Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).
Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work.
For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today.
Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.
Paperback, 224 pages, Scribner, September 2023
Have you heard the name “Hafiz”?! Here are soaring flights of fancy and solid life lessons, from one of the greatest poets of all time—made new by two award-winning translators. This is the perfect introduction to Hafiz for all lovers of poetry and seekers of love, spirituality, and meaning.
“Hafiz’s poetry aims to close the gap between mortal humans and the divine, and this book opens a door to the poet’s gardens. From the first page, you are invited to settle into a sublime sanctuary and partake in enchantment until you feel the Beloved inside your beating heart and running through your veins.”
—Ari Honarvar, author of A Girl Called Rumi
Paperback, 244 pages, Hampton Roads Publishing, October 2023
COWABUNGALY YOURS AT THE END OF THE WORLD is a scientific study that charmingly explores how astrophysics, our dying planet, iconic pop music, and love are intertwined. This is a chapbook that “knows what it is to spin on an axis of want.” I won’t be loaning my copy to anyone, in fear they’ll never give it back. – Sofia Fey, Poetry Editor at Hooligan Magazine Ashley Cline writes to us urgently from the end of the world, expertly balancing apathy with survival as we teeter on the edge of apocalypse. These poems know the end is near, and they’re not afraid. They’ll stay with you right up to the final breath.” – Dia Roth, Poet
Paperback, 50 pages, Lulu, March 2023
Drawing from the simple directness of Kenneth Rexroth’s book of Chinese poem translations and the always-present beauty of Lorca’s voice, Mojgani tumbles into the joys of desire, not just from others, but also unfurls a meditation on how to love whether in the presence of another or when alone. Birthed out of laughter and love, pain and remembrance, these new poems arrived out of a touchless world that has asked us all to navigate the difference between loneliness and alone. In this time Mojgani asks himself: “How do we show up to cup a little bit of ourselves into the soft earth and allow time to play its own part in what of ourselves we farm?”
Paperback, 100 pages, Write Bloody Publishing, July 2023
Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is also the winner of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition for his chapbook, My Burning City. He has been a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize, Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, the C.D. Wright Prize, and the Black River Chapbook Competition. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International and a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from several publications, including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, COUNTERCLOCK, Chicago Review, Nat. Brut, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Prairie Schooner.
Paperback, 90 pages, Black Lawrence Press, May 2023
Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is also the winner of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition for his chapbook, My Burning City. He has been a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize, Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, the C.D. Wright Prize, and the Black River Chapbook Competition. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International and a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from several publications, including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, COUNTERCLOCK, Chicago Review, Nat. Brut, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Prairie Schooner.
Paperback, 90 pages, Black Lawrence Press, May 2023
“A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems.” —Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
Paperback, 368 pages, Tuttle Publishing, April 2018
Winner of an Albertine and FACE Foundation Grant from Villa Albertine for excellence. The Abduction details the terror and sorrow surrounding the abduction of Maram Al-Masri’s only child by her then husband who fled to Syria, where due to the patriarchal nature of society and the social/political problems she was unable to fight for custody. These are haunting, spellbinding poems of love, despair, and hope, a delicate, profound and powerful book on intimacy, a mother’s rights, war, exile, and freedom.
Paperback, 100 pages, White Pine Press, April 2023
Three devastating losses are at the heart of Susan Hayden’s lyrical memoir, Now You Are a Missing Person. The suddenness of each of these deaths ― her father, her childhood best friend and her husband ― sparks and guides a series of explorations to claim equilibrium and a sense of self. Stories, poems and fragments are woven together to trace Hayden’s search for identity and belonging through lovers and friends, some enduring, some ephemeral. She creates an intimate album of her life, from the 1970s to the present, evoked in an LA populated by troubadours and actors, both shining and fading. Raised in an observant Jewish family in the suburban San Fernando Valley, she struggles and finds her footing in an ever-shifting culture of expectations around body image, sexuality, motherhood, widowhood, and autonomy.
