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In the deeply personal Decade of the Brain, Janine Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized American citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major auto accident. The collection is an odyssey of what it means to recover—physically and mentally—in the aftermath of trauma and traumatic brain injury, charting when “before” crosses into “after.” Through connected poems, buckling and expansive syntax, ekphrasis, and conjoined poetic forms, Decade of the Brain remembers and misremembers hospital visits, violence and bodily injury, intimate memories, immigration status, family members, and the self. After the accident I turned out all of the lights in the room while I watched, concussed, from the mirror. I edged like a fever with nothing on the tip of my tongue.
"Janine Joseph writes with an open and easy intimacy. The language here is at once disruptive and familiar, political and sensual, and tinged by the melancholy of loss and the discomforting radiance of redemption. A strong debut." —Chris Abani The best way to hide is in plain sight. In this politically-charged and candid debut, we follow the chronicles of an illegal immigrant speaker over a twenty-year span as she grows up in the foreign and forbidding landscape of America. From "Ivan, Always Hiding": I strained for the socket as you pulled me, my bare legs against your legs in the windowless dark. The room, snuffed out, could have been no larger than a freight car, no smaller than a box van; we couldn't tell anymore, the glints in the shellacked floor, too, were dulled. This is like death, you said, always joking. I slid my head into the crook of your neck, and didn't disagree. Raised in the Philippines and California, Janine Joseph holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her libretto "From My Mother's Mother" was performed as part of the Houston Grand Opera's "Song of Houston: East + West" series. A Kundiman and Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, she is an assistant professor of English at Weber State University.
Poetry. "Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile." Thurston Moore "'I wanted to be high, but now I'm trapped in my life.' Frustrated by the limits of his world, PARTYKNIFE's youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. 'Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am.' These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life." Sarah Manguso "PARTYKNIFE is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren't allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, 'the future.'" Blake Butler"
In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life’s work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.
Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them—plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript—can be found in this masterful collection of her life’s work. The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth. In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost. Even Jean's therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions—a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean's wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books—back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle. In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: "This is happiness. Old life,/ I'm glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found,/ I was written on a wall in air." The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet. Ada Limon states, “The extraordinary poems of Jean Valentine have often existed in the between spaces, the caves, the secret rooms of the mind. They are gorgeous wonders and curiosities that bring us a new kind of light. The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine will no doubt serve as an essential handbook for anyone looking to lean into the knotty questions of human existence.”
'These annual anthologies of the poems in the running for the Forward Prizes remain the best way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.' Daily Telegraph
While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent “afterward” of someone’s death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep—whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that’s happened in a life—all of the love and all of the loss—into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined—the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way.
Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to articulate a vision of human consciousness that is both scientifically informed and poetically truthful. The Lyric in the Age of the Brain examines several contemporary poets—Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Robert Creeley, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and experimentalists such as Harryette Mullen and Tan Lin—to discern what new language, poetic forms, and depictions of selfhood this perplexity forces into being. Nikki Skillman shows that under the sway of physiological conceptions of mind, poets ascribe ever less agency to the self, ever less transformative potential to the imagination. But in readings that unravel factional oppositions in contemporary American poetry, Skillman argues that the lyric—a genre accustomed to revealing expansive aesthetic possibilities within narrow formal limits—proves uniquely positioned to register and redeem the dispersals of human mystery that loom in the age of the brain.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the most acclaimed debut collection of poetry published in recent years, as well as one of the most relevant and accessible. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, draws on both English and Indian-English traditions to tell stories of alienation, assimilation, aspiration and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.
Rebel Lions, Michael McClure's first book of poetry since the retrospective Selected Poems (1985), spans a decade of profound personal change and poetic evolution for the author. In an introductory note, he provides a backdrop for the collection, which moves from old life to new. McClure's work bursts forth from the matrix of the physical and spiritual. "Poetry is one of the edges of consciousness," he asserts. "And consciousness is a real thing like the hoof of a deer or the smell of a bush of blackberries at the roadside in the sun." In the first section of Rebel Lions, "Old Flames," the poems range from the realistic ("Awakening and Recalling a Summer Hike") to the metaphorical ("The Silken Stitching"), as the poet addresses a life on the verge of transformation. The second section, "Rose Rain," exults in a life transformed through love's alchemy. Rebel Lions closes with "New Brain," poems affirming the freedom of all humankind and matter in the eternal now.