Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets⁵¹

In Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy, an American poet who moved back to the United States after living for years in Morocco, reflects on exile and return as he describes the experience of leaving North Africa and rediscovering a North...

An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers...

In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.

Composed and...

Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat...

The New World, Anthony Carelli’s new collection of poems, is an American travelogue that unfolds in a series of darkly comic episodes, with allusions to Dante as a thread throughout. In these epics in miniature, we meet a pilgrim-poet...

Earthly Delights begins with an invocation to the muse and ends with the departure of Odysseus from Ithaca. In between, Troy Jollimore’s distinguished new collection ranges widely, with cinematic and adventurous poems that often...

Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "a master of musicality and enlightening allusions." In the wholly original world of these new poems...

Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The...

Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in...

Taking its title from Heraclitus's most famous fragment, The River Twice is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. The world presented in these poems is a fluid one in which so much—including space and time, the...

In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might...

Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in...

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet...

In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the...

Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses...

The Scottish poet Niall Campbell's first book, Moontide, won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, the largest such prize in the United Kingdom, was named the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for both the Fenton...

In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles...

. . . we are fixed to perpetrate the species—

I meant perpetuate—as if our duty

"The first thing I recognize as the beginning of a poem," writes Richard Pevear, "is a distinct rhythm, not only of stress but of movement. Once I hear it, I can find words for it. But the essential thing, finally, is simultaneity—the...

"Every poet has one or two compulsive themes," writes Leonard Nathan. "One of mine is how to make things fit together that don't but should; the other is getting down far enough below a surface to see if something is still worth...

Describing this collection of his poems, John Allman writes, "It is a book about the inner and outer worlds, a collection of multiple voices and relationships. In one sense it is about suffering, family, and survival. However, it is...

Ben Belitt writes, "This volume—my fifth—extends and deepens a preoccupation I have had with the visible and invisible manifestations of people, places, and things. It offers a variety of poems of formal and textural density and, in...

"The poems are elegies for everything, including myself," writes James Richardson. "Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its surroundings, threatened...

Writing about poetry Diana Ó Hehir says, "I think of poetry as harnessed energy—as a marvelous way of taking the chaotic emotion, the turbulent perception, and recreating them as images that are specific, definite, directed....

"If salvaging truth becomes difficult in cultures which keep rebuilding and changing their pasts or accept annually the repetitions of natural renewal, Debora Greger's Movable Islands demonstrates that it can still be done...

Most of these poems first appeared in Poetry magazine in the decade from 1967-76 and quickly became underground classics. Brought together here--with more recent work--they reveal their coherence and their urgency.

From "Blake's...

This work concerns questions of loss and restitution, decline and recovery--questions best explored through the shifting revelations of narrative that are possible in a longer poem.

Originally published in 1982.

While seeming to affirm the Western poetic and cultural tradition, Greger attacks its rational heart. The subjects of her poems--Mozart operas, Botticelli's Three Graces, narcissus flowers--are the vestments of aristocratic Europe, but...

"[Koethe's] new collection is that rarity, a book of poems with a genuine philosophical dimension and an elegant but conversational poise."--The New York Times Book Review

"Solemn and playful, John Koethe's poems lock themselves...

"These poems are the waves emanating from the gravitational fall of my runs by the Eno river," writes James Applewhite, "and other travels, into a self I could not otherwise know. They are my repetitive song of belief in the possibility...

"Between the discovery that there is a design which only his poetry enables him to find as he confronts the world and the discovery that such a design is a snare, merely a means of keeping him from further discernment, Michael Rosen is...

The poems in Rachel Hadas's new book are united by a common preoccupation with passage--passage variously construed. In Section I, the four seasons are glimpsed in turn through the lenses of several types of personal associations...

This book has much of the modern sense of the individual being at a loss, but a partial answer comes from the inexhaustible freshness and splendor of the environment, a possession that can come back to us equally from some idea of Petra...

Visiting Rites was published to critical acclaim in 1982 and was a finalist for the National Book Award the following year. This Princeton Legacy Library edition of Phyllis Janowitz’s mesmerizing collection expands on themes of...

"For the sake of contraption (like Frost) and of character (like Robinson), John Burt will do a great deal, and his scope and scansion require a great deal, for his theme is nothing less than the reinvention of heroism (King Mark, Mary...

This volume of Alvin Feinman's poems presents a highly praised earlier work, Preambles and Other Poems, combined with more recent poems. Of Preambles Allen Tate wrote, "This is a remarkable first book. . . . There is an acute and subtle...

"Ms. Greger's poems take place at the point of encounter between the mind and the world of matter. . . . And it is the resistance of the real and the increasing urgency the poet feels in trying to extinguish her solitude . . . that make...

Set four hundred years in the future, Frederick Turner's epic poem, The New World, celebrates American culture in A.D. 2376.

Originally published in 1985.

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people...

With skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead's lyrics root...

This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close...

This is an eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a "snappy, entertaining book." A triumphant...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also...

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past....

From Before Recollection:
TRANSCENDENTAL POSTCARD
Ann Lauterbach

Jorie Graham
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Alicia Ostriker
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From a sequence, "The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden":

"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession...

Robert Pinsky
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Robert Pinsky
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