Paperback, 162 pages, Moontide Press, May 2023
For Alexis Rhone Fancher fans, the wait is over. Admit it! You’ve been lusting after something naughty to liven up your life. Once again, Alexis delivers. Brazen showcases her best work since Erotic, and includes all the “Famous Poet Behaving Badly” poems, together in one volume for the first time.
Do it! Give in to your Brazen nature …
Paperback, 108 pages, NYQ Books, March 2023
Love Ends in A Tandem Kayak is the death of stunted, academic fluffing in the world of fast, junk food verse. It is the embrace of saying the hard thing without the adornment of trite, fraudulent wisdom. This book is madness and crawling toward the confusing light. It is memory unpacking and a deep dive into the battle for staying alert in self-love, nude grief, and the revealed embarrassments and humor of being human. It’s funny, and it is beautifully heavy. If you’ve got a deep wound, this book will try to hold your hand and guide you to needle and thread.
Paperback, 130 pages, Write Bloody Publishing, March 2023
An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century. Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time. Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives.
Paperback, 120 pages, TriQuarterly, February 2023
Burning into Womanhood – “I want to tell her/ it takes a woman / a lifetime to know / if she is real / or only appears so / in a mirror.” Those are the words of the speaker in this debut collection from Nancy Murphy. At times melancholy, at times fierce, and always lyrical, these poems explore the various roles that women shift into and out of in their lives. From marriage to divorce, from having a mother to being a mother, to sending a daughter off to college, these poems explore the way women center the world, and what can happen when we lose that center and are forced to grapple with the realization that maybe “there is no mother now.” This book is for women and poetry lovers at every stage of their lives. A deeply personal and enjoyable read, this collection is one to revisit over and over again.
—Tresha Faye Haefner, Author of Take This Longing. Founder of The Poetry Salon
Paperback, 53 pages, Gyroscope Press, November 2022
Now “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.
Paperback, 176 Pages, Roandom House, November 2022
Arranged mostly chronological, the book is a poetic dream diary, charting the psyche of a citizen of America, isolating in a village in the Hudson Valley, during the Covid pandemic, with a wife and teenage daughter. Swerving between dazed loneliness, grief, and dark comedy, the poetic speaker considers mortality, as death encroaches. The speaker yearns for connection with loved ones, both living and gone. At times profane and brash, at other times tender and sincere. The poems are natural in the throat as speech, and yet energized by explosive metaphor, achieving moments of bruised pathos and temporary enlightenment.
Paperback, 100 Pages, Write Bloody Publishing, October 2022
Hilarious!! Here’s a poetry collection that will not disappoint. From the pitfalls of seeking peace at a Zen retreat to discovering Second Chances don’t live in his neighborhood anymore, Jon Wesick takes you on a laugh-filled stampede that doesn’t decelerate or ever dodge the opportunity to deride the platitudes we’ve allowed to shelter us. Roger Aplon, author of The Omnipotent Sorcerer, AFTER GOYA & Selected New Poems, Mustering What’s Left – Selected & New Poems 1976-2017, Improvisations – Poetic Impressions From Contemporary Music, and It’s Only TV
His book, The Shaman in the Library, has his signature. Something is here that belongs in the world of Shamanism. Something is here that belongs in the world of our city streets. Each poem has power and compassion and is an artful act of rebellion. Jon’s book offers a geographic scope of imagination with its dashes of fable and allegory accompanied by the sting of common sense. Joe Milosch, author of A Walk with Breast Cancer
Paperback, 96 Pages, Human Error Publishing, September 2022
Beat Not Beat, edited by Rich Ferguson and published by Eric Morago’s Moon Tide Press, is an anthology of California poets screwing on the Beat and post-Beat tradition. Co-edited by Alexis Rhone Fancher, S.A. Griffin and Kim Shuck, this dynamic anthology spans the postwar, atomic-bomb-obsessed American landscape to the here and now: a period when Beat poets, the Vortex, Baby Beats, and their progenitors inspired one another through cultural, political, and humorous means to create new forms of consciousness weaponizing pen and paper to enact mighty forms of lyrical rebellion. The collection features notable poets such as Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Wanda Coleman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski. It also features contemporary poets such as Douglas Kearney, Brendan Constantine, Kim Addonizio, Ellyn Maybe, Will Alexander, and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass.
