James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism.--Publishers Weekly

Not since the appearance of W. S. Merwin's translations and adaptations of aphorisms in Asian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet managed to put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom.--American Literary Review

No one theme or moral pervades these tesserae of specificity. Rather, Richardson's elegant compression invites the reader to fill in the blanks with personal experience... Richardson's knack for the quintessential, sustained for more than a hundred pages, left me satisfied yet hungry for more.-- Times Literary Supplement

Readers will be obsessed by this book; they will memorize passages, give copies to friends, proselytize. That's because Vectors so generously provides the best that poetry can offer. It is a masterpiece of practicality, beauty, and solace.-- Boston Review

James Richardson's Vectors... penetrates to the very heart of human nature. I stand looking in the mirror, alert to my own foibles, shaking my head as I tolerate what I know he knows about who I am.-- The Georgia Review

Almost every entry... introduces a new insight, provides a revelation, supplies a surprise... it is a book one wants to spend time with, a wonderfully friendly book, generous, witty and entertaining.-- Gulf Coast

Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends.-- Barrow Street

James Richardson's Vectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond-sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always, always, very shrewd. 'It can never be satisfied, the mind, never, ' wrote Wallace Stevens. Vectors is a remarkable testament to such questing, vivid minding, as these aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, success, fear, shame, self-consciousness, love and friendship.--Laurie Sheck

Linton Kwesi Johnson is one of the most influential black poets in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things.

Working within the frame of her native New England, Julie Agoos positions herself in her new book, Property, less as a first-person lyric speaker than as an acute listener to the layered history of small and large violences which ignite repeatedly in American life. Structured as a progression of poems which invoke the genres of oral history, gossip, legal transcript, and diary writing, Property arrives, in the long poem Deposition, at the story of a particular, explosive, and horrific local crime.

Property's subject is historical and political: as she experiments from her unique lyric perspective with multiple ways of tellingand explores through dramatic superimposition how the past inscribes and disturbs the present, Agoos interrogates our homegrown social and racial divides, and focuses emphatically on the ethics of living in a real and present world of ubiquitous war. Her images of natural beauty join a plain style derived from the rhythms of vernacular speech to challenge the complacenciesand consequences of her own American identity and belonging.

Born in Boston in 1956, Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) and Calendar Year (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). She taught for eight years as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and, since 1994, in the English department and MFA program in poetry at Brooklyn College/CUNY, where she is an associate professor. She lives in Nyack, New York.

She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns. When denizens of the 22nd century, if we get there, look back on our era and ask how we lived, they will take an interest both in the strangest personalities who gave their concerns verbal form, and in the most representative. The future will not--should not--see us by one poet alone. But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose. --Boston Review

Kasichke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase. --Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke in her own words: I realized while ordering and selecting the poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns body parts, dresses, and beauty queens. These weren't conscious decisions, just the things that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my life, and which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. The beauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me, in all their feminine loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction--congeniality. And then--Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen--all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given.

Laura Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004) and Dance and Disappear (winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

This book contains over thirty years of work. Without ever intending it, I wrote a spiritual autobiography in poetry. I once was a young poet who practiced Zen; over the years I became a formally ordained Zen monk who practices poetry. This book follows that transition in terms of both content and form. What I think is interesting about the book is that the very early poems are so full of suffering, longing, bewilderment, astonishment, etc., and their language is often 'poetic' with images culled from French Symbolism and Surrealism, and sensibilities akin to Baudelaire. They are the poems of a young man under the influence of poetry. But as the years pass, the influences shift. The poems become more sparse, less poetic, more direct. The Zen practice becomes more apparent. There is a kind of implicit narrative to the book that I never intended. It's the story of a man seeking a path and then finding one. That doesn't mean the journey is over, it just means that the path has been found and here we go --Seido Ray Ronci

Is there a god or isn't there?
Is there a me or isn't there?
Answer one
you answer both.
In the meantime,
black tea while it rains.

What is special about Matthews' Horatian Satires is the immediacy of the idiom, the sense of discovery of the actual moment, the quickness of the turn of the line. . . . Horace's words, in Matthews' hands, become alive, just-written, and immortal again because they are so new.--Stanley Plumly

Jane Kenyon, who was married to the poet Donald Hall, earned wide acclaim for her clear, vivid, deeply spiritual lyrics, many of them written in the face of her own -mortality.

During the year of her dying, Carruth's faithful correspondence, collected here, is a testament to the depth of their friendship, and a rare window into the inner life of a major poet as he confronts the loss of a dear friend. Both Carruth and Kenyon have devoted followings; Letters to Jane offers unique and personal new insight into their poetry.

Of this book, Francine Prose has written, Reading these beautiful, eloquent, moving letters from one poet to another, you keep forgetting (as you are meant to) even as, paradoxically, it never leaves your mind for a moment, that this is no casual correspondence. Its occasion is urgent and extraordinary. The recipient is dying.

. . . Carruth writes again and again--honest, direct, affectionate accounts of everyday events: writing and reading, visiting friends, traveling to give poetry readings, enjoying good moods and good health, enduring physical and emotional setbacks, feeding the dog and watching bee balm bloom in the garden.

What's most mysterious and marvelous about these letters--which end around the time of Kenyon's death in 1995--is how they manage to be, simultaneously, so relaxed and so intense, so concrete and so reflective, and how every word and every sentence reminds us of the preciousness of ordinary life, and of the enduring and -sustaining consolations of friendship.

