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.

From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet’s native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world’s relationship to the collective past. Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing—and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground. A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.