for the first time, shows her to be a great poet, more psychologically insightful, verbally sophisticated, and boldly original than scholars had realized. Her carefully curated and re-conceptualized printed collection also reveals her to be a remarkably self-reflexive and critically astute writer. When the manuscript and printed sequences are read together, as this edition encourages readers to do, Wroth’s poetry is seen clearly as innovative, erotic, and shrewdly multivalent.
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A Pan-American Life
Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee
Muna Lee; Edited and with biography by Jonathan M. Cohen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
The extraordinary Muna Lee was a brilliant writer, lyric poet, translator, diplomat, feminist and rights activist, and, above all, a Pan-Americanist. During the twentieth century, she helped shape the literary and social landscapes of the Americas. This is the first biography of her remarkable life and a collection of her diverse writings, which  embody her vision of Pan America, an old concept that remains new and meaningful today.
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Panegyric on Probinus and Olybrius. Against Rufinus 1 and 2. War against Gildo. Against Eutropius 1 and 2. Fescennine Verses on the Marriage of Honorius. Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria. Panegyrics on the Third and Fourth Consulships of Honorius. Pane
Claudian
Harvard University Press

Late antique court poetry.

Claudius Claudianus, Latin poet of great affairs, flourished during the joint reigns (AD 394–5 onwards) of the brothers Honorius (Emperor in the West) and Arcadius (in the East). Apparently a native of Greek Alexandria in Egypt, he was, to judge by his name, of Roman descent, though his first writings were in Greek, and his pure Latin may have been learned as a foreign language. About AD 395 he moved to Italy (Milan and Rome) and though really a pagan, became a professional court poet composing for Christian rulers works which give us important knowledge of Honorius’ time.

A panegyric on the brothers Probinus and Olybrius (consuls together in 395) was followed in the subsequent ten years by other poems (mostly epics in hexameters): in praise of consulships of Honorius (AD 395, 398, 404); against the Byzantine ministers Rufinus (396) and Eutropius (399); in praise of the consulship (400) of Stilicho (Honorius’ guardian, general, and minister); in praise of Stilicho’s wife Serena; mixed metres on the marriage of Honorius to their daughter Maria; on the war with the rebel Gildo in Africa (398); on the Getic or Gothic war (402); on Stilicho’s success against the Goth Alaric (403); on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399); and on the wedding of Palladius and Celerina. He also composed non-official poems such as the three books of a mythological epic on the Rape of Proserpina, unfinished as was also a Battle of Giants (in Greek). Noteworthy are Phoenix, Senex Veronensis, elegiac prefaces, and the epistles, epigrams, and idylls.

Through the patronage of Stilicho or through Serena, Claudius in 404 married well in Africa and was granted a statue in Rome. Nothing is known of him after 404. In his works can be found true poetic as well as rhetorical skill, command of language, polished style, diversity, vigor, satire, dignity, bombast, artificiality, flattery, and other virtues and faults of the age.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Claudian is in two volumes.

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Panzer Herz
A Live Dissection
Kyle Dargan
Northwestern University Press, 2023
A poet’s final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity
 
The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity.
 
Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.
 
I long to abandon this violent / vagrancy, but the roads . . .  teem with other men who know / no training, who see upon me / my teachers’ marks and ache / for the elicitation of drawn steel.
 
The denser blades of compassion and accountability are Dargan’s arms of choice to carry, and not conceal, the weapons he uses to probe his own heart and the hearts of the men and women who shaped him into a man that has been . . . and is unbecoming. The poetic paring of layered lines, the nicking of the process, these poems crimson the page—and not for scarlet spectacle. These versed incisions and sutures are the oeuvre dedicated to the outgrowing of the writer and the “man” that began it.
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Paper Anniversary
Bobby C. Rogers
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

"There is something in American poetry that might be called the book of the small town or, equally, the tale of the good family; or, if you like, the American Grafitti Suite. Poems that discover life's bonuses in new love, wise parents, old books, venerable nature, and the mysteries of all that endures in the face of the viciousness no life escapes--are, well, worth the wait. That’s how I feel about Paper Anniversary. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W. C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival."
--Dave Smith

"In his superb Paper Anniversary, Bobby Rogers is a near mystic of the domestic because love of family and landscape is connected to the eternal--and if not the eternal, our longing for love to last. Rogers is a meditative poet, then, one who knows language and memory are inadequate to hold love in an abiding present: 'But ownership is the last lie/we tell ourselves--nothing goes unshared.' So his moving, widely thoughtful, and commodious poems are full of joy tinged with elegy."
--Andrew Hudgins

Bobby C. Rogers is professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, Image, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, and numerous other magazines. He is the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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The Paper Wasp
Teresa Cader
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In these poems, Teresa Cader undertakes three poetic explorations, all of them deriving from the book's opening image of a paper wasp spinning its white nest on a terrace in ancient China. The paper universe assembled by the wasp teems with both destructive and creative forces and will lead to the invention of paper and the power of writing. The book's first section explores the mystery of creativity; the second looks beneath the papery surface of the nest at the connection between physical and figurative birth. "Internal Exile," winner of the Poetry Society of America's 1997 George Bogin Memorial Award, forms the third section of the collection, addressing the invasion of the nest by destructive powers in the example of the life of Soviet writer Eugenia Ginzburg.
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Paracritical Hinge
Essay, Talks, Notes, Interviews
Nathaniel Mackey
University of Iowa Press, 2018

Paracritical Hinge is a collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey’s multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experimental writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s “calibanistic” language practices to Federico García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H. D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

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Paradise
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books, 2022

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

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Paradise Lost
A Primer
Michael Cavanagh
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
A record of a teacher’s lifelong love affair with the beauty, wit, and profundity of Paradise Lost, celebrating John Milton’s un-doctrinal, complex, and therefore deeply satisfying perception of the human condition. After surveying Milton’s recurrent struggle as a reconciler of conflicting ideals, this Primer undertakes a book-by-book reading of Paradise Lost, reviewing key features of Milton’s “various style,” and why we treasure that style. Cavanagh constantly revisits Milton the singer and maker, and the artistic problems he faced in writing this almost impossible poem. This book is emphatically for first-time readers of Milton, with little or no prior exposure, but with ambition to encounter challenging poetry. These are readers who tell you they “have always been meaning to read Paradise Lost,” who seek to enjoy the epic without being overwhelmed by its daunting learning and expansive frame of reference. Avoiding the narrowly specialized focus of most Milton scholarship, Cavanagh deals forthrightly with issues that recur across generations of readers, gathering selected voices—from scholars and poets alike—from 1674 through the present. Lively and jargon-free, this Primer makes Paradise Lost accessible and fresh, offering a credible beginning to what is a great intellectual and aesthetic adventure.
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Paradise
Poems
Stephen Gibson
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
In Paradise, Stephen Gibson's fourth poetry collection, we are taken on a journey through history and myth, wars past and present, public discoveries and private loss. As the reader confronts past horrors and present truths as well as the speaker's personal ones (an abused mother, a shellshocked father), it becomes apparent that the paradise sought-not in the hereafter but in the here and now-lies just beyond reach. It all ends, suggest these verses, with the understanding that behind everything we find nothing more divine than the human.
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PARADOX HILL
"FROM APPALACHIA TO LUNAR SHORE, REVISED EDITION"
Poems by Louise McNeill, Edited and with an Introduction by A. E. Stringer
West Virginia University Press, 2009

With a new introduction by A.E. Stringer, this reprint of Louise McNeill's classic work remains as vivid as when it was first published. Containing poems from several decades of her career, Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore is a must-have collection of a beloved poet's heartfelt exploration of her physical and cultural surroundings.

