Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets⁵³

A remarkable book of poems that mixes humor about the absurdities of office life with moments of Zen-like wisdom

A wide-ranging collection from a rising poet that showcases her sharp, contemporary voice

Compelling poems that celebrate language as it encounters the nameless variety of the natural world, from Australia to Italy

From an award-winning poet, an exciting new collection that explores exile and return, from North Africa to North America

An innovative and inviting book of poems about the places where language and landscape converge

The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a new collection of philosophical, elegiac, and wry meditations on film, painting, music, and poetry itself

From an “uncommonly fluent” and “rewarding” poet (The Observer), a collection of miniature epics that asks: can grace be found amid disarray?

The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as “a seduction by way of small astonishments”

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry

An impressive new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune)

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English

From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City

The North American debut of an exciting new voice in British poetry

A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history

A new collection of poetry from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"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....

"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...

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...

From an award-winning poet, a poignant collection that wrestles with anxiety, boredom, fear, and grief

"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...

From the title poem:

Ampersand

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.

"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...

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry

An inventive and observant collection of lyric poems from the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

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...

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...

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...

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

From Before Recollection:
TRANSCENDENTAL POSTCARD
Ann Lauterbach

From Erosion:
SAN SEPOLCRO

From A Woman Under the Surface:
MOON AND EARTH

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...

From An Explanation of America:
LAIR

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:
CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING