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What happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying, given our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds? Bertram's third full-length collection of poems shows how the factual is tinted and stylized, filtered through a self grappling with the difficulty of knowing what is "real."

In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin, poems all in English but springing from widely varied voices, histories, and geographies. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and enchantment. These poems confirm English to be vital and evolving, deployed by revered and emerging poets in Aotearoa/New Zealand (selected by Hinemoana Baker) and Australia (by Les Murray), Canada (by Todd Swift), the Caribbean (by Ishion Hutchinson and five other Caribbean poets), Ghana (by Kwame Dawes), India (by Sudeep Sen), and South Africa (by Rustum Kozain).

Poetry. Winner of The Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press's First / Second Book Award, chosen by Dan Beachy-Quick. Kristina Jipson's HALVE peels away the layers of orderly narrative with which we try and tame the chaos of mourning. At once frank and elusive, Jipson's poems resist the pull of storytelling and personal confiding, instead using formal variation to embody emotion and memory. These poems lay bare the experience of losing a brother and evoke the haunting that results as language fails to contain either grief or the love that precedes such a loss.

Both a cyber-thriller and a simmering romance, MY IMMACULATE ASSASSIN raises disturbing and timely questions about the technology and morality of "idealistic" murder.

Poetry. Award-winning poet Jennifer Militello's third full-length collection, A CAMOUFLAGE OF SPECIMENS AND GARMENTS, casts a smokescreen of selves. Fragmentary letters addressing illness and struggle are interspersed with ventriloquisms in the voices of mythological heroes and long-dead composers, ancient goddesses and murdered girls. Intricate "dictionaries" offer multi- layered definitions that, like layers of clothing or ancient amulets, are meant to provide shelter from a world that cannot be controlled. This captivating book stitches together a plethoric identity so as to examine the disguises we all wear.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson. "Early Surrealist, resistance fighter, anti-nuclear activist, and exquisite poet, Rene Char is at the heart of 20th century French poetry.... Carlson gives English-language readers a real sense of Char's depth and breadth. And her masterful translations catch the barely contained drama that gives Char's work such tension and presence"--Cole Swensen.

Poetry. Stitching a seam. Sweeping a floor. First light after working the all- night shift. These are small moments in everyday jobs, but surprisingly luminous. In his tenth book, Michael Chitwood describes hard, often dangerous labor, but renders also the quietude of housekeeping and office routines. We call this "making a living," the way we move through our days, to pay for the roof over our heads. Raking autumn leaves or drilling a dynamite hole to clear rock for a house foundation, we construct our lives. Chitwood knows that what we do today roots us in the past and becomes our future. Here is praise, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, for all our gear and tackle.

Poetry. Fascinated by what emerges from unlikely sources when absorbed into memory, Gale Marie Thompson's poems delight in what remains: John Wayne, Bewitched, turnip fields, camellias and canned figs, and--of course--kitchens. SOLDIER ON uses the light of the kitchen as a starting (and ending) point to explore remembered spaces, which take on new facets and textures in a flood of associations and the mind's endless cross-indexing. Inside a world of objects, people, and artifacts, SOLDIER ON constructs the language in which we love and lose love.

As gradual as a cloud passing or a blossom opening, this is the story of a woman very slowly dying, accompanied by her husband and an astonishing number of offspring, from infants to young adults. David Huddle's nineteenth book explores how children grieve, and shows how the wit and courage of even the littlest brothers and sisters can be a source of resilience. Familial conversation composes an intimate requiem, transforming loss into comprehension. Only one of our finest writers could manage this delicate material. THE FAULKES CHRONICLE is subtle, and autumnal novel - made of momentary details yet with an encompassing grandeur.

Poetry. Honorable Mention, Berkshire Prize for First or Second Book, chosen by the Tupelo Press Editors. Each poem in THE INFANT SCHOLAR is an homage to those born brilliant and vulnerable, those who carry around with them a great comprehension at odds with their age. These poems are built upon facts and observations unearthed while panning the world for gold: diamonds sewn into the Romanov corsets that deflected bullets, or a lift-off in some early space flight to the moon, with a chimpanzee at the helm; Iphigenia saying goodbye to her beloved daylight, and Edward R. Murrow describing what soldiers heard as they entered prison camps at the end of World War II: "the handclapping of babies."