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Paraíso
Poems by
Jacob Shores-Argüello
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Winner, 2017 CantoMundo Poetry Prize

Paraíso, the first book in the new CantoMundo Poetry Series, which celebrates the work of Latino/a poets writing in English, is a pilgrimage against sorrow. Erupting from a mother’s death, the poems follow the speaker as he tries to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum . . . these help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the cloud forest alone.

In a Costa Rica far away from touristy beaches, we encounter bus trips over the cold mountains of the dead, drug dealers with beautiful dogs, and witches with cell phones. Science fuses with religion, witchcraft is joined with technology, and eventually grief transforms into belief.

Throughout, Paraíso defies categorization, mixing its beautiful sonnets with playful games and magic cures for the reader. In the process, moments of pure life mingle with the aftermath of a death.
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Pardon My Heart
Poems
Marcus Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Winner of the 2019 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry 

Pardon My Heart 
is an exploration of love in the contemporary African American ethos. In this lyrically complex collection, the speakers and subjects—the adult descendants of the Great Migration—reckon with past experiences and revelatory, hard-earned ideas about race and class.

With a compelling blend of narrative, musicality, and imagery, Jackson’s poems span a multitude of scenes, landscapes, and sensations. Pardon My Heart examines intimacy, memory, grief, and festivity while seeking out new, reflective sectors within emotion and culture. By means of concise portraiture and sonic vibrancy, Jackson’s poems ultimately express the urgency and pliability of the human soul. 

 
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Part of Nature, Part of Us
Modern American Poets
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 1980
The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes the distance. She keeps the poet in view not only as thinker and artist, but as a man or woman whose humanity never disappears in her analysis. With her penetrating critical gift, Vendler assesses American poets from T. S. Eliot to Charles Wright.
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Partially Excited States
Charles Hood
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
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Particle and Wave
Benjamin Landry
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Are we alone? If so, Particle and Wave insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements—a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry—unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, Particle and Wave is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius, culture and world histories are recontextualized through the lens of personal experience. Muscular, precise, structurally varied, and imagistic, these poems engage in lyricism yet resist mere confession. In doing so they project the self as a composite, speaking in a variety of registers, from the nursery rhyme songster, to the ascetic devotee, to the unapologetic sensualist. They welcome all comers and elbow the bounded physical world to make way for a dynamic, new subjectivity.
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Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt
Marge Piercy
University of Michigan Press, 1983
Piercy writes of women and poetry and of woman becoming poet
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The Passion Book
A Tibetan Guide to Love and Sex
Gendun Chopel
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The PassionBook is the most famous work of erotica in the vast literature of Tibetan Buddhism, written by the legendary scholar and poet Gendun Chopel (1903-1951). Soon after arriving in India in 1934, he discovered the Kama Sutra. Realizing that this genre of the erotic was unknown in Tibet, he set out to correct the situation. His sources were two: classical Sanskrit works and his own experiences with his lovers. Completed in 1939, his “treatise on passion” circulated in manuscript form in Tibet, scandalizing and arousing its readers.
 
Gendun Chopel here condemns the hypocrisy of both society and church, portraying sexual pleasure as a force of nature and a human right for all. On page after page, we find the exuberance of someone discovering the joys of sex, made all the more intense because they had been forbidden to him for so long: he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy in his youth and had only recently renounced it. He describes in ecstatic and graphic detail the wonders he discovered. In these poems, written in beautiful Tibetan verse, we hear a voice with tints of irony, self-deprecating wit, and a love of women not merely as sources of male pleasure but as full partners in the play of passion.
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The Passionate Spectator
Essays on Art and Poetry
John Yau
University of Michigan Press, 2006
The Passionate Spectator collects essays, reviews, and art criticism by John Yau, an internationally lauded poet, critic, and curator. In this wide-ranging collection, Yau explores the intersection of art and poetry, dissolving boundaries between the artistic traditions and reimagining what it means to see and to write. Whether he is interpreting the poetic use of titles in Jessica Stockholder’s paintings, reviewing the collaborative book project between American poet Robert Creeley and German artist Georg Baselitz, or considering the significance of Frank O’Hara’s decision to have his portrait drawn wearing nothing but army boots, Yau is consistently daring, original, and contemporary.

Yau’s diverse critical sensibilities permeate The Passionate Spectator as he moves seamlessly between the visual and literary arts. Highlights of this collection include an essay on the poet as art critic, a study of the relationship between Kevin Young’s poetry and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an imaginative piece in which Yau speculates about what Jorge Luis Borges would have created had he been a visual artist. In the title essay, Yau lays out the duty of the spectator—a duty shared by viewer, reader, critic, and artist: “it is up to us to experience art, to engage and believe in its power.”
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The Past That Poets Make
Harold Toliver
Harvard University Press, 1981

This is an analysis of the literary art of recapturing the past as the artist perceives it. By clearly distinguishing different ways of creating a past--in fiction, history, and other arts--Toliver enriches our understanding of literary strategies.

The Past that Poets Make examines such questions as how a fictional narrative differs from other ways of seeing a past time; to what extent literature is nontemporal, transcending its time, and to what extent it is tied to the institutions and traditions of its era; how given works conjure up a sense of time; and how fictional narratives function as transmitters of ideas to societies prepared to absorb them.

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Patches of Sunlight, Or of Shadow
Safeguarded Notes, 1952–2005
Philippe Jaccottet
Seagull Books, 2020
Philippe Jaccottet’s newest work follows in some ways the approach of Seedtime, his recent two-volume collection of notebooks. Similarly comprising on-the-spot jottings, philosophical reflections, literary commentary, dream narratives and sundry “notes,” this book nonetheless differs from the preceding volumes in that the Swiss poet includes more personal material than ever before. Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952–2005, Jacottet offers here passages about his family, the death of his father-in-law and of his mother, his encounters with other major poets—such as René Char, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, and his friends Yves Bonnefoy and André du Bouchet—and his trips abroad, as well as, characteristically, his walks in the countryside around the village of Grignan, in the south of France, where he has lived since 1953. For a poet who has been notoriously discreet about his life, this book offers unexpected glimpses of the private man. Above all, the entries in this notebook show how one of the greatest European poets grapples with the discouraging elements of existence, counterbalancing them by recording fleeting perceptions in which “something else,” almost like a threshold, seems present.
 
