Poetry should make you feel, and that is exactly what the powerful and plain-spoken poems in Mathias Nelson's DIP MY PACIFIER IN WHISKEY do. They make you feel deeply, sometimes like you have been kicked in the crotch, but feel nonetheless. This is the first poetry book in a long time that you can embrace one moment and throw across the room the next-the one thing, however, I guarantee you won't do is put it down.

Originally written in 2000 as his Masters thesis, Raymond P. Hammonds Poetic Amusement has been passed around underground as a digital file for ten years among those associated with The New York Quarterly. As provocative today as it was when it was written, what began as Hammonds observations of the influence of po biz and writing programs on contemporary American poetry became a timeless treatise on poetry itself. Using his experience with NYQ and devouring many literary critics across the ages from the ancient Greeks to contemporary critics, Hammond examines at once both our current literary environment and the essence of poetry. In seeking to answer the questions What is poetry? and Where does poetry come from? for himself, he encourages readers to ask those questions for and of themselves as well. Relevant and accessible to readers and writers of poetry and to those who think they dont know or want to know what poetry is, Poetic Amusement will anger, elevate and inspire all those who read it.

My Misspent Youth is an incisive collection that marked the start of a new millennium and became a cult classic, from the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed and the author of The Unspeakable An essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for her fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths the hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

From his chapbook, Spiked Libido, to his unpublished manuscript, Unholy Melodies collects the entire body of work of Ted Jonathan. Images of the original chapbook, Spiked Libido, are followed by complete, unchanged presentations of both Bones & Jokes and Run. The entire collection is capped off with a faithful presentation of Ted's unpublished manuscript, Unholy Melodies, exactly as it was sent to the editor prior to his death.