Heartbreaking and hilarious poems reaffirming our youngest conclusions about the world. Known for his dreamy abstraction and the emotional ferocity on the page and on the stage, this is a birthday card from the phenomenal world to our wildest selves. No approach to writing (odes, codes, lectures, letters, tests and attendance sheets) is left unexploited as a means to poetry. This is his second collection.

The 2018 edition of the Best American Poetry—“a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune)—collects the most significant poems of the year, chosen by Poet Laureate of California Dana Gioia. The guest editor for 2018, Dana Gioia, has an unconventional poetic background. Gioia has published five volumes of poetry, served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently sits as the Poet Laureate of California, but he is also a graduate of Stanford Business School and was once a Vice President at General Foods. He has studied opera and is a published librettist, in addition to his prolific work in critical essay writing and editing literary anthologies. Having lived several lives, Gioia brings an insightful, varied, eclectic eye to this year’s Best American Poetry. With his classic essay “Can Poetry Matter?”, originally run in The Atlantic in 1991, Gioia considered whether there is a place for poetry to be a part of modern American mainstream culture. Decades later, the debate continues, but Best American Poetry 2018 stands as evidence that poetry is very much present, relevant, and finding new readers.

Slow Dance with Sasquatch is an invitation into a private ballroom, a banquet hall in the middle of the woods. Here, you will sit and feast and waltz with your monsters. Here, you will harvest imagination from loneliness and longing. Here, you will coax laughter from the beasts’ mouths. Here, the table is always fully loaded. Here, the cake is always warm, and no matter how much of it you eat, you will never stop being beautiful.

"This is the greatest fucking book of poetry ever!" is how Beau would have described this book ten years ago. In truth, this collection of poems from 1997-2005 simply reflects a time when he was wrestling with the power he'd given his ego, struggling to break from the idealizing of love, and beating himself up for his shame and insecurities. He allows us into places most poets would edit out, exposing his limitations in his choices and in what's absent from each selection. Unafraid to live in fear, willing to share the empty of glory, and pushing to include the minutia as integral parts of one's process, these poems bring a mirror to his past, sans heroic declarations and beautiful decorations. Beau Sia's new collection of old work seeks to give a fuller picture for the reader who is looking for glimpses of the dark places growth begins, and who wants to feel like they are beautiful, without having to lie in the extremes of tragedy or enlightenment. Beau Sia swings gravity like a bat (aluminum, whiffle ball, and fruit). I hope to experience everything in this life, but if I leave this world before I get to hang glide the high points, it won't matter... I read Beau Sia. -Buddy Wakefield, "Live for a Living" Beau Sia mixes serious commentary, outrageous theatrics, and downright outrage into a potent, entertaining, and memorable cocktail. He is both the spoonful of sugar and the medicine, and he goes down in the most delightful way. - Taylor Mali, "Last Time As We Are” Beau Sia has forged a poetic voice unlike any other-- a 7th level hybrid of deep-sea-mind-diving and hip-hop-spelunking and time-travel-reporting that is once riveting, humbling and inspiring; a firey worship of the life you have to live. - Mindy Nettifee, "Rise of the Trust Fall”

A Choir of Honest Killers, Buddy Wakefield's first new book of prose and poetry in eight years, is an episodic novel exploring his creative climb out of the gritty underbelly of anger and shame, into the dissolution of tragedy addiction and the unmistakable clearing ahead. Having toured the world performing poetry for the last eighteen years, navigating the blunt loneliness of life on the road and a rotating cast of unlikely antagonists, Buddy keenly unpacks topics like the intense overcompensation of his masculinity, growing up terribly queer in the south, the detriments of public shame, a toxic fear of intimacy and the devastation of a failed major relationship. Wakefield revs up for his relay race to the light with refreshing humor and insight by finding meditation as the love of his life, accepting bliss and learning to let go. While the poetry in A Choir of Honest Killers undeniably throws plenty of insightful punches, it's the through-story about moving from devastation to frequent serendipity that gives the book pace. But it's worth noting, as Wakefield writes, “Perfect probably isn't what you think it is.” Wakefield is ultimately catapulted through collective misery, landing in a sustainably joyful life governed by awareness, equanimity and a constant thorough understanding of impermanence. A Choir of Honest Killers is the result of a lifetime of intense work, fervent seeking and largely takes aim at an exodus from tragedy addiction, into the transmutation of his self-admitted density.

Popular in queer communities, anti-war organizations, college campuses and women/gender studies programs, Andrea Gibson's second book of poems, The Madness Vase's topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibson's work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases out the other side. Moments later, we find ourselves inhaling words that fill us with light. Their luminous imagery is a buoy that allows us to resurface from their world, clutching new possibilities of our own, and linger in our psyches and entreat us to action. They challenge us to grow into our own skin. By the time you finish reading The Madness Vase, you too will believe, "Folks like us/We've got shoulder blades that rust in the rain/But they are still G-sharp/Whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption/So go ahead world/Pick us/To make things better."

This book contains poetry from a small team of wildly unique, talented and award-winning authors who have been touring the world for years. They have united for a once in a lifetime tour to perform their work and to charge the hearts of America with gut-splitting, lust wrangling, socially active verse. This is the Junkyard Ghost Revival.

A clear voice of her generation, Sierra DeMulder’s writing offers a gritty, sincere perspective on the subtle joys and modern pains of living. Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder’s personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms. DeMulder possesses the most important quality a young writer can have, a unique voice. That voice exploded onto the national poetry scene. Sierra uses subtlety and tension the way photographers use angle. She will eat your heart out with a spoon. -Karen Finneyfrock, “Ceremony for the Choking Ghost" DeMulder is intensely personal. - Huffington Post violently passionate and sweet, deftly moving between the two modes. - The Lamron, New Journal of SUNY Geneseo

Sheila Ingle’s husband John was brought up in Ingle Holler in Union, South Carolina, with eight other Ingle families. They worked together in the mills, shared their gardens, attended church, and enjoyed the playing and singing of the songs from the Grand Ole Opry. When five of the brothers went off to war, those who couldn’t fight took care of their families. The Ingles stuck together, just like they were taught in the Appalachian hills of Erwin, Tennessee. Love of God, love of family, and love of country were modelled in each home. In fact, one year Make Ingle put his sons and grandsons together to build Hillside Baptist Church. Adults kept up with the newspapers and the radios; world happenings were important. Any type of sickness brought a barrage of soup and cornbread, because children still had to eat. On those twenty acres, the children played in the creek, cowboys and Indians, and hide-and-seek. They built their own wagons and sleds to race down the hill on the dry, hickory leaves. All the boys learned to shoot a .22 caliber, and John’s mother Lois could light a match with her shots. Living in Ingle Holler was home, where each one was accepted.

The Romans believed that an artist's inspiration came from a spirit, called a genius, that lived in the walls of the artist's home. This character appears throughout the book, providing charming commentary and biting insight on the young author's creative process and emotional path.