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The Patience of Ice
Renate Wood
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Filled with awe at the improbable, incomprehensible trajectory of human experience, Renate Wood ponders history, memory, and family. Beginning with the sequence titled "German Chronicle," Wood evokes her childhood in Germany during the WWII, recording the war's impact on the world in general and on her family in particular. Her poems move between the past and the present, from family life to mythology, and are distinguished by intellectual and emotional courage, metaphoric surprise, and linguistic clarity.
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Patmos
Bruce Bond
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
The dead are never far from the living in Patmos, the end is always nigh, and the cultural symptoms of denial and reconciliation, unresolved shame and loneliness, remain just beneath the surface: "It is how, these many / years, we survived. In our rooms, alone, at the end of time." In this book-length poetic sequence, Bruce Bond explores the psychology of endings as a living presence that haunts our spiritual, moral, and ecological imaginations, elevates its summons, and draws us to question its significance. The horrors and glories in the revelations of John of Patmos provide a lens into a wound, a crisis of values, a longing to heal a visionary brokenness that is fundamentally solitary and yet contemporary, written against a door that will not open.
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The Pattern More Complicated
New and Selected Poems
Alan Williamson
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Alan Williamson artfully joins social and literary history with personal experience in The Pattern More Complicated, a collection of his very best poems over the last twenty years. A powerful section of new poems draws the whole work together in a kind of autobiographical novel, as—in Eliot's phrase, from which the title is taken—"the pattern of dead and living" grows "more complicated" with the years.  Williamson's verse is a refreshing examples of how delicately the personal can intersect with the public in a love for the considered life.

The Pattern More Complicated assembles Williamson's most important, representative poems, marking the trajectory of poetic development and the recurrence of themes across the span of four previous collections to present a survey of a major American poet in a single volume.
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Patterns of Epiphany
From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning
Martin Bidney
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

After explaining his new methodology, Bidney identifies and discusses epiphanies in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walter Pater, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Bidney postulates that any writer’s epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes. Bachelard’s analytic approach involves studying patterns of perceived experience—phenomenology—but unlike most phenomenologists, Bidney does not speculate on internal processes of consciousness. Instead, he concentrates on literary epiphanies as objects on the printed page, as things with structures that can be detected and analyzed for their implications.

Bidney, then, first identifies each author’s paradigm epiphany, finding that both the Romantics and the Victorians often label such a paradigm as a vision or dream, thereby indicating its exceptional intensity, mystery, and expansiveness. Once he identifies the paradigm and shows how it is structured, he traces occurrences of each writer’s epiphany pattern, thus providing an inclusive epiphanic portrait that enables him to identify epiphanies in each writer’s other works. Finally, he explores the implications of his analysis for other literary approaches: psychoanalytical, feminist, influence-oriented or intertextual, and New Historical.

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Pax Americana
Paul Otremba
Four Way Books, 2015
The poems in Pax Americana are born out of the violent, fractious, and disillusioning opening to the 21st century. The decade of protracted wars and economic collapse—coupled with the polarizing of wealth and ideologies in this country—create the catalysts for this book. These are social poems that want to talk, and through talking hopefully make a space where people can meet and find meaning in each other.
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Peach State
Poems
Adrienne Su
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Finalist, 2022 Patterson Poetry Prize

Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors. Often employing forms—sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas—they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.
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Pearl from the Dragon’s Mouth
Evocation of Scene and Feeling in Chinese Poetry
Cecile C. C. Sun
University of Michigan Press, 1995
The interplay between the external world (ching) and the poet’s inner world (ch’ing) lies at the heart of Chinese poetry, and understanding the interaction of the two is crucial to understanding this work from within its own tradition. Closely coordinating her discussions of poetry and criticism so that practice and theory become mutually enriching and illuminating, Sun offers sensitive and original readings of poems and a wealth of insights into Chinese poetics.
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Pearls of Meaning
Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, Ṣūfīsm and History of Iranian Studies in Europe
J.T. P. de Bruijn
Leiden University Press, 2020
Pearls of Meanings offers a collection of essays by J. T. P. (Hans) de Bruijn, a pivotal and leading scholar of Persian studies. The volume covers a number of essential domains of Persian culture, with a particular emphasis on poetry and Sufism. Poetry and the reception of Persian literature in Europe both play pivotal roles in these essays, thereby representing the studies of a generation of Persian cultural scholars such as A. Reland (1676–1718), C. H. Ethé (1844–1917), J. F. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), and E. G. Browne (1862–1926). Pearls of Meanings is an essential cornerstone for scholars working in Persian studies.
 
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Peasants Wake for Fellini's *Casanova* and Other Poems
Andrea Zanzotto
University of Illinois Press, 1997
This marvelously astute translation of Andrea Zanzotto's poetry brings one of Italy's greatest contemporary poets to English for the first time in over twenty years. The main body of this volume is a unique film poem that grew out of Zanzotto's collaboration with Federico Fellini on the film Casanova. The poem's beauty is enhanced by its presentation in the original Veneto dialect, along with contemporary Italian and English. With reference to Finnegans Wake and utilizing Fellini-inspired myth, the tri-lingual play of the poetry is rich in layers, rich in meanings. Including drawings by Fellini and illustrations by Murer, this volume also contains poems dedicated to Montale, Pasolini, and Charlie Chaplin--and the first English translation of Zanzotto's poetry on the tragedy of Bosnia-- all together in an unusual and beautiful format.

Supported by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Collegeof Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame
 
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Pelican Tracks
Elton Glaser
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Pelican Tracks is a book of poems with a homing instinct. Elton Glaser travels a restless circuit between his native Louisiana and his adopted home of Ohio, from the “spice and license of the lowlands” to the “streets of Akron cobbled in ice.” These reflections, leavened with a fierce wit and moving bravura of language, are extracted from the origins and ends of the poet’s life—his birth in the final spasms of the second World War, the fears and excitements of youth, the death of parents, and the unexpected losses of adulthood. Marking his tracks between the Pelican State and the Buckeye State, Glaser records the damaged beauty of “everything sinking, everything rising again in the mind.”

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Penultimate Suitor
Mary Leader
University of Iowa Press, 2001
In The Penultimate Suitor Mary Leader strips away comfortable layers of poetic self-protection to arrive at a position of acute emotional self-conflagration. Each poem turns upon and returns to the infuriating and glorious correlations between love and art. Learning to love, learning to make art, trying to make beauty, trying to be a beauty-all these efforts call for passionate explorations in the schools of art and love.
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Penumbra
Poems
Michael Shewmaker
Ohio University Press, 2017

Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one’s own mortality. Learned and formally adept, these poems consist of equal parts praise and despair. They announce Shewmaker as an important new voice in American poetry.

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Penury
Myung Mi Kim
Omnidawn, 2009
In Penury, Myung Mi Kim probes sanctioned norms of cognition by breaking communication into its most discrete components. With these irruptions and suspensions, she writes into extremes of forced loss, violence, and impoverishment. Exposing latent relations in sound and sense, Kim proposes how new ethical awareness can be encountered where the word and its meaning/s are formed. Here, language is not offered as transparent communication of ideas, but as testament to and disruption of oppressive dominant concepts and cultural practices. "Penury" means poverty, but in this text's radical relation to lack, we hear the most elemental and active forms of change.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poet and Revolutionary
Jaqueline Mulhallen
Pluto Press, 2015
Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley is an emblem of the Romantic movement and one of the lights of English culture—his poems memorized by schoolchildren, his life honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. That wasn’t always the case, however. In his own day, Shelley was widely loathed, seen as an immoral atheist and a traitor to his class for his revolutionary politics. His work was damned as well, receiving scathing reviews rooted as much in disapproval of his politics and personal life as in the verse itself. That’s the Shelley that Jacqueline Mulhallen brings to life in this accessible, political biography: the Shelley who, though writing when the working class was in its infancy, clearly grasped—and wanted to change—the system of oppression under which laborers and women lived. The revolutionary Shelley, Mulhallen shows, has long served as an inspiration to figures from Karl Marx to W. B. Yeats to the poets and writers of today, and for popular movements like the Chartists and the suffragettes, even as his public image and poetry became part of the establishment.
 