Paperback, 364 Pages, Moontide Press, September 2022
For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are “for everyone, everywhere…democratic in [their] insights and feelings” (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.
Paperback, 240 Pages, Scribner, September 2022
How can poetry be used to fight racism and oppression? Throughout this book that idea is explored through the use of language, storytelling and poetic form. The topics covered range from the murder of unarmed Black people to environmental rights and water protection.
Paperback, 158 Pages, World Stage Press, August 2022
Hailed as “indispensable” (David Wojahn), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation, and alert us to the haunting wonders and relationships that surround us.
Hardcover, 272 Pages, W. W. Norton & Company, May 2022
Jamie O’Halloran is an American-Irish poet living in the West of Ireland. She was the 2021 Artist in Residence at Brigit’s Garden in Galway and is the recipient of a 2021 Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her poems have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and appear most recently in The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Drawn to the Light, One Hand Clapping, Skylight 47, The Night Heron Barks and the Dedalus Press anthology Local Wonders. Jamie’s poetry reviews can be found in The Laurel Review, LitPub, and The Tupelo Quarterly.
Paperback, 30 Pages, Southword Editions, April 2022
Millicent Borges Accardi adds luster to her acclaim as a leading poet of the Portuguese-American experience with a new collection of breathtaking scope. She inhabits the new artistic frontier in exploring what heritage means to those descended from immigrants long established in the place of their dreams-“a dark mixture of all I have lost. This collection of poems is as lush and volcanic as the Azorean landscape, grounded in earthiness, rich with the yearning for the sea, and seasoned with saudade.
Paperback, 106 Pages, New Meridian Arts, October 2021
Tlacuilix: Tongues In Quarantine is the first book by Project 1521, a group of Southern California writers, scholars, and an artist. The collection of poetry and prose centers the experience of people who have endured family separations, colonialism, and institutional violence and have responded through cultural affirmation and various forms of resistance. It features the related paintings of Sandy Rodriguez.
Paperback, 90 Pages, Hinchas Press, September 2021
Vintage stories from the ’80s and ’90s about the sex-starved and the lonesome who wander through the streets of Barcelona, Casablanca and the Central African Republic with few prospects or friends. Accidents, disease, betrayal, war, the police, higher-ups, thugs, terrorists–all these evils, and more, conspire to assault the alienated characters who roam through these pages, characters who at times seek refuge in art or psychoanalysis or drugs but rarely find peace. People are rarely “at home” in this world–they’re caught in a foreign coup, or wander through the jungle, or miss each other’s answering machine messages, or walk on the decks of cruise ships, or sit in exotic cafes all the while waiting, waiting…
Paperback, 175 Pages, Independently Published, May 2022
One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the “dark magicians,” and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— “her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns”— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.
Paperback, 144 Pages, TriQuarterly, February 2017
Panoramic is a spicy, unapologetic poetry collection examining life after surviving sexual assault and reclaiming sexual identity through BDSM and inner healing. Kinky, introspective, and real, this collection is one of a kind in the full range of healing and hurt the author explores. Panoramic has something for everyone and gives a much needed look into the world of BDSM and kink. Whether you engage in kink or not, this collection brings a much needed light to BDSM, consensual relationships, and the complex journey of exploring sexuality safely and healing the pieces that have been hurt. Who knows, you may even end up feeling a little…inspired…
Paperback, 190 Pages, Curious Corvid Publishing, April 2022
Trumpets in the Sky is a collection of poems that point to the universe while proclaiming the complexities of living on planet earth. These poems are full of astonishment, absurdity, reverence, and social science. Some are surreal, some are staid, all are sincere.
Paperback, 100 Pages, Moontide Press, January 2022
“Mesler’s is again a poetry manifesting, indeed, sustaining–the Memphis school. Wm. Carlos Williams and numerous others would find it substantial and elucidating of the all the contraries to the idealized lumpen life. The bottom falls away from it, the foundations, the bases, and one is put on notices to be aware of what lives live within the one we live. Merely by seeing in language. A poetry that does not need explaining, abjures it explicitly.”
