Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.

Winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, North American Stadiums is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive. “You were supposed to find God here / the signs said.” In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention; overlooked places of industry become sites for pilgrimage; and history large and small—of a city, of a family, of a shirt—is unearthed. Here is a factory emptying for the day, a snowy road just past border patrol, a baseball game at dusk. Mile signs point us toward Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Salt Lake City, Chicago. And god is not the God expected, but the still moment amid movement: a field “lit like the heart / of the night,” black stars stitched to the yellow sweatshirts of men in a crowd. A map “bleached / pale by time and weather,” North American Stadiums is a collection at once resolutely unsentimental yet deeply tender, illuminating the historical forces that shape the places we inhabit and how those places, in turn, shape us.

Bloodwarm is a collection that explores what itís like to live in a Black body that is constantly scrutinized and dissected beneath the white gaze. These poems both utilize and reinvigorate classic poetic forms with a voice that speaks back to the mob that hunts it. This book is an act of rebellion, an assertion of worth, a will to live. Poetry.

Mary Peelen's spare poems pulse with what they contain and describe--in both the imagistic and the mathematical sense of the word--harnessing the power of the sciences to navigate the chthonic worlds of illness, loss, and desire on both personal and planetary scales. Peelen denies the divisions of mind and body, art and science, precision and ardor. Her poems resonate with allusion (Lady Lazarus's hair as a supernova) and sound (copernicium, ununoctium). Peelen unveils new ways to make sense of our complicated, contradictory world. -- Elizabeth Bradfeld, naturalist and author of Once Removed

A selection of poems and seminal prose texts about poetics from major Russian writers of the Modernist era.

"The debut poetry collection from writer and musician Cameron McGill"--