SIMON ARMITAGE, Poetry: Tyranasourus Rex Versus Corduroy Kid (Knopf)
Simon Armitage's latest collection from the UK comes to the US, and it brings news from unusual places, whether from the recent past, remote warrior worlds, or a future that is extinct before it arrives. Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid is Simon Armitage's wittiest, most alertly combative and impassioned collection to date.
ROBERT BLY, Poetry Translation: Hafiz (Houghton Mifflin)
LUCILLE CLIFTON, Poetry: Voices (BOA Editions)
In Voices, National Book Award-winner Lucille Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered, the underprivileged, the families of the “other” America. These include poems written for and about her mother and father, aunts, uncles and nephews, and extended family. Spare muscular language combine with copious silences to create the trademark Clifton poem – one is which the speaker always understands that the joy, grief and loss others have experienced stands in direct relationship with her own.
PETER COLE, Poetry: Things on Which I've Stumbled
(New Directions)
In Peter Cole’s remarkable new book, the forces and sources that have long driven his work as both poet and translator come together in singular fashion. Plumbing the past as it soars in the present, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled rides a variable music that takes it from an archeology of the mysterious poetic fragments unearthed in a medieval Egyptian synagogue through a meditation on the power of perplexity, from lyrics suffused with a “normal mysticism” to poignant political commentary on the blighted hills surrounding modern Jerusalem. Cole’s ability to register the beauty of surfaces even as he sees beyond them to a deeper vision of connectedness, his finely calibrated ear, his wit and grounded wisdom, along with his keen sense of literature’s place in a meaningful life render these poems at once utterly fresh and somehow abiding.
MARK DOTY, Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Selected (HarperCollins)
Fire to Fire collect the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, the dignity of the powerless, the instructive presence of animals, and art's ability to give shape to human lives: Doty's subjects echo and develop across 20 years of poems that speak to the crises and possibilities of our times.
CORNELIUS EADY, Poetry: HARDHEADED WEATHER (Penguin)
An exciting new collection from one of America’s most engaging voices, this book at once delineates the arc of the poet’s universe and highlights the range of his talents. In full control of his considerable skills—and displaying a new maturity as he enters midlife—Eady writes sly, unsentimental, witty poems full of truths that are intimate and profound, and his humor is both sophisticated and demotic, a rare combination. The selected poems present the best of his work, and, taken as a whole, form a moving—and sometimes searing—testament to the power of poetry.
PERCIVAL EVERETT, Fiction: The Water Cure (Graywolf)
The Water Cure is the chilling confession of a victim turned villain. Ishmael Kidder is a successful romance novelist. His agent is coming to visit her usually productive client. But Kidder’s eleven-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered, and it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. Percival Everett combines his prodigious gifts for gripping storytelling and lacerating satire as he explores the impact of national excess on individual consciousness.
FORREST GANDER, Fiction: As A Friend
“Heroism is a secondary virtue,” Albert Camus noted, “ but friendship is primary.” In his gemlike first novel, Forrest Gander writes of friendship, envy, and eros as a harmonic of charged overtones. Set in a rural southern landscape as vivid as its indelible characters, As a Friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him (his girlfriend Sarah, his friend Clay) provokes intense self-examination and an atmosphere of dangerous eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style and powerfully unsettling.
FORREST GANDER, Translation: Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho
Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published seven books, including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982), which changed the course of Mexican poetry. Coral Bracho's poems explore the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. Containing poems from all her groundbreaking collections in Spanish, Firefly under the Tongue is the first book in English by this most important and influential living poet.
JORIE GRAHAM, Poetry: Sea Change (HarperCollins)
Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of damage done, and the realization that the existence of a "future" itself may no longer be assured? As formally gorgeous and inventive as anything Graham has written, Sea Change is an essential voice speaking out for our planet and the world we have known.
EAMON GRENNAN, Poetry: Matter of Fact (Graywolf Press)
Matter of fact. Matter of life or death. What does it matter? Eamon Grennan’s new poems seek out criteria with which to question what is unreliable and what is real, what is mere distraction and what is worthy of attention, what is speculation and what is fact. In prose poems and lyrics, Grennan turns to the immutable power of the natural world and the sustaining forces of art to assign value to what endures, to what finally matters. Here is the poet deeply attuned to the everyday possibilities of love, family, and beauty, and in Matter of Fact, he is at his unmistakable best.
MARIE HOWE, Poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
(Norton)
An anticipated new volume from Marie Howe. Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? These are astonishing poems by a poet known as “a truth-teller of the first order.”
ETGAR KERET, Fiction: The Girl on the Fridge
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
This is a new collection of the stories that made Etgar Keret Israel’s bestselling and most acclaimed young writer. A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.
LI-YOUNG LEE, Poetry: Behind My Eyes (Norton)
A highly anticipated collection from one of the most powerful voices at work in America today. Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the most beloved poets in the United States. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straight forward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.
PHILLIP LOPATE, Fiction: Being With Children (The New Press)
A High-Spirited Personal Account of Teaching Writing, Theater, and Videotape. In the 1960s, Philip Lopate went into an urban school to teach poetry and became a part of the school community. Being with Children, published in 1975 but out of print for many years, is Lopate’s classic account of his relationship to his craft and to his young students. The book explores the horrible and beautiful aspects of being with young people five hours a day, and explains why teachers persist in staying with the public schools and
trying to make them into places where young people can flower.
PHILLIP LOPATE, Fiction: Two Marriages (Other Press)
Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit. The Stoic’s Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he’s adopted as his “substitute religion.” When Rita’s cousin from the Philippines arrives, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon’s stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test. Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends. Party preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank’s son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.
