A first-person account of the Iraq War by a solider-poet, winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award. Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James’ own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner’s yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

Camera Lyrica navigates the intersection between realism and naturalism, locating moment by moment--the only way it can--the artful, necessary, and always mysterious transformation that occurs between the perceiver and perceived. Amy Newman's subjects range from Audubon's drive for precision, Michelangelo's unfinished Pietá, Darwin and forty-year old Barbie, to a meditation on the diversity of Type itself. With grace and dexterity, her intelligent eye dips into Catholic Mysteries, and the quiet but momentous domesticity of a backyard quince tree. Hers is a language both lush and spare, as she filters it and the world through a lucid imagination, transforming both into something beautiful, challenging, and wholly new.

The family response to the sudden deaths of the speaker's two young nieces is at the center of Catherine Barnett's award-winning first collection. This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy. “Living Room Altar” Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean, except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt, except for her body, which once held their bodies, my sister wants everything back now— If there were a god who could out of empty shells carried by waves to shore make amends— If the ocean saved in a jar could keep from turning to salt— She’s hearing things: bird calling to bird, cat outside the door, thorn of the blackberry against the trellis. "These heart-breaking poems of an all-too-human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so." —Robert Creeley

A single word holds a narrative of the human condition.

HE’LL EAT YOUR HEART, EAT YOUR EYES, DEVOUR YOUR SOUL, THEN YOUR LIES, HE’LL MAKE YOU SCREAM, MAKE YOU CRY, AND WON’T LET UP UNTIL YOU DIE… After her mother’s funeral, Dracula-obsessed Catherine Hall goes to stay at her Aunt Lyrica’s B&B in Whitby, a place she used to visit often as a child. She thinks some sea air and time spent with her mother’s eccentric sister is just what she needs. Catherine’s past is marred by a terrible secret, however. A secret shrouded in folklore. And it’s not long till Catherine finds herself immersed in a hellish nightmare in which a familiar dark presence unveils itself and preys on her every fear. Memories of Aunt Lyrica’s daughter, the popular and outgoing teenage-runaway Calanthe Black, come crashing back, and Catherine realises she must piece together the terrifying truth of what really happened to her cousin in the summer of 2003. Because when Catherine’s teenage sister, Summer, the family’s blue-eyed girl, unexpectedly turns up at the B&B, Catherine – now haunted by ghostly visions – can’t help but wonder: is history about to repeat itself? EDITORIAL REVIEW: "This book is many things: Dracula tribute, character study, composition on grief and regret, ghost story and murder mystery. Normally, I'd scoff at a book attempting to be all of these things. However, Dixon deftly navigates through each facet of the story with the ease of a veteran writer. Do you like your horror novels to be dark? And awesome? Then here you go. Grade: A" - Jason Cavallaro, Horror Drive-In

Treating subjects from landscape to sculpture to a 19th century technical encyclopedia, the poet is fascinated with light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury—things transparent, evanescent, impossible to grasp. Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down. From “The Invention of Streetlights” Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own. There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin. and light entire rooms. . Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man. on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn. and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched. Notre Dame seem small. . Now the streets stand still. . By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium. to photograph a midnight ball. “Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali

These soulful lyrics use allusive imagery and ecumenical diction to consider the pastoral as a life to inhabit, not an artifact or idealized place to visit. Here, the specter of loss makes a world more precious—notions of home and love must be ever-evolving as colts are stillborn and pigeons slaughtered, apple blossoms frozen in spring and dead lambs burned in diesel fire. But, these poems insist, there is beauty in the soil and beauty in birth—and death in birth, and beauty in death, as well. And Upon the Earth No Wind Pigeons erupting from a barn. Twenty-three ewes stand at once, ice-chunks clinking in their wool. I call, soft, call loud but the mare treads the snow blue. Am I born to constant hazard? Wood becomes more than wood simply by its burning. Steam rises up from the land— I call but do not move. The moon rising shines even upon all things and I can’t tell which is mare and what’s weather. Silence in eaves ever after. “It is rare to see a poet work so hard in the physical world—serious farm labor—and still catch a fleeting glimpse of the spirit. Kevin Goodan does this convincingly because his language is so precise and his mind knows when to jump and when to stand still. This is a remarkable book.”—James Tate Kevin Goodan received his BA from the University of Montana and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His poems have been -published in Ploughshares and other journals.

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

Born and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) came to the United States in the mid-1970s to pursue graduate study in literature; by the mid-1980s, he had begun to establish himself as one of the most important American poets of the late 20th century. Mad Heart Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali is the first comprehensive examination of all stages of his career, from his earliest work published in India but never reissued in the U.S., through his seven poetry volumes from American publishers, ultimately collected as The Veiled Suite. The essays, written by a range of poets and scholars, many of whom knew and studied with Ali, consider his early free verse poetry; his transition into writing more formalist poetry; his correspondence with poets Anthony Hecht and James Merrill; his literary engagement with the political realities of contemporary Kashmir; his teaching and mentorship of young poets; and Ali’s championing of the ghazal, a traditional Eastern poetic form, in English. Some essays have a predominantly scholarly focus, while others are more personal in their tone and content. All exhibit a deep appreciation for Ali’s life and work. Contributors to this volume include Sejal Shah, Rita Banerjee, Amanda Golden, Ravi Shankar, Abin Chakraborty, Amy Newman, Christopher Merrill, Jason Schneiderman, Stephen Burt, Raza Ali Hassan, Syed Humayoun, Feroz Rather, Dur e Aziz Amna, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Mahwash Shoaib, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Grace Schulman, and Ada Limón. Mad Heart Be Brave closes with a long biographical sketch and elegy by Agha Shahid Ali’s friend Amitav Ghosh and a comprehensive bibliography assembled by scholar Patricia O’Neill with Reid Larson.