–Gordon Osing, author of Theaters of Skin, and La Belle Dame
Paperback, 96 Pages, Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2014
“Pam Ward shapes the distance of remembering with poignancy, a black eye, a knocked down Dinah, and blam blam. In her pen, language croons on “the corner of 43rd and pain.” Summon your courage and plunge into Ward’s truths; you’ll be glad you did.”
– Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles
Paperback, 141 Pages, World Stage Press, January 2022
Full of fun and full of anguish, superbly conscious of every rule they break, Jendi Reiter’s third poetry collection explores female-to-male transition and gay masculine identity through the voices of unusual objects and fictional characters with some aspect that is constructed, technological, or hybrid. From a surrealist’s eggbeater discovering feminist consciousness, or a pastry box enforcing omertà, to the Nicene Creed as interpreted by Frankenstein, these startling life studies open up onto a broader consideration of humanity’s relationship with technology and the shadow side of male dominance of nature. Illustrated with original paintings by graphic designer and multimedia artist Tom Taylor.
Paperback, 95 Pages, Independently Published, December 2021
“More than editor, Peggy Dobreer has served as an expert midwife to this collection of poems that emerged from her daily guided meditations and integrated writing prompts. Slow Lightning is the result, born at the height of the pandemic and culled from over two thousand of these poems crafted in this setting with unflinching candor, innovative storytelling, and mastery. A deeply satisfying array of poetry to be deeply savored.” — Stephen Reigns, author of A Quilt for David.
Paperback, 95 Pages, Independently Published, December 2021
Over 60 brilliant stories, poems and essays from ?dozens of small presses, ?as selected from 900 presses worldwide by ?more than ?200 distinguished staff contributing editors. Series Honors: The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Pushcart its 2020 recognition for “Distinguished Service to the Arts.”
Paperback, 576 Pages, Pushcart Press, December 2021
With their second book, Navigating With(out) Instruments, traci kato-kiriyama uses her present-political unrest, family love and loss, her own cancer diagnosis-to join the traumas of the past generations with the hope of the future ones. Often seamless, often with a loud bang, kato-kiriyama moves from genre to genre, from poetry to essays to plays and to letters, framed by the history of US colonialism and war mongering, to urge readers to protect and to share their legacies, both personal and communal, as a means of global survival.
Paperback, 576 Pages, Pushcart Press, December 2021
This Bob Holman book speaks for itself (or not)! Includes new poems, some greatest hits, a gang of “shorties,” and full sections of Dance/Performance Poems and Praise Poems for Ntozake Shange, Sun Ra, James Gandolfino, Jessica Hagedorn, Elizabeth Murray, Ed Sanders and many others.
Paperback, 210 Pages, YBK Publishers, December 2019
“Lisbeth Coiman is a dazzling new voice. With tender rage, she excavates what it means to love and grieve a homeland.” -Ariel Gore, author of Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance and F*ck Happiness.
“Lisbeth Coiman writes ‘Before I was born / A pristine future / streamed down from El Ávila tributaries’ in the opening of her poem “El Guaire.” With these words and beyond, I am also taken to my point in history, the promise that we are all born into without knowing what’s to come, and how we are as individuals and as a collective, forced to reckon with a past that we are killing off to chase a promise of a better future. For immigrants, this carries a bigger weight, as we are both killers of self while our selves are so often the victims of a society that wants to kill us. Coiman’s collection is a deeply personal work that makes us revisit the guilts and the angers that we carry.” -Chiwan Choi, author of The Yellow House
Paperback, 108 Pages, Finishing Line Press, August 2021
Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year’s most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021 is Tracy K. Smith, the former United States Poet Laureate, whose own poems are, Toi Derricotte’s words, “beautiful and serene” in their surfaces with an underlying “sense of an unknown vastness.” In The Best American Poetry 2021, Smith has selected a distinguished array of works both vast and beautiful by such important voices as Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young.