An engaging look at one of English history and literature’s most compelling, complicated, and talented figures, Percy Bysshe Shelley will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the man and his work.
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Perennial Fall
Maggie Dietz
University of Chicago Press, 2006
At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life.  Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.
 
Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches “like fish.” By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its “perennial fall”—both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness. 
 
“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. This is a spectacular debut and more than that—a wonderful book.”—Robert Pinsky
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The Perfect Bastard
Poems
Quinn Carver Johnson
Northwestern University Press, 2023
An innovative poetic interrogation of wrestling, queerness, and staying true to oneself

Quinn Carver Johnson’s debut collection, The Perfect Bastard, follows its titular protagonist, a nonbinary and queer professional wrestler, as they travel across Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri, working for a booker known as the Puppeteer. Inspired by their idol Adrian Street, the Perfect Bastard strives to positively represent queerness and resist the Puppeteer’s stereotypical and demeaning kayfabe. In the ring, they face off against the likes of champion Jack Holiday and the First Crusher, but their most important battles, against the Puppeteer, take place behind the scenes. They must choose between person and persona, authenticity and humiliating hype, if they want to succeed in the industry.

When offered success on the grandest scale—the championship belt—in exchange for mocking their own queerness, the Perfect Bastard questions their path: Will they betray their identity to achieve their dream, or will they walk away from the world of professional wrestling—a world that refuses to make a genuine, healthy space for them?
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Perfect in Their Art
Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali
Edited by Robert Hedin and Michael Waters. Foreword by Budd Schulberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Two combatants, one ring, and a battle governed as much by determination and drive as by rules and referees: that’s boxing. Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali spans the millennia to present more than one hundred of the finest in pugilism poetry from both oral and written traditions, celebrating the lasting literary, historical, and cultural significance of boxing’s storied heritage.

Editors Robert Hedin and Michael Waters pulled no punches in assembling the definitive poems and poets of the sport. Works by such classical poets as Homer, Virgil, and Pindar are gathered here side-by-side for the first time with the poems of Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This provocative collection also features more recent literary heavyweights, including Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Levine, Wislawa Szymborska, Ai, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, and Norman Mailer. Equally impressive is this anthology’s rich sampling of boxing music, including ballads, blues, marches, waltzes, and pop lyrics. Irving Berlin, Memphis Minnie, Leadbelly, Paul Simon, Warren Zevon, and Bob Dylan are only a few of the songwriters in this volume compelled to honor the sweet science.

Complemented by a foreword from On the Waterfront author Budd Schulberg, Perfect in Their Art offers glimpses into the boxing ring’s literal and metaphoric place as a popular stage for brutal but artful combat. Together these poems celebrate the heroes and traditions of this most primal competition across its many eras to provide an accurate, graceful, and spirited evocation of boxing’s cultural legacy as both sport and art.

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The Perfect Life
Lyric Essays
Peter Stitt
Tupelo Press, 2013
Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the “heretical” Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.
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Perigee
Diane Kerr
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
In these visceral poems, Diane Kerr reckons with dark trauma. Retracing memories from girlhood that she once felt compelled to keep secret, perspectives shift as the lens of adulthood brings the past into sharp clarity.

Moments are revealed in layers; we join the poet as she rides through fields on horseback, watches a woman testify on television, and comes to terms with her experiences of sexual abuse. Vivid recollections of emotionally charged minutiae—broken-in cowboy boots, the second button on a blouse, a housecoat patterned with pink begonias—remind us how even the smallest details can be fraught with both nostalgia and pain. Each poem wields power, with resonating narratives of fear and survival reminding us that suffering has no statute of limitations.
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Perilous Balance
Arnold Stein
University of Minnesota Press, 1945

Perilous Balance was first published in 1945. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Peripheries
A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, No. 6
Sherah Bloor
Harvard University Press, 2024
Peripheries, No. 6, spans the senses with music, choreography, painting, sculpture, archival material, short stories, and poetry by Victoria Chang, Angie Estes, Aracelis Girmay, Joanna Klink, Alice Oswald, Rowan Ricardo Philips, Tracy K. Smith, and many more. The journal also includes a special folio, “Anti-Letters,” which comprises the “personal” writings—ephemera, letters, lists, notes, recordings, etc.—of poets such as Cody-Rose Clevidence, Jill Magi, and Jane Miller, among others. The issue also features a review by Tawanda Mulalu, creative nonfiction from Jackie Wang, a mixed media collaboration between Sharon Olds and Sam Messer, a David Grubbs composition with an accompaniment by Susan Howe, and an excerpt from a book-length poem by Geoffrey Nutter.
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Persephone in America
Alison Townsend
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world.

Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments.

Persephone, Pretending

(Madison, Wisconsin)

When the news says that the girl

who had been missing almost four days,

only to be found in a marshy area

at the edge of our medium-sized city,

was faking it all along, I wondered

what made her do it. I'd seen

her face—bright smile, dark eyes—

on a flier masking-taped to a pillar

at the airport the week before,

felt the involuntary frisson

of the curious, then only fear

at the thought of a girl abducted

in this place once voted

"America's most livable city."

She must have wanted

something she couldn't name,

that good girl with good grades

who looks like so many girls

in my own classes, but who keeps

changing her story. It happened

here; no, it happened there; no,

I really just wanted to be alone.

Then she turns her face away,

tired of telling her tale,

not sure what to make up next

or where invention will take her.

“Fictitious victimization disorder,”

Time magazine claims, but I wonder

what else, imagining her in the marsh,

cold, unrepentant, powerless, her mind

gone muddy with lack of sleep,

no way out of this lie she almost

believes, or the lies ahead,

nothing but memory of the rope,

duct tape, cough medicine,

and knife she bought at the PDQ

with her own cash, wanting

to be taken by someone so badly,

she takes us, she does it to herself.

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Persephone in the Late Anthropocene
Poems
Megan Grumbling
Acre Books, 2020
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Meanwhile, Persephone’s mother searches for her troubled daughter, and humanity is first seduced by the unseasonable abundance, then devastated by the fallout, and finally roused to act.

This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the “Late Anthropocene.” These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse.

Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer’s Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs “whodunits,” as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of “throwing their voices,” and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.
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Persian Literature and Judeo-Persian Culture
Collected Writings of Sorour S. Soroudi
H. E. Chehabi
Harvard University Press
This volume presents several articles and other writings of Sorour S. Soroudi (1938–2002), who taught in the Department of Iranian Studies at the Hebrew University for three decades. Soroudi’s research was concentrated in three main areas, all of which are well represented in this collection. First, Soroudi was an early specialist in modern Persian poetry, particularly that of the constitutional era; her studies and translations did much to bring this poetry to the attention of critics and scholars. Second, on the basis of extensive fieldwork as well as literary study, Soroudi contributed greatly to the study of Judeo-Persian literature and folk culture. Third, Soroudi explored the history and culture of Iranian Jewry, which she situated in the larger context of Iranian history. This volume, meticulously and sensitively edited by Houchang E. Chehabi, brings together many of Dr. Soroudi’s published articles in these two areas. Included in this book is a previously unpublished piece as well as an article that appears here in English for the first time.
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Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus
Harvard University Press, 2008

Four unconnected but unforgettable plays from ancient Athens’ first great tragedian.

Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BC), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens, fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably also at Salamis, and had one of his productions sponsored by the young Pericles. He was twice invited to visit Sicily, and it was there that he died. At Athens he competed for the tragic prize at the City Dionysia about nineteen times between circa 499 and 458, and won it on thirteen occasions; in his later years he was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.

Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition contains fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians (472), on the recent war, the only surviving Greek historical drama; Seven against Thebes (467), the third play of a trilogy, on the conflict between Oedipus’ sons which ends when they kill each other; Suppliants, the first or second play of a trilogy, on the successful appeal by the daughters of Danaus to the king and people of Argos for protection against a forced marriage to their cousins (whom they will later murder, all but one); and Prometheus Bound (of disputed authenticity), on the terrible punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to humans in defiance of Zeus (with whom he will later be reconciled after preventing his overthrow). The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy (458), comprising Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides, presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother’s avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena’s pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.

This edition’s third volume offers all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays, with brief headnotes explaining what is known, or can be plausibly inferred, about their content, and bibliographies of recent studies.

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Persius
A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural
Shadi Bartsch
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Roman poet and satirist Persius (34–62 CE) was unique among his peers for lampooning literary and social conventions from a distinctly Stoic point of view. A curious amalgam of mocking wit and philosophy, his Satires are rife with violent metaphors and unpleasant imagery and show little concern for the reader’s enjoyment or understanding.

In Persius, Shadi Bartsch explores this Stoic framework and argues that Persius sets his own bizarre metaphors of food, digestion, and sexuality against more appealing imagery to show that the latter—and the poetry containing  it—harms rather than helps its audience. Ultimately, he encourages us to abandon metaphor altogether in favor of the non-emotive abstract truths of Stoic philosophy, to live in a world where neither alluring poetry, nor rich food, nor sexual charm play a role in philosophical teaching.
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Personal Science
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Tupelo Press, 2017
What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram’s third full-length collection pivots on an extended piece of creative nonfiction, “Forecast,” which shows how obsessive thinking can begin in actual occurrences that are then exploded in the imagination. The science is personal, as the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is “real.”
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Persons Unknown
Jake Adam York
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
In this stunning continuation to the poetry collection A Murmuration of Starlings, dedicated to those who lost their lives during the Civil Rights movement, Jake Adam York presents another set of searing portraits of these martyrs—men whose murders haunt America’s history. These elegiac and documentary poems seek justice and understanding for such sacrifices as Mack Charles Parker, lynched in Mississippi in 1959, his body disposed of in the waters of the Pearl River; Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, abducted into the depths of the Homochitto Forest, beaten, and drowned in the Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan; and Medgar Evers, dedicated activist, whose assassination outside his home in 1963 sent shockwaves throughout the South. Drawing on photographs, articles, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts, York deftly weaves history and memory into a lyrical reckoning for these often-overlooked victims of the bitter struggle for Civil Rights.

A Natural History of Mississippi

A blade of rust from the ocean

and from the air a rumor

that corrodes the earth in tongues,

lichen, moss, magnolia,

until each gossip’s true.

Things go this way,

each green repeating its fact

of sun and wind and rain,

its dialect, its blade,

while beneath each leaf

a quiet cuts between the veins.

Laced, pale wings open

to learn the particular weather,

the place or part of speech

that will darken

and give them a name.

So each sugar furls

to burn and bitter

against whatever mouths

might swallow,

each skin becomes

the history of its harbor,

another word for here.

This hatch of bark and shade

hangs like a photograph

of all it covers, so perfect,

so still, its edges

blur, then disappear.

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Perspectives of Roman Poetry
A Classics Symposium
Edited by G. Karl Galinsky
University of Texas Press, 1974

Written by leading specialists, the essays in Perspectives of Roman Poetry seek to provide a broad range of readers with a good understanding of some essential aspects of major Roman poets and poetic genres. The value of the essays is enhanced, for comparative purposes, by their extensive reference to modern authors. such as Shakespeare and Tolkien. For the modern reader, Latin quotations are accompanied by effective English translations.

The essays and their authors are as follows:

  • "The Woman's Role in Latin Love Poetry," by Georg Luck
  • "Autobiography and Art in Horace," by William S. Anderson
  • "Some Trees in Virgil and Tolkien," by Kenneth J. Reckford
  • "The Business of Roman Comedy," by Erich Segal
  • "Ovid's Metamorphosis of Myth," by G. Karl Galinsky
The preface and concluding panel discussion illumine the situation of literary criticism inthe classics and point out the need for diversity.

Perspectives of Roman Poetry resulted from a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1972. These essays offer different and, in some cases, heterodox interpretations that will serve as a basis for future discussions.

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Persuasions Of Fall
Ann Lauinger
University of Utah Press, 2004

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized author of numerous collections of poetry and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. In Persuasion of Fall, the first prizewinning volume of the annual competition, Ann Lauinger celebrates the quotidian in ways that are wise, uncompromising, and sometimes sly in their playfulness.

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Petrarch and His Legacies
Edited by Ernesto Livorni and Jelena Todorovic
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

This book gathers cutting-edge articles by prominent scholars reflecting on Petrarch’s poetry and his long legacy, from the Renaissance to the present day. The scholars engaged in this volume read Petrarch in the context of his own world and with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches, never overlooking the opportunity for an interdisciplinary reading that combines poetry and visual arts. The volume includes scholars from the United States and Europe (Italy, in particular), thus offering the opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches.  

The articles in the second half of the volume celebrate Petrarch’s legacies beyond the historically fundamental Renaissance Petrarchism, while exploring the presence of Petrarch’s poetry in several cultural realities. The scholars also read Petrarch with necessary attention to new disciplines such as digital humanities. The richness of the volume lies in these innovative perusals of Petrarch’s works not only through the critical lens of dedicated scholars, but also through their readings of artists who throughout the centuries appreciated and revived Petrarch’s poetry in their own literary endeavors.

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Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy
Shannon McHugh
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism’s capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry’s work in the world. These poets’ works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric’s utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.
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Petrarch
Everywhere a Wanderer
Christopher S. Celenza
Reaktion Books, 2022
An enlightening study of the contradictory character of this canonical fourteenth-century Italian poet.

Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private.

In this biography, Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike.
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Petrarch’s Lyric Poems
The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics
Francesco Petrarch
Harvard University Press

For teachers and students of Petrarch, Robert M. Durling’s edition of the poems has become the standard one. Readers have praised the translation as both graceful and accurate, conveying a real understanding of what this difficult poet is saying.

The literalness of the prose translation makes this beautiful book especially useful to students who lack a full command of Italian. And students reading the verse in the original will find here an authoritative text.

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Phenomenal Reading
Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics
Brian M. Reed
University of Alabama Press, 2012
The essays in Phenomenal Reading entice readers to cross accepted barriers, and highlight the work of poets who challenge language-as-usual in academia and the culture at large.
 
Phenomenal Reading is comprised of essays that are central to how best to read poetry. This book examines individually and collectively poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Why do their words appear in unconventional orders? What end do these arrangements serve? Why are they striking? Brian Reed focuses on poetic form as a persistent puzzle, using historical fact and the views of other key critics to clarify how particular literary works are constructed and how those constructions lead to specific effects.
 
