Matthew has been a rising star in American poetry. At the center of Mayakovsky's Revolver is the suicide of Dickman's older brother. But the book is also an exploration of love: how to love the unknown and how to celebrate life despite grief. These are elegies and love poems, verses about and for the body of the beloved. This book finds the connection between grief and joy, comfort and rage, and confirms Dickman's standing as a major young poet.

From a dazzling, award-winning young poet, a collection that paints life as a celebration in the dark. At the center of Mayakovsky’s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman’s older brother. “Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief. from “Mayakovsky’s Revolver” I keep thinking about the way blackberries will make the mouth of an eight year old look like he’s a ghost that’s been shot in the face. In the dark I can see my older brother walking through the tall brush of his brain. I can see him standing in the lobby of the hotel, alone, crying along with the ice machine.

All American Poem embraces the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. Introduction by Tony Hoagland.

"Their verse . . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality." —The New Yorker Identical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters—landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare. "Lucky in Kansas" Judy Garland: This is always the worst part Tin Man: The coming back Judy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shit The Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farm Straw Man: I wouldn't call it lucky The Lion: We were lucky to get back Straw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky means Judy Garland: It's funny what you miss Tin Man: The running Judy Garland: The flying Tin Man: The flying monkeys Judy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green world Michael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.

Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity, by one of the most fearless poets of his generation. "Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure" (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.

At the center of Mayakovsky s Revolver is the suicide of Matthew Dickman's older brother. Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief.

A play and selected poetry by Russian author Vladimir Mayakovsky.

“By turns tender, heartbroken, enraptured, delighted, angry, melancholy—all the turns of human family life.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s An intimate, moving volume of poems on the anxieties and love of single fatherhood and domestic life. Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman’s signature “clarity and ability to engage” (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children’s dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents’ failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work—repetitive, exhausting, and sublime—of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet’s hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself.

Like a flash of lightning it came to him—the unathletic high school student Ted Kooser saw a future as a famous poet that promised everything: glory, immortality, a bohemian lifestyle (no more doing dishes, no more cleaning his room), and, particularly important to the lonely teenager, girls! Unlike most kids with a sudden ambition, Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and thirteenth poet laureate of the United States, made good on his dream. But glory was a long time coming, and along the way Kooser lived the life that has made his poetry what it is, as deeply grounded in family, work, and the natural world as it is attuned to the nuances of language. Just as so much of Kooser’s own writing weaves geography, history, and family stories into its measures, so does this first critical biography consider the poet’s work and life together: his upbringing in Iowa, his studies in Nebraska with poet Karl Shapiro as mentor, his career in insurance, his family life, his bout with cancer, and, always, his poetry. Combining a fine appreciation of Kooser’s work and life, this book finally provides a fuller and more complex picture of a writer who, perhaps more than any other, has brought the Great Plains and the Midwest, lived large and small, into the poetry of our day.

In her second collection of poetry, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine-grained and crude. With her unique and engaging voice that mixes pop culture, archaic mysticism, and inventiveness with lyric forms, these poems play with reality and fantasy, distorting perception, and are universal and personal at once.