<P>Heather Christle's stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in&#160;Heliopause&#160;locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking ...
<P>From the depths of sorrow following the sudden death of her closest female mentor, Brenda Hillman asks anguished questions in this book of poems about separation, spiritual transcendence, and the difference between life and death. Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation ...
<P>In this nuanced and moving new collection of poems, Brenda Coultas weaves a meditation on contemporary life and our place in it. Coultas, who is known for her investigative documentary approach, turns her attention to landfills and the odd histories embedded in the materials found there. The poems make their home among urban and rural detritus, waste, trinkets, and found objects. The title poem, for example, takes its cue from t ...
<P>Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention ...
<P>Public Figures is an essay-poem with photographs and text that begins with a playful thought experiment: statues of people in public spaces have eyes, but what are they looking at? To answer that question, Jena Osman sets up a camera to track the gaze of a number of statues in Philadelphia—mostly 19th century military figures carrying weapons. How does their point of view differ from our own? And how does it compare, say, to the ...
<P>When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam's Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam's lifetime. «How should I mourn?» David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam's first bath, a «holy/Rite»; tying the shoelaces of the «little man»; traveling to Greece, whe ...
<P>"When history proves useless and consensus chimerical," Donald Revell has written, «the poet's necessity is invention, and this does a lot to explain our century's preference for revision over mimesis.» For Revell, The disruptions of this century have destroyed old illusions of historical continuity: «The consolations of history are furtive,/ then fugitive, then forgotten.» Invoking such contemporary events as the coll ...