Understanding that explication and contextualization do not always sufficiently harness the power of poetry, Reed pursues phenomenological methods that take into account each reader’s unique perception of the world. This collection of twelve essays values narrative as a tool for conveying the intricacy, contingency, and richness of poetic experience.
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Phormio. The Mother-in-Law. The Brothers
Terence
Harvard University Press, 2001

The Roman comic playwright “whose every word delights.”

Terence brought to the Roman stage a bright comic voice and a refined sense of style. His six comedies—first produced in the half dozen years before his premature death in 159 BC—imaginatively reformulated in Latin plays that were originally written by Greek playwrights, especially Menander. For this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Terence, John Barsby gives us a faithful and lively translation with full explanatory notes, facing a freshly edited Latin text.

Volume I contains a substantial introduction and three plays: The Woman of Andros, a romantic comedy; The Self-Tormentor, which looks at contrasting father-son relationships; and The Eunuch, whose characters include the most sympathetically drawn courtesan in Roman comedy. The other three plays are in Volume II: Phormio, a comedy of intrigue with an engaging trickster; The Mother-in-Law, unique among Terence’s plays in that the female characters are the admirable ones; and The Brothers, which explores contrasting approaches to parental education of sons.

The Romans highly praised Terence—“whose speech can charm, whose every word delights,” in Cicero’s words. This new edition of his plays, which replaces the now outdated Loeb translation by John Sargeaunt (first published in 1912), succeeds in capturing his polished style and appeal.

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Photographing Eden
Poems
Jason Gray
Ohio University Press, 2008

Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray’s poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

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Phyla of Joy
Karen An-hwei Lee
Tupelo Press, 2012
“Karen An-hwei Lee’s third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity’s essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought….Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite —‘ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.’” — Rigoberto González

There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.

In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.
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Physics Envy
American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After
Peter Middleton
University of Chicago Press, 2015
At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration.
           
In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American—shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.
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Piano in the Dark
Nancy Naomi Carlson
Seagull Books, 2023
Poetry from an especially deft magician of words.
 
This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals—our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets its name . . . has no word for this forgetting.” At once vulnerable and open, tempered and tempted equally by the erotic and the empathic, such dualities limn these affectingly beautiful and lyrical poems. Carlson’s lines, entreating as Scheherazade, “weave chords / into tales within tales, whirlpools within seas” to save her life. Indeed, music has no need for voice or harp, as “in anechoic chambers, you become / the only instrument of your worldly sounds,” echoing Mozart’s credo “that music lies / in the silence between notes.” In a world scarred by pandemics, wars, and violent tribalism, the givens are gone—“talismans we clung to, believing / we might be spared in some way / by marking our doors / with our own sacrificial blood.” In these unflinching free and formal verse poems, Carlson seduces us with the promise of the joy yet to be had, were we to look in the right places.
 
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Picnic, Lightning
Billy Collins
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry Prize

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."

This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning--one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s--combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."
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Picture Books for Children
Fiction, Folktales, and Poetry
Mary Northrup
American Library Association, 2012

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Picturing Religious Experience
George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures
Daniel Doerksen
University of Delaware Press, 2012
Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life—which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems. Altogether, this study maintains that Herbert owes to his religious orientation not just themes or details, but an impulse to observe and depict the inner life, and scriptural patterns which significantly contribute to the substance and literary excellence of The Temple.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Picturing Worlds
Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Literature
David Stirrup
Michigan State University Press, 2020
Paying attention to the uses that Anishinaabe authors make of visual images and marks made on surfaces such as rock, bark, paper, and canvas, David Stirrup argues that such marks—whether ancient pictographs or contemporary paintings—intervene in artificial divisions like that separating precolonial/oral from postcontact/alphabetically literate societies. Examining the ways that writers including George Copway, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Gordon Henry, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and others deploy the visual establishes frameworks for continuity, resistance, and sovereignty in that space where conventional narratives of settlement read rupture. This book is a significant contribution to studies of the ways traditional forms of inscription support and amplify the oral tradition and in turn how both the method and aesthetic of inscription contribute to contemporary literary aesthetics and the politics of representation.
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Piers Plowman
The A Version
William Langland
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Passionate about trying to create social justice in a time of crisis after the Black Plague, William Langland spent his entire life working on Piers Plowman, an epic study of the human quest for truth, justice, and community. The “A Version,” the first and shortest of the three versions he crafted, is wonderfully relatable and completely teachable to a modern student audience. Piers Plowman is becoming ever more relevant to students and scholars in English studies. Perhaps because the poem involves culture, religion, community, and work and engages explicitly with the histories of government and popular revolt, this allegorical tale of a wandering Christian named “Will,” searching for truth with the aid of a humble plowman named Piers, has found new critical and pedagogic life in the last 20 years. Currently there are no translations of the A-version of Piers Plowman in print, so readers, scholars and teachers have been longing for an affordable, student-centered translation. The apparatus includes a 30-page historical and critical introduction, footnotes, a bibliography, a note on translation theory and practice, and samplings of the original text in Middle English, with a guide to pronunciation of that language. Piers Plowman is an extraordinary important document about the issues dramatically relevant to this day. It confronts poverty and inequity in 14th-century England and explores the need for virtue and social justice, encouraging its readers to create equality with open access for people of all classes and abilities. Though a Christian poem, Piers addresses issues of inclusivity, social responsibility and communal duty, as the poem’s protagonist wanders about the world, facing injustice and persecution as he looks for truth and salvation. Michael Calabrese, author of An Introduction to Piers Plowman and director of the Chaucer Studio’s Middle English recording of the poem, brings Piers Plowman to life for 21st-century students and for all readers interested in the history of society, virtue, faith and salvation.
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Pindar's Verbal Art
An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style
James Bradley Wells
Harvard University Press, 2009
In Pindar’s Verbal Art, James Bradley Wells argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through the inclusive appeal of entertainment, popular instruction, and laughter. This is the first study of Pindar’s language that applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualized records of verbal art. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, Pindar’s Verbal Art is a sociological stylistics of epinician language and demonstrates that Pindar’s is a highly dialogical form of art, an intertextual web of voices, whose study enables us to appreciate popular dimensions of his songs. Wells offers a new take on recurrent Pindaric questions: genre, the unity of the victory song, tradition, and, principally, epinician performance.
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Pinion
Monica Rico
Four Way Books, 2024
“I / step into the kitchen because I can / no longer smell the lilac / bush my father cut down,” Monica Rico writes in the opening poem of her astonishing debut collection. Deeply invested in unearthing women’s identity from a patriarchal family structure, these pages catalog life beside loss, the truth of cruelty accompanied by a defiant vitality. Here, where the declaration “I can” is modified to “I can / no longer,” Rico untangles the paradox of love, how a persistent absence keeps the missing object present, asserting itself through grief and memory; the scent of lilac lingers precisely because we cannot smell it anymore. The dual meaning of "pinion" scaffolds this collection, which considers Rico's family and their experiences in the context of her grandparents' immigration to the USA from México, American racial capitalism, and the mass migration catalyzed and necessitated by Western colonialism. “Pinion” in noun form refers to a bird's outer flight feathers; in verb form, it means to bind or sever this part of the wing to hinder flight. Bound up in this word, then, is a thing and its destruction — a possibility and a thwarted hope side by side. Rico creates her own motifs to write a representative genealogy, approaching her family as an ornithologist: across poems, her grandfather (who worked at General Motors) appears as an owl, her grandmother figures as a robin, and the American project shows up in the eagle's warped beak and surveilling eye. A field work of restoration, these poems compose a personal history and a deconstruction of global capitalism as articulated through an encyclopedia of birds. From the chaos of our flawed world, Rico salvages an enduring hope, reminding us that “a broken / song like an ugly duckling isn’t ugly / but unique, and stands out like the flightless / dodo who trusts because it is too awful not to.” 
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The Pink Guitar
Writing as Feminist Practice
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
University of Alabama Press, 2006
An influential feminist study of poetry and writing
 
The Pink Guitar is a landmark study of women's writing and poetics—and representations of women artists—in the 20th century. It probes the work of H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp, among others, and includes DuPlessis’s pioneering essay “For the Etruscans,” described in American Literature as “one of the finest pieces of criticism in the feminist literary tradition.”

