“Reading The Auctioneer Bangs His Gavel, I had the sense of finding a poet I’d been looking for unawares: one who intertwines a survey of human sexuality (and gay sexuality at that) with theological questions; one who tackles ambitious poetic projects without sounding pretentious; one who writes fables using the ordinary materials of daily reality; one who balances the Jewish sources of the Western tradition with its Hellenic counterpart; one who knows how to be serious with the assistance of laughter; one who can tell a story and excerpt his own autobiography as a way of gaining larger perspectives on experience. ‘No things but in ideas,’ seems to be his aesthetic motto, and that has served him well in his goal—to declare that we are free to follow our natures in the pursuit of happiness.”—Alfred Corn

Weeks in This Country is a collection of poems concerned with place. From Turkey to rural Bohemia to Cape Cod, Griffith uses the rich imagery of her travels to evoke both the exotic and the personal. These are poems of observation and poems of meditation. Ultimately, they speak of the longing for connection—among individuals, between cultures, and across history.

“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’” — Andrew Hudgins

An updated and enlarged edition of an annotated collection originally published more than 20 years ago, Bloody Versicles serves as two books in one: an anthology of ribald, moralistic, sad, yet amusing and entertaining verse relating to specific crimes; and a small encyclopedia of select criminals and their wrongdoings.

“In Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent, Stephen Frech takes a time-honored, traditional subject, the life of Christ, and brings it to life again. At the same time he deftly explores the divided nature of human beings—what it means to be spirit living in flesh, what it means to be incarnate. These fine, subtle, thoughtful poems again and again find the myth inside the real and the real inside the myth.”—Andrew Hudgins

Recipe for Blackberry Cake is a collection of poems about women’s lives—poems about girlhood, about mothers and daughters, about how relationships between women are distorted by violence in the home. The poems tell the stories of four generations of women, beginning in the coal camps of West Virginia in the late 1940s and ending in a shopping mall in Ohio some 50 years later. At the heart of the collection is the choice to tell how dangerous and how brave the lives of our mothers, grandmothers, and daughters have been.

“His best work is characterized by thoughtfulness, strong descriptive skills flavored with vivid turns of phrase, and emotional complexities in both the poems themselves and the effects they evoke.” —Boston Book Review

Displaying a range of voices and subjects—from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss—Creech’s poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the “kingdom of desire.” Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

“These ‘stone’ poems by Karen Craigo are reminiscent of W. S. Merwin’s deep image poems or Vasko Popa’s surrealist ‘pebble’ poems. But Craigo does Merwin and Popa one better. She manages to create and sustain a complex and shifting personal mythos without sacrificing the mystery and evocative force of the focusing image. Popa’s ‘pebbles’ chanted a mean, gutteral, one-syllable song, but Craigo’s ‘stones’ belt out whole operas. A brilliant debut.”—George Looney

Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman’s poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one’s past.