A collection of essays, stories, and recipes by James M. Cain, edited by Roy Hoopes and Lynne Barrett.
Kingdom extends Joseph Millar's articulate devotion to the astonishments of daily life--their mingled beauty and pain. As in his first three books, Millar, like the late Philip Levine, has a keen eye for the hardscrabble details of working-class lives--from California's wheat fields to the Lehigh Valley to the rooftops of Paris and a host of other locales "down here on earth in the kingdom." Perhaps more fully than any recent book, this one calls to mind Dylan Thomas's assessment that the best poems "show us that we are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that our bliss and suffering are forever shared, and forever all our own." Kingdom shows Millar working at the height of his powers, sifting the "rag and bone shop of the heart" for songs and stories. It's his best book yet.
Windthrow: a forestry term for the uprooting or breaking of trees by wind. The voices of K. A. Hays' third volume of poetry speak out of nature's violent transformations. At turns self-effacing and empathic, fearful and accepting, these are poems of heat: the heat of new motherhood, of uncertainty, and of grief. Here, the things of a teeming world--" the truck stacked with cut trees," "the military jet, droning over," and "the beachgrass, blown / with dusty miller sprout"--are bound for renewal and ruin. In poems spare and strange, Hays looks outward to lay bare the complexities of our emotional lives.
"Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alan Dugan described Skoyles's poems as "clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time." That description holds true for this selection of poems from his previous four books: A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. The title, taken from the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, alludes to the temporal quality of existence, how one moves from sunlight to twilight in the course of a lifetime. And how those evening hours arrive suddenly, as if in no time at all."
The poems in Inside Job range from intensely autobiographical lyrics to brief historical portraits of literary figures like Grace Paley and Jorge Luis Borges, to obituaries of idiosyncratic characters such as heavyweight boxing contenders and inventors of candy bars. The tone is often wry, sometimes wistful, and always compassionate. Praise for John Skoyles: "For poems so full of linguistic playfulness, there is a surprising accuracy of perception." --The Georgia Review "Wise, benevolent, witty." --Northwest Review "Skoyles scrapes at the surface of everyday things and finds a wonderful strangeness just underneath." --Harvard Review
New play by the author of I Love You Terribly
Joyce Peseroff's new collection teases the nature of self-knowledge from a world where identity is fluid, character fragmented, landscape overwhelmed, and culture riven. In poems that dramatize politics, eros, myth, and mortality, Peseroff's edgy wit cuts through the classical Greek definition--"You're not an animal/or a god, take the middle path"--to parse our century's slippery dialectics. Playful and complex, Know Thyself distills music from the salt of human experience.
Souvenir, a collection of autobiographical essays rooted in the present, investigates travel, staying put, and how it is that our experience of being here right now includes so much of being elsewhere at another time. Rhett reconciles present to past in serious encounters with birth and death, alongside lighter observations. In a world that makes no sense except the sense we make of it, Souvenir plays with the dynamics of home and away to represent the fullness of daily life.
An anthology of poems by twelve exceptional young American female writers
"Beginning in poverty and a broken home, Wesley McNair went on, through family hardships and setbacks, to become what Philip Levine has called "one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry." This memoir tells how he developed into a poet against the odds, incorporating his struggles into his art."--Publisher's website.
Like Robert Frost's North of Boston, David Yezzi's Birds of the Air intersperses charged lyrics with longer dramatic narratives. His monologues explore the frenetic pressures of urban life, as a number of memorable characters take stage: the guy who is hired to clear out a dying man's apartment; the actor stuck in an inadvertently hilarious production of Macbeth and his estranged girlfriend's tragic end; and the short-order cook who elevates his work to an art form. Like the birds of the air described by St. Matthew, these threadbare denizens of the modern city subsist on the few scraps that fall to them.
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