 

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Pink Lady
Poems
Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025
A new collection from the award winning poet Denise Duhamel
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Pink Waves
Sawako Nakayasu
Omnidawn, 2021
A poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance.
 
Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.
 
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Pitch Dark Anarchy
Poems
Randall Horton
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Pitch Dark Anarchy investigates the danger of one single narrative with multilayered poems that challenge concepts of beauty and image, race and identity, as well as the construction of skin color. Through African American memory and moments in literature, the poems seek to disrupt and dismantle foundations that create erasures and echoes of the unremembered. Pitch Dark Anarchy uses the slave revolt of the Amistad as a starting point, a metaphor for "opposition" and "against." These themes run through the very core for the book while drawing on inventive and playful language. The poems bring to life human experiences and conditions created by an "elite" society. In these poems, locations and landscapes are always shifting, proving that our shared experiences can be interchangeable. At the very core of Pitch Dark Anarchy is a seven-part poem based on the artist Margret Bowland’s "Another Thorny Crown Series," which are paintings of an African American girl in white face.

Through innovative formal and visual techniques, such as fractured syntax and typographical disruption, Horton evokes the disorienting experiences of urban life, while also calling into question the complicity of language in the oppressive structures he anatomizes.

 
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Pitch of Poetry
Charles Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.

Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.
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Pittsburghese
Robert Gibb
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Pittsburghese, Robert Gibb’s latest book of poems, is a work of poignant remembrance, filled with revelations found in the everyday “debris of paradise.” The collection is anchored by personal and public histories, the city’s “consensus things” and “standard archaeologies,” as well as by music—jazz, blues, R&B and gospel—“sweet rebuttal” to the world’s “cold hymns.” Throughout, motifs function like the thorns on the jaggers—Pittsburghese for brambles—whose points engage the reader “one by one.” Other poems elegize the great buildings and working stiffs of the city’s industrial past, celebrating its artifacts and artworks, the “necessary mystery” of its trees and wild creatures. Particulars of a world in which dialect is the alembic, the means of expression and the shapes it takes on as well—habitation and name.
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Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition
Toward a 21st Century Poetics
Rigoberto González
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition gathers Rigoberto González’s most important essays and book reviews, many of which consider the work of emerging poets whose identities and political positions are transforming what readers expect from contemporary poetry. A number of these voices represent intersectional communities, such as queer writers of color like Natalie Díaz, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Eduardo C. Corral, and many writers, such as Carmen Giménez Smith and David Tomás Martínez, have deep connections to their Latino communities. Collectively, these writers are enriching American poetry to reflect a more diverse, panoramic, and socially conscious literary landscape. Also featured are essays on the poets’ literary ancestors—including Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, and Francisco X. Alarcón—and speeches that address the need to leverage poetry as agency.

This book fills a glaring gap in existing poetry scholarship by focusing exclusively on writers of color, and particularly on Latino poetry. González makes important observations about the relevance, urgency, and exquisite craft of the work coming from writers who represent marginalized communities. His insightful connections between the Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American literatures persuasively position them as a collective movement critiquing, challenging, and reorienting the direction of American poetry with their nuanced and politicized verse. González’s inclusive vision covers a wide landscape of writers, opening literary doors for sexual and ethnic minorities.


 
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A Place for Humility
Whitman, Dickinson, and the Natural World
Christine Gerhardt
University of Iowa Press, 2014
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are widely acknowledged as two of America’s foremost nature poets, primarily due to their explorations of natural phenomena as evocative symbols for cultural developments, individual experiences, and poetry itself. Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones.

Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.

A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in conjunction with this important change in American environmental perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought. Christine Gerhardt argues that each author's poetry participates in this shift in different but related ways, and that their involvement with their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal choices meet on a surprising number of levels.
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The Place One Is
Martha Ronk
Omnidawn, 2022
A collection from celebrated poet Martha Ronk considering the relationship between person, body, and place.
 

The Place One Is explores the intersection of person and place, the ways in which changes in the tangible world alter one’s vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern for—to take one example—the dwindling water supply in California. The body’s position, its geometry, and the topography of the surrounding land become less and less recognizable as body and world blend together. Gravel giving way underfoot mirrors the way that words dissolve into mumbles, and the skeleton of a rusty car on the sand appears like one’s own skeleton. Ronk shows that disintegration here is disintegration there. These poems also wonder at interdependence, considering how lines intersect and continue to connect us to the sea—and to islands, lagoons, greenery, sky, and space. 
 
In the first part of the collection, the poems focus on a rural landscape, and in the second part, they consider the overly bright urban world of Los Angeles. 
 
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Places in the Making
A Cultural Geography of American Poetry
Jim Cocola
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Places in the Making maps a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets who have used language to evoke the world at various scales. Distinct from related traditions including landscape poetry, nature poetry, and pastoral poetry—which tend toward more idealized and transcendent lyric registers—this study traces a poetics centered upon more particular and situated engagements with actual places and spaces. Close generic predecessors of this mode, such as topographical poetry and loco-descriptive poetry, folded themselves into the various regionalist traditions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but place making in modern and contemporary American poetics has extended beyond its immediate environs, unfolding at the juncture of the proximate and the remote, and establishing transnational, planetary, and cosmic formations in the process. Turning to geography as an interdisciplinary point of departure, Places in the Making distinguishes itself by taking a comparative and multiethnic approach, considering the relationship between identity and emplacement among a more representative demographic cross-section of Americans, and extending its inquiry beyond national borders.