HONOR MOORE, Memoir: The Bishop's Daughter (Norton)
With a depth of questioning that recalls James Carroll’s An American Requiem, this memoir engages the reader in the great issues of American life: war, race, family, sexuality, and faith. Paul Moore’s vocation as an Episcopal priest took him from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor of postwar America, prominence as an activist bishop in Washington during the Johnson years, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York. The Bishop’s Daughter is a daughter’s story of that complex, visionary man: a chronicle of her turbulent relationship with a father who struggled privately with his sexuality while she was openly explored hers, and a searching account of the consequences of sexual secrets.
VALZYNA MORT, Poetry: Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press)
Factory is Tears is the remarkable American debut of Valzhyna Mort, a dynamic young Belarusian poet who has taken European literary festivals by storm. There is an urgency and vitality to Mort’s poems, while intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems that question what language is, challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how, and fight to keep a mother tongue alive. Startlingly fresh images occupy and haunt the mind. Translated in collaboration with Franz and Elizabeth Wright.
FRANCINE PROSE, Fiction: Goldengrove (HarperCollins)
At the center of Francine Prose's profoundly moving new novel is a young girl plunged into adult grief and obsession after the drowning death of her sister. Over one haunted summer, Nico must face that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them. She learns about the power of art, of time and place, the mystery of loss and recovery. But for all the darkness at the novel's heart, the narrative itself is radiant with the lightness of summer, charged by the restless sexual tension of teenage life.
ROBIN ROBERTSON, Translation: Medea (Simon & Schuster)
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband Jason has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible... Award-winning poet, Robin Robertson, has captured both the pace and vitality of the drama and the power and beauty of the poetry and has reinvigorated this masterpiece for the twenty-first century.
CHARLES SIMIC, Poetry: That Little Something (Harcourt)
In his eighteenth collection, Charles Simic, the superb poet of the vaguely ominous sound, the disturbing, potentially significant image, moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior. "Evil things are being done in our name," he writes in "Those Who Clean After," and, even more directly, in "Memories of the Future" he writes: “There are one or two murderers in any crowd.” Simic understands the strange interplay between ordinary life and extremes, and he writes with absolute purity about those contradictory but simultaneous states of being or feeling: "Everything about you / My life, is both / Make-believe and real." A profoundly important poet for our time, and a stunning book.
CHARLES SIMIC, Poetry: Sixty Poems (Harcourt)
Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best known poems, to celebrate his appointment as 15th Poet Laureate of the United States.
PATRICIA SMITH, Poetry: Blood Dazzler (Coffee House)
In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.
TERESE SVBODA, Memoir: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent (Graywolf) Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, selected by Robert Polito
In 1946, Terese Svoboda’s uncle served as a military policeman in occupied Japan. He was assigned to guard convicted fellow Americans—GIs gathered from all over the Pacific. "The captain called a meeting for all the MPs. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded. He said he was going to have to start executing the prisoners, the ones in the death cells." Svoboda's uncle remained a silent witness to the unqualified punishment of American prisoners, many of them African American. His closely guarded secret remained under wraps for decades. With the news of Abu Ghraib, he fell into a terrible depression, and the tapes he sent Svoboda ended abruptly with his suicide. Svoboda launched her own investigation,. Black Glasses Like Clark Kent reveals how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and be buried by time and protocol. View video clip from the book.
DEBRA WINGER, Memoir: Undiscovered (Simon & Schuster)
In this lyrical, deeply personal book, the beloved, three-time Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger reveals how she has drawn on her creative talents to transform a successful career into a fulfilling life. Known for her indelible, Oscar-caliber performances in such films as Terms of Endearment, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Urban Cowboy, Winger demonstrates that her creative range extends from screen to page, giving us an intimate glimpse of an artist wide-ranging in her gifts. Undiscovered is a book about transformations—personal, artistic, spiritual. Here, Winger passionately makes her case for forging a life beyond acting, lived among the people who inspire her—and shows how she has done just that. This is her first book.
C. D. WRIGHT, Poetry: Rising, Falling, Hovering
(Copper Canyon Press)
C.D. Wright is one of America’s most compelling and idiosyncratic poets—an artist who has developed a unmistakable voice and penetrating vision. C.D. Wright’s new book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, is an interweave of deeply personal and politically ferocious poems that write into the realities of our times—from illegal immigration and the specific consequences of Empire to the challenges of parenting and the honesty required of human-to-human relationship. But the style of Wright’s unpredictable language arcs through the historical context to reach with broadened vision deeper into the personal.
KEVIN YOUNG, Poetry: A Book of Odes, Elegies and Blues (Knopf)
Facing the sudden loss of his father, Young pays homage to his significant clan: to “aunties” and “double cousins,” and a great-grandfather’s grave in a segregated cemetery. At the book’s heart is a series of highly original food odes, poems that grow out of hunger and pain and find a way to satisfy both. Whether in “Ode to Pork” or in addresses to collard greens, catfish, and kitchen grease, Young counts his losses and our blessings, knowing “inside /anything can sing.” And Young is still singing the blues, though now with a touch of country and western, burnished by loss and a hard-won maturity, delivering poems that speak to our cultural losses, even as he buries his own, “sadder than / a wedding dress / in a thrift store.”
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER, Translation: Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House)
These spare and allegorical later poems of Romania’s great poet, Eugen Jebeleanu (1911–1991), are deeply moving expressions of collective and personal guilt from an artist whose early participation in and later disillusionment with the regime lend his work a particular, searing authenticity. Appearing in English for the first time, these profoundly unsentimental poems are politically and artistically significant lyric testimonies.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI, Poetry: Eternal Enemies
(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)
One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski’s is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history’s dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books—people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake—which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.
MARY KARR, Memoir: Lit