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The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016
There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.--New York Times
From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.--New Yorker
Extraordinary.--Los Angeles Times
Ecstatic, bawdy, haunted, and brilliant with the pressures of its arrival.--Boston Globe
Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial big--and very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant.
Torso of Air
Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--
Waiting.
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award
100 Notable Books of the Year, The New York Times Book Review
One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021
By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes.--Craig Morgan Teicher, 'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview for NPR
A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem.--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's Dark (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019)
Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men.--O, The Oprah Magazine
Named a Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2019
One of Buzzfeed's 66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On
The Rumpus poetry pick for What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner
One of BookRiot's 50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.--NPR.org
In reviewing Richard Siken's first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse. In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions--such as, Why paint a bird?--are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its--and our own--invention.
* Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read.--Library Journal, starred review
[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create.--Vanity Fair
Siken's stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art.--Booklist
Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken's sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency.--Publishers Weekly
War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken's first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases--the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion.--The Rumpus
The Museum
Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.
He saw a painting and stood in front of it
for too long. It was a few minutes before she
realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking
at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his
face and then the face in the painting. What do you
see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't
know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was
looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.
This is where everything changed . . .
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
I write hungry sentences, Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them. This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams.
I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia
like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones.
The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick
against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow!
With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion
pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars.
The lion didn't want to do it--
He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd
this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . .
Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.
Winner of the 2015 Washington State Book Award in Poetry Translation
The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse [is] a tough-spirited book of enlightened free verse.--Kyoto Journal
The Zen master and mountain hermit Stonehouse--considered one of the greatest Chinese Buddhist poets--used poetry as his medium of instruction. Near the end of his life, monks asked him to record what he found of interest on his mountain; Stonehouse delivered to them hundreds of poems and an admonition: Do not to try singing these poems. Only if you sit on them will they do you any good.
Newly revised, with the Chinese originals and Red Pine's abundant commentary and notes, The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse is an essential volume for Zen students, readers of Asian literature, and all who love the outdoors.
After eating I dust off a boulder and sleep
and after sleeping I go for a walk
on a cloudy late summer day
an oriole sings from a sapling
briefly enjoying the season
joyfully singing out its heart
true happiness is right here
why chase an empty name
Stonehouse was born in 1272 in Changshu, China, and took his name from a cave at the edge of town. He became a highly respected dharma master in the Zen Buddhist tradition.
Red Pine is one of the world's leading translators of Chinese poetry. Every time I translate a book of poems, he writes, I learn a new way of dancing. And the music has to be Chinese. He lives near Seattle, Washington.
A best-selling volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry in an English-Spanish edition.
Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most popular poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of intuition and pure imagination.
This complete translation of Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda's original Spanish-language poems alongside William O'Daly's English translations. In his introduction O'Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda's poetry, writes, These poems, more so than any of Neruda's other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith.
When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist.
Neruda's questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O'Daly's translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous. --Publishers Weekly
Pablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile's ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973.
II.
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
XIV.
And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?
Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?
Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?
Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?
A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go.
In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called wakas, each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name-with reverence, economy, and whimsy-the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
