“After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I’ve just come back from a trip to Russia. Philip Metres’s brilliantly compressed lyrical narratives capture the grandeur and the bleakness of an almost mythological country, where a bronze statue of the great poet Pushkin now gazes out on the golden arches, and the swear of a slammed door is more expressive than a mouthful of words. These are subtle, accomplished, shimmering poems that explore the nuances of being an outsider in a language.”—Maura Stanton

“There is a sadness to McBride’s poetry that only a deep thinker can recreate, someone who has been inside the beautiful dark hollows of disappointment. It is encouraging to read the powerfully rendered thoughts of a vulnerable mind in a cynical time—here is a poet unafraid to be hurt; here is a poet bleeding in his own glass crop. Encouraging? Yes, because McBride understands that defensive poetry has no value.” — Larissa Szporluk

Drawing upon his experiences and knowledge as a professional anthropologist, Kent Maynard takes readers on a sensory journey through the cultures and landscapes of a fascinating and foreign world.

“These precise, plain-spoken poems are limned by a subtle music, not to mention a lyric grace that is never overplayed. For in a world as harsh as this one, a world delimited by war, beauty is as appalling as it is necessary. Hugh Martin’s great achievement is to remind us of this necessity, and to assert the power of poetry as witness and as solace.” —James Harms

Martin’s poetry captures life in the Midwest through the authenticity of his voice, his dramatic sense, and the wonderful innovation of his multidisciplinary talents (poet, scholar, teacher, librettist, and performer). From his first volume of poetry in 1969 to Inscribing My Name, Martin’s work brings alive important issues and struggles in our understanding of what it means to be human. This accomplished body of work is a unique combination of traditional poetic forms, the African American musical tradition, and Martin’s extensive experience creating and performing theater and opera.

Djelloul Marbrook started writing poems in Manhattan when he was fourteen. In his thirties he abandoned poetry after publishing a few poems in small journals, but he never stopped reading and studying poetry. Then at age sixty-seven, appalled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the poet within awakened. Stuffing sky-blue notebooks in his pockets, Marbrook began walking around Manhattan determined to affirm his beloved home in the wake of the nihilistic attacks. Far from Algiers emerged from hundreds of poems he has composed in the years since.

“The publication of The Secret Turning of the Earth announces the arrival of an American poet who moves through space and time—the Venice of 1740, Paris in 1900 , 1948 Boston, present day Columbus—exercising a singular vision. These strong, ambitious poems are mapped out by means of what Anthony Libby calls ‘the geometries of seeing’; they pay that fierce and unwavering attention we expect only from the boldest, most perceptive travelers.”—David Citino

“Under and out from under the shadow of death Joanne Lehman writes ‘in the emptiness between one breath and the next.’ Her rural Ohio land-scape is animated with rough and mild weather, red wing blackbirds, hayfields, woodlands, and the sweet and sometimes too-tight lips and rhythms of sectarian life. These poems speak simply, and their mourning, memory, and healing are a balm for times when a little bit of quiet would do us all a world of good. This is a fine first book—as meditative, wise, and joyful as it is bound to local life on our turning earth.”—Julia Kasdorf

“Found in these pages is simple profundity, desire unmitigated, the things we wish for each other, the science of absolutes so easy to understand, and so devastating: these poems put complex moments in such a straightforward context that we grasp not simply the words but the full feeling as something we have felt in some kind of similar vocabulary.” —Alberto Ríos, Judge

“Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’” —Alicia Ostriker