Some Kinds of Poems

This is a set of poems (each with the word “poem” in its title) unpretentiously calling the nature of poetry into question. These are small, brilliant, desperate songs, each skewed yet accurate. Foust discovers the uncanny with every turn of phrase. I might say these poems are a kind of (black) magic, but Foust says: […]

Design

About the Book: “Sally Keith’s gift to us is an experience of the world rich and intensely present to mind: simple because fully known, as if for the first time; and also complex because profoundly analyzed, not by means of abstraction but by a visionary intimacy with the texture and grain of feeling. This is […]

Popular Music

About the Book: “In this beautiful debut volume, Stephen Burt, in poetic actions that range with unusual ease from prose to sonnets and free verse, explorers the sensation of selfhood as it presents itself, in all its fractured parts, for re-formation. His speaker moves from the longing to ’be someone else’ – to rid himself […]

Palma Cathedral

About the Book: “There is a Wordsworthian grandeur about Michael White’s poems, a rhetorical and emotional fullness that is breathtaking. His attention to the shifting complexity of the natural world, his precise diction, his finely tuned cadences carry with them an unusual power, an immense gravity. Reading him, one feels the irresistible pull of belief […]

The Thicket Daybreak

About the Author: Catherine Webster is a poet, teacher, and third-generation California farmer who lives in the San Joaquin Valley. Her book of poems The Concept of Bodily Objects was also published in 1997. She has edited Handspan of Red Earth: An Anthology of American Farm Poems, and her work has appeared in Hwy 99, […]

Summer Mystagogia

About the Author: Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1992. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Spirituals and The Creation, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award in 1994. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Antaeus, Field, Hudson […]