"Natasha Sajé's new book Bend divulges the spirit of a sensualist and the habits of a contemplative; sometimes vice versa. Colors are separated with the veracity of paint. Shifts in temperature are registered and background noises distinguished, not only for texture's sake but for their essential contribution to the poems' substance. . . . For company Sajé summons a curious assortment of lettered forbears including Cotton Mather, Henry Vaughan, Nietzsche, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley. A virtuous and subtly depraved book is Bend." -C.D. Wright

Literary Nonfiction. Life in Art Series. Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that ideal, writing of books he has loved and of the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores the quest for freedom in thought and action among the Amish, the French partisans, and the "heretical" Cathars, and he offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter. "THE PERFECT LIFE is no miscellany. Its very personal narrator is a wanderer in time as well as place--from the mysteries of childhood to the failures of an adult; from the American Midwest and Gettysburg to enclaves in Sonoran Mexico and the region of the Languedoc. All the pieces here are of a piece. Along the way there are poignant portraits of some of our most significant poets and precise meditations on examples of war. What connects the disparate parts of Stitt's journey is a lyric intelligence unafraid of self-analysis, in stories that do not turn away and in prose that does not yield."--Stanley Plumly "This deviously serious stealth memoir cum literary whodunit is light as a feather."--Suzannah Lessard

The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals, insects, sugar, cardamom, legends, countries, relatives, soaps, fruits-taste and touch. I love the nubby layerings of lines, luscious textures and constructions. . . . She knows that many worlds may live in one house. . . ."

"Karen An-hwei Lee's third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity's essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought....Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite -'ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.'" - Rigoberto GonzálezThere's an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word "joy" in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe's minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.

Poetry. Using the metaphor of a "flight cage," where birds are held captive, as physical manifestation of the space from which her speakers address us, Dunham reinvigorates the persona poem. Instead of "performing" historical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Akhmatova, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she invites them to inhabit her, flickering in and out of sight, refusing an easy artifice. "In her second collection of poetry, Rebecca Dunham, with stunning formal innovation, parses the blessings and afflictions of womanhood, of motherhood. These poems, brilliant on their surfaces, dark and grave in their depths, will startle the reader with their radiance, and haunt--ghost-ridden as they are--with their otherworldly gravity"--Eric Pankey.

Poetry. It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. "Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity"--Dean Young.

Poetry. In 2007, the Tupelo Press Poetry Project was established to provide poets and creative writing teachers with engaging, challenging prompts or provocations for writing new poems.The Winter 2012 edition of the Poetry Project celebrated Valentine's Day with a simple challenge: write a stunningly good erotic poem. Be bad. Be good and bad. To our delight, that challenge was met and then some. Sensual, witty, cerebral--the results are this anthology, modest in size only, which includes the winners, plus our favorites of the submissions.Contributors: Cynthia Rausch Allar, Michelle Bitting, Lisa Coffman, Amy Dryansky, Li Yun Alvarado, Paula Brancato, Gillian Cummings, Darla Himeles, Joel F. Johnson, Christopher Kokinos, Amy MacLennan, Stephen Massimilla, Barbara Mossberg, Susanna Rich, Aubrey Ryan, Anna Claire Hodge, Janet R. Kirchheimer, Conley Lowrance, Lea Marshall, Mary Ann Mayer, Steven Paschall, Liz Robbins, Jo Anne Valentine Simson, Jeneva Stone, Molly Spencer, Judith Terzi, Gail Thomas, Kim Triedman, Bruce Willard, and P. Ivan Young.

Chitwood's seventh collection of poems is tremendously varied in shape and pace, from terse, reflexive aphorisms to rangy narratives.

You Can Tell the Horse Anything is a debut collection of prose poems that explores the many manifestations of longing-true love, spiritual redemption, a good night's sleep, the list is long and varied. Using humor and lyricism, they give voice to an array of animals as well as human characters who inhabit the sometimes rocky terrain between the common place and the absurd. Ultimately, these poems - these tightly packed mini-dramas - are microcosms of our own everyday lives. They challenge our sense of self, our sense of belonging and comfort. They ask us to tread carefully in a world that is easily turned on its side. Yet, ironically, they also encourage us to be hopeful, to realize that solace and small joy can be found talking to a horse or raising worms on a moonlit mountain.

Poetry. In her second book, Jennifer Militello investigates the tensions of identity as a source of illness and health. BODY THESAURUS presents the human physique as a flawed conduit and, through poems highlighting symptoms, antidotes, and diagnostic tests, seeks alternate renderings for the complexities of self. Even as the endangered psyche supplies a filter, gods are confronted, maladies are faced, and actualities are marked, remembered, or lost. The beauty of struggle and the chance for redemption act as counterstream, increasingly evident and--again and again in the poet's verse--indisputably real.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay "Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves," Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite's fusion of gender identities: "Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: 'i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body' ... This is [Waite's] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence - to get around English's pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and..."

To go without food from dawn to dusk for the month of Ramadan - how does this feel? When we deny our major appetites, what do we become? Kazim Ali brings a poet's precision and ardor to his brilliant meditations on ritual fasting.Jane Hirshfield, author of AFTER and NINE GATES, says: "Kazim Ali -- a writer whose powers astonish in everything he puts pen to -- has made in FASTING FOR RAMADAN a book that is hybrid, peregrine, and deeply, quietly revelatory. Ali's meditations on the month-long ritual fast unfold, across cultures and spiritual practices, the deep meaning of a chosen foregoing. These journal-born pages are both intimate and public, at once ecumenical, particular, daily, and eloquently learned; planted on the deep roots of tradition, they breathe this moment's air. Is it possible for a work to be at once modest and an undeniable tour de force? This book proves: it is."

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America's leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.