Positing place as a pivotal axis of identification and heralding emplacement as a crucial model for cultural, intellectual, and political activity in a period marked and imperiled by a tendency toward dislocation, the critical vocabulary of this project centers upon the work of place-making. It attends to a poetics that extends beyond epic and lyric modes while relying simultaneously on auditory and visual effects and proceeding in the interests of environmental advocacy and social justice, often in contrast to the more orthodox concerns of literary modernism, global capitalism, and print culture. Focusing on poets of international reputation, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, Places in the Making also considers work by more recent figures, including Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, Myung Mi Kim, and Craig Santos Perez. In its larger comparative, multiethnic, and transnational emphases, this book addresses questions of particular moment in American literary and cultural studies and aspires to serve as a catalyst for further interdisciplinary work connecting geography and the humanities. 
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Places/Everyone
Jim Daniels
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

    Jim Daniels, in his first book of poems, draws upon his experiences in living and working in his native Detroit to present a start, realistic picture of urban, blue-collar life.  Daniels, his brothers, his father, and his grandfather have all worked in the auto industry, and that background seeps into nearly all these poems.
    The first of the book’s three sections sketches out this background, then moves into a neighborhood full of people whose lives are so linked to the ups and downs of the auto industry that they have to struggle to find their own lives; in "Still Lives in Detroit, #2," Daniels writes, "There’s a man in this picture.  / No one can find him."  The second section contains the "Digger" poems, a series on the lives of a Detroit auto worker and his family which tries to capture the effects of the work on life outside the factory.  Here, we listen to Digger think, dream, wander on psychological journeys while he moves through his routines, shoveling the snow, mowing the lawn, and so forth.  In section three, the poems move into the workplace, whether that be a liquor store, a hamburger joint, or a factory.
    These poems, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, concentrate on the efforts of workers to rise above the often depressing work of blue-collar or minimum-wage jobs, to salvage some pride and dignity.  The poems in this book try to give a voice to those who are often shut out of poetry.  They are important.  These lives are important, and the poems, more than anything, say that.

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Planned Solstice
David Micah Greenberg
University of Iowa Press, 2003
In David Greenberg's Planned Solstice, the natural and material worlds are provocatively juxtaposed, so as to affirm serious explorations of our place within them. Greenberg's considerations are vast, invigorating, and challenging; his poems take on charged historical and political subjects—civil wars at home and abroad, the World Trade Center's destruction, issues of race and difference—and handle them with utter aplomb and freshness.

These poems move from imagistic inquiry toward political coherence and a sense of divided place. The book's four-part structure also echoes seasonal change and seeks among extreme—solstice-like—experiences the hope that separate lives may speak to one another. Throughout, images of contested growth, natural and human, ask the reader to see what is both organic and structural in settings of consciousness, space, and politics—to find what is free and what is also formed by consequence. Greenberg's are not facile pronouncements; they come to us after such rigorous deliberation, such painstaking examination, that they cannot but carry a hint of the oracular about them.

The poems in Planned Solstice should be read, re-read, and re-read again, as they yield a new crop, “a decision of field,"”every time one dares to venture in
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Planted by the Signs
Poems
Misty Skaggs
Ohio University Press, 2019

Planted by the Signs brings us the contemporary Appalachian poetry—cultivated in the dirt of Elliott County, Kentucky—of Misty Skaggs. With an eye for details that exquisitely balance personal and social observation to communicate volumes, she tells the stories of generations of women who have learned to navigate a harsh world with a little help from the Farmers’ Almanac and the stars. The collection is separated into three sections that reference the best times to grow and harvest. Knowing and following these guidelines—planting by the signs—could mean the difference between prosperity and tragedy in the lives of Appalachian families.

Personal, political, and passionate, Planted by the Signs also explores what it means for Skaggs to care for her great-grandmother at the end of her life. Color photos by the poet further showcase her sidelong and fierce outlook. The images and poems together deliver an intimate look into the day-to-day reality of a backwoods woman embracing barefooted radicalism in the only place she could call home.

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Plash & Levitation
Adam Tavel
University of Alaska Press, 2015
Plash & Levitation delves into the chaotic sublime of fatherhood, the candid revelations of youth, and the lingering consequences of history. Adam Tavel’s revealing and imaginative poems are joined by fictional monologues from historical figures and cultural icons, juxtaposing personal history with our shared one. Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and rock legend Keith Moon are joined by musings from the Redskins logo and the Wolfman. Together they create a lively chorus that clashes and soars. The result is forty-two fascinating pieces that are witty, consistently musical, and undeniably powerful—the perfect inaugural selection for the Permafrost Book Prize.
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Plasma
Bradley Paul
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
The poems in Plasma, Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of plasma: an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch thousands of electronic images, sounds, and stories.
 
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The Plath Cabinet
Catherine Bowman
Four Way Books, 2009
Part homage, part exploration, The Plath Cabinet offers a new window onto Sylvia Plath’s world, from her hand-made dolls and her passport to a preserved lock of her hair. The Plath Cabinet is not simply an unparalleled biography: it is a memoir in poems, telling the story of Bowman’s relationship to Plath and to poetry. The Plath Cabinet is a must-read for Plath-lovers, for anyone interested in memoir and biography, and for all readers of contemporary poetry.
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Plato through Homer
Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues
Zdravko Planinc
University of Missouri Press, 2003
This new study challenges traditional ways of reading Plato by showing that his philosophy and political theory cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the literary or aesthetic features of his writing. More specifically, it shows how Plato’s well-known cosmological dialogues—the Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias—are structured using several books of the Odyssey as their shared source text.
While there has recently been much scholarly discussion of the relation between poetry and philosophy in Plato’s dialogues, little of it addresses questions central to thoroughgoing literary criticism. Planinc’s work is unique in that it shows the significance of Plato’s extensive refiguring of key episodes in the Odyssey for an interpretation of his political philosophy.
Plato’s cosmological dialogues are almost always discussed topically. The Timaeus is picked through for its theological or scientific doctrines; the Critias is reduced to its Atlantis story, or puzzled over because of its ostensible incompleteness; and the Phaedrus is read for its parallels to modern understandings of erotics or rhetoric. The dialogues are not usually considered in relation to one another, and then only in the context of developmental schemes primarily concerned with distinguishing periods in Plato’s metaphysical doctrines.
Planinc argues that the main literary features of the Phaedrus,Timaeus, and Critias are taken from books 6 to 9 of the Odyssey, the largest part of the story of Odysseus’s stay with the Phaeacians, from the time he swims to shore and encounters Nausicaa to the time he reveals his identity and begins recounting his earlier travels after hearing Demodocus’s songs. By exploring the full range of the many charming and intriguing things the dialogues present in this literary context, he shows that they are a coherent, unified part of Plato’s corpus.
Plato through Homer takes a radically new approach to Plato’s texts that illuminates their literary and philosophic significance and highlights their enduring appeal.
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Plato's Breath
Randall R. Freisinger
Utah State University Press, 1997

Freisinger's new poetry collection is inhabited alike by bright, tangible images and thoughtful, intricate meditations. Pumpkins, poultry houses, sperm tests, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a father's damaged brain, an anatomist's tools, a baby falling from a fourth-story window-all of these come to the page distinct and palpable. At the same time, the work finds a central inspiration in theoretical work like Jeremy Rifkin's social criticism. Poetry of both the mind and the heart, Plato's Breath embraces the power of imagination to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary affirmation of life.

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The Play of Fictions
Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative
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Playful Song Called Beautiful
John Blair
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful.

From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable. 
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PlayHouse
Poems
Jorrell Watkins
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home
 
Jorrell Watkins's debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States's fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in Play|House embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner, and witness. Throughout, Watkins inflects a Black/trap vernacular that defamiliarizes the urban Southern landscape. Across three sections of poetry scored by hip-hop, blues, and trap, Watkins considers how music is a dwelling and wonders which histories, memories, and people haunt each home. Past figures such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and the short-lived 1940s trio Day, Dawn & Dusk intermingle with Migos, the Watkins family, childhood friends, and loved ones both parted and departed. At its core, Play|House reckons with the truths and failures of masculinity for Black boys and men, all the while documenting moments of triumphant Black joy and love.
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Playlist
Poems
David Lehman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
A New Collection of Poetry from the Editor of The Best American Poetry
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