Paperback, 240 Pages, Scribner, September 2021
The 45th edition of the most celebrated literary series in America. Pushcart Prize XLV is continuing evidence that much of today’s vibrant writing appears only in small journals and book presses.The series has been selected for Publishers Weekly Carey Thomas Award, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof citation, and the Poets and Writers/Barnes and Noble “Writers For Writers” award among others.Here are 70 authors from more than 50 presses as selected from the nominations of 220 distinguished Contributing Editors and 800 participating presses.Recent reviews include: “Essential.” Library Journal“Must reading” Kirkus Reviews“Distinguished.”
New York Times Book Review
Paperback, 600 Pages, Pushcart Press, December 2021
When Dobreer comes to the poetry party, she brings her gypsy wagon with her, her vardo, lovingly carved from a life of élan. Dobreer wraps her lyric scarves around the reader’s psyche where one is drawn into the dance. And this dance is never stilted or predictable. It only asks the reader to meet its rhythms, the rock and sway, the tango-laced eroticism that threads Forbidden Plums. She works an almost cerebral mysticism into the lines as she tightropes our desires and reminds us that there is sustenance in longing. Like the “one bright flower in a crib of soft mud, like a solitary cloud wisping for miracles”.
-Lois P. Jones, author of Night Ladder
Paperback, 62 Pages, Glass Lyre Press, May 2021
‘A bold and necessary correction to the subcontinent’s poetry canon.’ – Jeet Thayil This first-of-its-kind anthology brings together the best of contemporary queer poetry from South Asia, both from the subcontinent and its many diasporas.The anthology features well-known voices like Hoshang Merchant, Ruth Vanita, Suniti Namjoshi, Kazim Ali, Rajiv Mohabir as well as a host of new poets. The themes range from desire and loneliness, sexual intimacy and struggles, caste and language, activism both on the streets and in the homes, the role of family both given and chosen, and heartbreaks and heartjoins. Writing from Bangalore, Baroda, Benares, Boston, Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka, Delhi, Dublin, Karachi, Kathmandu, Lahore, London, New York City, and writing in languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and, of course, English, the result is an urgent, imaginative and beautiful testament to the diversity, politics, aesthetics and ethics of queer life in South Asia today.
Hardcover, 240 Pages, Harper Collins, September 2020
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.
Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.
Hardcover, 1170 Pages, Library of America, October 2020
‘Night Surgery’ marks the first full-length collection by Julianna McCarthy. In it we discover the strange combinations of wonder and precision needed to repair the heart, to separate humor from pain, and stitch the night together. “By noon light / or moonlight the way home is always long…” Whether the subject is love or music or the history of loss, McCarthy’s work allows us to savor the world in real time. “Night falls as the wind rises. Front doors open all along the block, people / rushing, crowding, embracing their way to one another…” The only cure for beauty is more of it. The healing starts with ‘Night Surgery.’
Paperback, 86 Pages, Blue Horse Press, May 2021
Sh!t Men Say to Me: A Poetry Anthology in Response to Toxic Masculinity features the work of over 70 poets from across the country (and some even beyond it) who have all been struck by the sharp tongue of toxic masculinity, and have something necessary to say about it. Poets of different backgrounds, genders, sexualities, creeds, and colors unpack deeply personal stories about weaponized power, engrained misogyny and finding one’s complete personhood in a system that tries to make you less. This is their book.
Paperback, 189 Pages, Moontide Press, March 2021
Amanda Gorman is the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history. She is a committed advocate for the environment, racial equality, and gender justice. Amanda’s activism and poetry have been featured on The Today Show, PBS Kids, and CBS This Morning, and in The New York Times, Vogue, Essence, and O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2017, Urban Word named her the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, she now lives in her hometown of Los Angeles. The special edition of her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” will be published in March 2021. Her debut picture book, Change Sings, and the breakout poetry collection The Hill We Climb and Other Poems will be published in September 2021.
Hardcover, 32 Pages, Viking Books, March 2021
Alexis Rhone Fancher tears the plain brown wrapper off erotica. She refuses to play safe, strips away pretense, intent on exposing the fragility, angst and longing lurking just below the sexual surface. EROTIC features poems and flash never before seen in any collection, as well as gems from Rhone Fancher’s first two erotic offerings, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & other heart stab poems (2014) and Enter Here (2017). It includes the infamous “Sister Poems,” all together for the first time. With her “take no prisoners” attitude, Rhone Fancher spares no one, least of all herself.
