Poetry. Fiction. In days before selfies and social media, postcards were a ubiquitous feature of travel, providing both means of communication with friends and family while away, and souvenirs of journeys once back home. Even if not quite gone, they seem more than a little nostalgic now, as do many of the poems in Jeanne Griggs' new collection, POSTCARD POEMS. By choosing to present her poems as short notes that could fit on a postcard, she has opted for a formal brevity; and the conceit of holiday communication allows her to write both about place (so that her poems are often both ekphrastic and epistolary--a neat trick) and about the people in her life. Travel, of course, is always a journey through both exterior and interior spaces, physical and mental, and we witness both in these often wistful poems. A visit on Cape Cod with friends, women of a certain age, affords an opportunity to live like in the books, / without any of the fuss / of having to sustain anything / except ourselves. Children grow up over the span of these travels, despite her wishing she had caged them, holding onto the past. A third visit to Niagara Falls is the first without her son--the first time / you were too young to remember / and the second too old to want / to come along--who is now far off in Siberia on travels of his own. Iowa is a place equally exotic, known only from watching a baseball movie / ...until we left our daughter / there, and they drive long out of the way to visit the Field of Dreams site, And it was there, / just like we'd seen it, / in real life. Stopping South of the Border she buys picture postcards of this place on the way / to where we're actually going. That's a good description of the mosaic of life that is constructed out of these brief notes, a chronicle of stops along the way until, in the final poem, all future plans suspended... / we are / still saving up from our last trip.

Clare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girl's natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance. In The Heavy-Petting Zoo, the male of the species is shown in all his preening glory, his growling and posturing exposed but also given marks out of ten. The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insider's in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of today's bright young things.

In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time. While Earnest can be read literally as Eleanor’s lover, he is best understood as another side of the poet’s self. The ambiguity at play in Earnest, Earnest? is embodied in the form of the “Earnest Postcards” that structure the book—these postcards are experimental in their use of images and formal in their dialogue with the sonnet. Thus, Earnest, Earnest? is a question of tone, address, and form.

A collection of poetry by Ted Kooser.

Postcard poems the author sent to rapper Lil Wayne during and after his incarceration at Rikers Island Prison.

It begins by chance: Leo receives emails in error from an unknown woman called Emmi. Being polite he replies, and Emmi writes back. A few brief exchanges are all it takes to spark a mutual interest in each other, and soon Emmi and Leo are sharing their innermost secrets and longings. The erotic tension simmers, and, despite Emmi being happily married it seems only a matter of time before they will meet in person. Will their feelings for each other survive the test of a real-life encounter? And if so, what then? Love Virtually is a funny, fast-paced and absorbing experience, with plenty of twists and turns, about a love affair conducted by email.

In California, Agnes, a giant Pacific octopus, pens a series of postcards to strangers from both above and below the pier.

"Comfortably intimate—classically adroit in its formal wit and invention—altogether unique yet in no way excluding, this meticulously edited edition of a master poet’s collected works gives us the defining bridge from the 'New American Poetry' of the ’50s to that poetry now contemporary on both coasts and in all conditions. No one ever recognized the people with whom he lived more particularly than did Ted Berrigan, and no one ever brought them home to a reader with such unaggressive and persistent power. This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley "Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself. It is wonderful to have his Collected Poems in print."—John Ashbery "A comprehensive and carefully chronicled volume that puts Ted Berrigan in historical context as one of the most influential poets of his generation. His poems: deft, light, definitely humorous, irreverent, poignant, ‘marvelous and tough.’ The truth doing its work, ‘the great man doing the ordinary thing,’ with a quick ear and a quick tongue, revealing the personal in the universal. He gives you his full attention—‘about to be born again thinking of you.’ "—Joanne Kyger "In a life devoted to experimental art, Ted Berrigan shaped his poetry and the space he occupied with a bold artistry based on his playful but powerfully skeptical view of the world. He wondered what might actually be captured within the pages of a book, but The Collected Poems allows us to again enjoy Ted Berrigan’s delightfully demanding presence."—Lorenzo Thomas "A singular balance of personal-historical vision and sentiment both sweet and sour, developed within the fractured verbalism of the late twentieth century found lyric, creates in Ted Berrigan's poems the unique colors of a particularly lived (and still intensely living) ensemble of moments."—Tom Clark, author of Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan "Some people are just more real than others. I don't know another way to say it. Ted Berrigan is totally real and he has fashioned an important sound for all of us to listen to. He put it all together just before everyone else in his time, our time, got going. America is lucky to count him as one of its great poets."—Peter Gizzi

Chicago Poetry Press is pleased to announce the release of Postcards from Poland, written by Joseph Kuhn Carey of Glencoe, IL, a Journal of Modern Poetry Book Award Selection. The poems in Mr. Carey's manuscript were composed over three years after the author took an inspiring journey with his family to the Polish cities of Krakow & Zakopane. The "artistic travel-log" nature of the poems present the sights, sounds and colorful events occurring in and around these two mysterious, gorgeous and overlooked cities, which are home to ancient castles, fantastic museums, breath-taking churches, soaring cable-car rides, astonishing mountains, and amazing nightclubs set deep in medieval cellars, as well as nearby horrific and powerfully enlightening WWII death camp locations. The author Joe Carey says: "There is something essential and important in these two cities for the older and younger Polish generations. For the older generation, Krakow and Zakopane represent things that survived WWII intact and largely untouched-while to the younger generation, the two cities represent the vibrant, energetic and robust side of Polish life." Joseph Kuhn Carey is the recipient of an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)/Deems Taylor Award for music-related writing (for articles written about jazz artist/composers Carla Bley, Charlie Haden and Anthony Braxton) and a Grammy-voting member of The Recording Academy. He's published a chapbook of poetry ("Bulk-Rate") and a book on jazz ("Big Noise From Notre Dame: A History of The Collegiate Jazz Festival," University of Notre Dame Press) and has released two "Loose Caboose Band" CDs of original children's songs with his brother, Bill, entitled "The Caboose is Loose" and "Mighty Big Broom," the latter of which garnered two first-round Grammy nominations in 2008 (both recordings, and all of the individual songs, are available on iTunes, CDbaby.com and Amazon.com). He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Fine Arts (in Creative Writing) degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Master of Science in Mass Communication degree from Boston University. He's traveled the country interviewing bakers for Bakery Magazine, written about jazz & blues artists for Down Beat, JazzTimes and The Boston Globe, and his poems have been selected in the Journal of Modern Poetry's JOMP 15 and JOMP 16 Poetry Contests, the Writer's Digest 7th Annual Poetry Awards Contest & 80th Annual Writing Competition, Highland Park Poetry's 2013 "Poetry That Moves" & 2013 "Poetry Challenge" contests and the Evanston Public Library's 2013 35th Annual Jo-Anne Hirschfield Memorial Poetry Awards. When not scribbling poems, stories and songs on all available scraps of paper to read to his wife and sons over dinner, he runs a successful multi-state property management business.

An anguished god surveys a world stricken by fundamentalism in these powerful poems by a writer whose cultural experience spans three countries: Pakistan, the country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of adoption. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books. Postcards from god was her first book from Bloodaxe. It combines two collections published separately in India, Purdah (1989) and Postcards from god (1994). In Purdah she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, children. Postcards from god meditates upon disquietudes in the poet's chosen society: its sudden acts of violence, its feuds and insanities, forcing her into a permanent wakefulness that fits her eyes with glass lids. If the poems collected in Purdah are windows shuttered upon a private world, those gathered into Postcards from god are doorways leading out into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of the tender grace of attention.