Hayden Carruth is the author of more than 20 books, predominantly poetry. His work has been awarded many honors, including the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has also written widely on jazz and the blues. He lives in Munnsville, NY.

This book is a startling lyrical account of a young Catholic American student's summer in Uganda, where she taught English to adults and assisted at a medical clinic in a remote country village. Written while the author was still in college, it is an astonishing debut, richly musical and descriptive, confident, unpretentious and bursting with new experience: love, identity, religious faith and the complex collisions of culture and language.

Hegnauer's book will appeal to several different audiences. Poetry-readers will discover the precocious work of a very young writer--only 21 when the book was completed--and be struck by her technical virtuosity and the emotional and intellectual depth of her poems. Those interested in multicultural issues will find a wealth here; the poet's exploration and assimilation of Ugandan culture, people and language is an insightful and memorable record of her experience, told in language that's lively and entertaining. Catholic readers will be fascinated by the quandaries with which she was faced and how she reconciles her actions with her very strong faith.

Lilah Hegnauer completed her undergraduate degree at Portland University, a small Catholic college in Portland, Oregon. She taught English in the Kiganda Highway Secondary School in Uganda and worked in the local medical clinic during the summer of 2003, living with the family of a Ugandan priest, Father Achilles Kiwanuka. She was given several classes of students, a caning stick, and was told to teach anything. In the clinic, she was soon helping deliver babies and tending to people with AIDS. Lilah Hegnauer is now a graduate student in creative writing at The Ohio State University.

Something has happened here: An empire has gone to seed, an entire country goes on strike, people begin eating dirt and flowers, and a couple lives on a riverboat to avoid the ground. In Mine, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, and sharply intelligent, this is writing that excavates.

As history unfolds over and over the same geography, these poems become, as Hu has written, practice for the living. The book grows out of the poet's interest in how the histories we extract from the land become interlaced with our identity. The book asks, Where do we come from? But also, How do we make amends?

Tung-Hui Hu lives in San Francisco, where he writes on film and new media. Previously, as a computer scientist, he worked on Internet architecture. His first collection, The Book of Motion, won the Eisner Prize and was published by The University of Georgia Press.

The poems in Slow Fire use original and compelling language to create experiences so real that the reader can inhabit them. This poet can delight in a loitering saxophone or a twelfth-century stone prayer hut, but much of her attention--her eye of close observation and precise language--is tuned to the natural world.

With a lifelong interest in ecology and outdoor experience from Maine to Arizona, Pamela Alexander incorporates specifics of desert and forest into her lines. Whatever the subject of the poem, from the death of a mother to marriage to real estate (James Merrill called her choice of subjects impeccably democratic), this is a book with an environmental consciousness and a liveliness of language that engages the reader on many levels.

Pamela Alexander is the author of three previous collections. Her first, Navigable Waterways, a Yale Younger Poets selection, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. After teaching for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the faculty of Oberlin College, where she is co-editor of FIELD magazine. An avid outdoorswoman, Alexander often finds the beginnings of poems as she bikes, hikes, kayaks, and cross-country skis. She divides her time between Ohio and Ontario, Canada.

This is the first book by a poet whose imagination is intimately related to the physical world around him, which he describes as a wholly new and startling landscape that is the acolyte deserts of Arizona. Living here on the moon, as it were, and for half of the year in nearly unbearable temperatures, something altogether interior visited me. The experience of this landscape is confused by its actual history--on the one hand, geological, on the other hand, recent and territorial, and in the great middle ranges, the profound consciousness of Anasazi and Hohokam. They say, here, just to walk on the ground is to dream.

Josh Rathkamp's language is plainspoken but emotionally charged. He writes about love (both its pleasures and its difficulties) and of the strangeness of consciousness itself with a confidence that can only come from experience that's been scrutinized and distilled. At first glance quiet and modest, these poems gather considerable force as the book takes us deeper and deeper into questions essential to us all: Can love survive our limitations? What is art, and why do we need it? How can we speak of human consciousness?

Josh Rathkamp was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He received a BA from Western Michigan University and an MFA from Arizona State University. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Indiana Review, Fugue, Meridian, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Rhino, and Drunken Boat. He currently teaches at Arizona State University and Phoenix College.

Fans of an earlier generation of American poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, and Robert Bly, will find much to enjoy in this large volume of poetry that showcases an acute poetic prowess, capturing a range of heartfelt emotions and experiences. --NewPages

Allows readers to observe the nuances of style and thematic continuities within this atuhor's complex body of work... The poems within The Pear as One Example invoke barren landscapes and unremarkeable objects, rendering them a gem-like concentration of subjective concepts, which shine with 'arctic, oblique light' throughout. --Smartish Pace

This book off ers a generous selection from Eric Pankey's previous seven collections of poetry as well a book-length group of new poems.

For Pankey, language is a means of divination, of augury, of reading the world--the refracted past, the ephemeral present, and the mutable future. While these meditative poems are deeply philosophical, their subject is the world of things. In these poems, he explores the world by way of the body--the body as a marker of time, the body as a vessel of grief, the body as an ecstatic radiant filament. Like an alchemist, Pankey takes the elemental and transmutes it into the mythic.

At the center of many of these poems is a spiritual crisis. Pankey is like the man Flannery O'Connor describes in her essay, Novelist and Believer, who can neither believe nor contain himself in disbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God. Each of these poems is a pilgrimage.

If Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the strange, arranged marriage that gave rise to American poetry, Pankey is their off spring: at once expansive and concise, clear and hermetic, and visionary and mystic.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959, Eric Pankey directed the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis for many years. For the last decade, he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and daughter.