Paperback, 144 Pages, NYQ Books, March 2021
Rolland Vasin (aka Vachine) , a third generation American writer of Romanian decent, was born into a literary family. His grandfather, John, a poet(unpublished), father, Ray, a newspaper reporter and editor, and dabbler in fiction(unpublished), and mother, Betty, the owner of Alphabooks, a retail rare and used book store, all with working-class occupations, had a strong sense of social justice and did not own a TV set until the 1960s. At dinner they debated the merits of political stories of the day from such as the Los Angeles Daily news and Nation magazine among many other sources. A family of American Patriots, all men served respective duty in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. A former Naval Officer Rolland returned from Vietnam to Graduate school and pursued a career as an external auditor in International and Local Accounting Firms. After a series of life-changing events he shifted focus to serving the Accountability needs of child and family-related not-for-profit organizations and embarked on a path of self-expression which passed through phases of Stand-up Comedy, Improvisational Theater, and Performance Poetry. Winning 3rd place in The Laugh Factory’s contest for the Funniest CPA in LA, Rolland’s poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as reading Open Mics from Cambridge MA to Big Sur CA. Out of these adventures arose the late-life desire to share his work with wider audiences from which arose this first book, Stitches & Scars, a chronology of experiences in war, love, and social justice advocacy. Published at Rolland’s age of 75 years to also honor the contributions of his family to the literary community.. A resident of Santa Monica, Rolland enjoys family gatherings with his two children and his grandsons. He plays the guitar, banjo, ukulele, and harmonica, but not all at the same time.
Paperback, 232 Pages, Lummox Press, January 2021
Poetry. Women’s Studies. “In Julie Danho’s THOSE WHO KEEP ARRIVING, the personal is political and the political is terrifying. Danho faces this terror and transcends it to make stunning poems about creating a home and family. She often employs the ekphrasis mode, seeing well-known visual pieces anew, using them as vehicles for exploration. She also writes her own character studies in American Landscape and other forms. In ‘Abstraction,’ a sonogram is imagined as art on a wall called ‘Moon, Clouds, / Volcano Taken From Above.’ The glittering surfaces of her elegant poems are as fascinating as their substance.”–Denise Duhamel
Paperback, 88 Pages, Silverfish Review Press, September 2020
Described by Robert Hass as “unquestionably one of the great living European poets” and by Charles Simic as “one of the finest poets living today,” Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts. This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting-the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Bara«nczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry.
Paperback, 296 Pages, Mariner Books, November 2000
Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject—Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself—that is unwilling to fall under his spell.
“In the funhouse world of Ron Koertge, Mary’s halo is as big as an inner tube, Mrs. Death fills in for her dreaded husband, and it takes a whole day and a half to build Rome. These new poems will entertain you so well, you might not even notice how the poet is issuing everywhere little appeals to your heart.” —Billy Collins
Paperback, 80 Pages, University of Pittsburgh Press, October 2018
“Reading SPEAKING PARTS, I’m reminded of Marlon Brando’s response to the praise lavished on his (arguably spectacular) acting skills: ‘Everybody acts, ‘ he’d shrug. Precisely! In Beth Ruscio’s ingenious, turn-on-a-dime poems, performance is all. There is no ‘true’ self for her speaker to uncover, and no canned epiphanies for readers, either. There are only the unsparing imperatives of improvisation-timing, cunning, abandon, ruse. Each moment’s desire met and then deflected. What does it take to play our/selves? Everything.”
-Dorothy Barresi, author of WHAT WE DID WHILE WE MADE MORE GUNS
Paperback, 116 Pages, Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc., September 2020
A Foreigner, Wherever I Go takes the reader across and around the globe with humor and sincere devotion to exploring the character and personalities of the cultures encountered. Many of these poems, written by a young man traveling extensively for the first time, have an air of naiveté that offers a refreshing vision at a time when the world’s dissimilar cultures, although seeming accessible, regain much of their unique mystery in these intimate quotidian rendezvouses. ~ Roger Apion, Editor: Waymark
Paperback, 88 Pages, Human Error Publishing, November 2020
Poetry. Art. “This collection is obsessed with the miracle of words and the mouths that say them, the bodies that carry them out and back in, deliciously, deliriously. FOOTNOTE reminds us that the act of saying is something we may never fully understand–and that is cause for whirling joy.”–Chen Chen
Paperback, 44 Pages, Lithic Press, December 2017
Billy Collins’s new collection brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made him one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.
Paperback, 144 Pages, Random House, September 2020
A relatively unhinged mashup of standup comedy, absurdist poetry and Dadaist nonsense, Comedy Album delivers a blast of humor without the aural distraction (which would also be a great name for a band.). Author Dan Hendrickson says, “Comedy is all about timing. And while some people might say now is the perfect time for such an offering, others would be quick to say, ‘No, Dan, that’s a really terrible idea.’ Those two points of view and where I’m at form a nearly perfect triangle.”
Paperback, 126 Pages, Flat Sole Studio, September 2020
“From floating lanterns at Hiroshima to the unstoppable petal storm of cherry blossoms, Mariko Kitakubo’s vivid imagery tugs at the full range of our emotions-from the horror of war to the joy of a new love, from redwood forests to dreams of Betegeuse, Indigo is a highly recommended journey you will never forget.” —Deborah P Kolodji, California Regional Coordinator, Haiku Society of America
Paperback, 152 Pages, Shabda Press, April 2016
“Matt Sedillo’s poetic work is full of history, struggle, tragedy, anger, joy, despair, possibility and faith inthe struggles of working class people to overcome the forces of capitalism and racism. If PatriceLumumba, Rosa Luxembourg, Emiliano Zapata and Ella Baker were alive today, they would all be readingand sharing Matt Sedillo’s work with their comrades in service of organizing the next revolution. He istruly the poet laureate of struggle.” – Paul Ortiz, Author of Emancipation Betrayed and Director of theSamuel Proctor Oral History Program
Paperback, 128 Pages, FlowerSong Books, December 2019
A collection of contrasts: 85 poems ̶ some erotic, some gritty, each of them mining the eccentricities of small moments, and making the common-place memorable. With remarkable photographic images by Jeffrey O’Connell.
Paperback, 137 Pages, Garden Oak Press, March 2019
Coffee House Confessions is a collection of poems written in and about coffee houses throughout the world.
“I know no one else who manages to combine quantity of poems with quality the way Ellaraine Lockie does. She is a font of creative ideas and brings the ultimate in craft and experience to the realizing of those products of inspiration, observation, and research. I admire her work immensely.” GERALD LOCKLIN, Professor Emiritus of English at California State University, Long Beach
Paperback, 44 Pages, Silver Birch Press, February 2013
Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening “Proem” (prologue poem)—“I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa”—Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, “His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race.
Paperback, 128 Pages, Knopf, February 2015
Founded in 2009, the Second Sunday Poetry Series has become one of the leading poetry events in the Los Angeles area. This anthology collects 54 of the more than 100 poets who have appeared over the last ten years–from L.A.’s unofficial poet laureate, Brendan Constantine, to the spiritual and complex Meg Day, to the late Nita Donovan, converted from a Stepford Wife to published poet and spoken-word artist. This is an indispensable cross section of the poetry scene in L.A. in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Paperback, 115 Independently Published, November 2019
In his new collection, Jeffrey McDaniel confronts the insular and expansive qualities of loss. With electric language and surrealistic imagery, McDaniel’s poems deliver the quotidian elements of middle-age life while weaving us in & out of childhood and adulthood alongside body and mind. The tragic and life affirming share the same page and the same world, reminding us how close corruption can be to innocence; domesticity to fantasy; aging to youth.
Paperback, 65 Pages, Pitt Poetry Series, February 2020
In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a “magician and a master” (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
Paperback, 160 Pages, W. W. Norton & Company, January 2016
