Poetry. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago where he studied on the Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and now resides in a small town on the Atlantic coast. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University (where he was director of the Poetry Center). Mandel was closely associated with the rise of Language Poetry during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. This is is his first new book since the mid-1990s.

Poetry. "The world, as refracted through the lens of Tom Mandel's poetry, takes on the singularity of a new kind of order. His voice is fresh, astringent and altogether compelling. He is a dynamic presence" -John Ashbery.

Poetry. ABSENCE SENSORIUM. "Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson have done what two poets are not supposed to be able to do: they have jointly written a great long poem that is seamless, where you cannot tell where one leaves off and the other takes up. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Two enormous poetic talents and two richly imaginative perspectives on two lives combine to make a single magnificent poem, one that 'holds the night between two pale fingers'"-George Lakoff.

Tamara Kamenszain was born in Buenos Aires and is one of Argentina's leading poets and essayists. She is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as four essay collections. She was awarded a number of prizes, such as Primer Premio Municipal de Ensayo (First Municipal Prize) and Tercer Premio Nacional (First National Prize) for her essay collections,

"The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany."--

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.Praise for I Cut My Finger:One of Eye's "Best Reviews of 2007""Taddle Creek Recommends" Pick (Summer 2007 issue)"... Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry ... Absurd, surprising, topical, surreal - his new work builds on the mythic significance and brilliance of several career-long metaphors and subjects." (The Globe and Mail)"It is surrealism at its best: written not to dispel the present but to reveal it." (Arc Poetry)"A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." (Taddle Creek)

Stuart Ross's sixth poetry collection is both an experimental departure for Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. Gathering into one volume three discrete poetry projects -- an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua accompanied by his original photos of decomposing cars, a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems about the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, and a selection of cubist and abstract poems where Ross shows his experimental New York School cards like never before -- all of the poems in this book are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense understanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason.

"The poetry in this collection explores insights that paradoxes point to in our lives, as energizing antidotes to bland generalities. What's the present, when past and future erupt into it? Can truth be found among our very errors? Can we speak beyond the limits of language? Do we all live in the same world, if different animals see it differently? There are many sorts of poems here, about love, family, farming, war, nature ... seeking a wider view of life in our age."--

"'Pete's first poetry collection is a knockout. It reveals the same keen intelligence and wry perspective he showed in his 2 memoirs, with an eloquent, unique style that lays bare the universal in the deeply personal. He can add gifted poet to his already impressive resume.'--Bonnie Raitt. 'Peter Coyote's poems are every bit as wonderful as his memoirs, rich and lively, sweet and perplexed, full of sorrow and laughter, love and lovers, soul and bodies, Zen and wild mother nature, truth, hope, disappointment, resurrection; ie, Life with a capital L.'--Anne Lamott"--

Poetry. Infused with an eerily adept understanding of Latin American history and culture dating from the 15th century to modern times, their collective duende, REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR will come to stand as a monumental work and as a companion piece to the epic Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This collection of poems takes on the true power of myth--Wayne Atherton. REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR tells the story of the fall of an ancient, vibrant civilization to Spain's conquistadors under Cortez. Pines's language is intelligent and refreshing, his ideas provocative, his images striking, and his narrative--however tragic--dramatically thrilling. This book is a smoking mirror--Maurice Kenny.

Poetry. With art by Wayne Atherton. "The sea's endlessness, its glittery surfaces, the often scruffy island life of the Bahamas are wonderfully recorded in Paul Pine's FISHING ON THE POLE STAR. Bright-scaled marlin populate the text, as do Wayne Atherton's mysteriously beautiful collages. The vision is spacious and colorful, awe- filled and deep dwelling." Michael Heller "FISHING ON THE POLE STAR is full of wonder, for Pines knows that fishing correlates with the Arthurian Graal- search, the poet's hunt for the poem, the deep sea-voyage to heal the wounded soul. This collection places him in the tradition of Hektorovi, Walton, Melville, Hemingway, and Hughes." Richard Berengarten"

Poetry. "'Remember this, ' the poet tells himself as he races his 'little girl': 'what is a memory that anticipates itself / a recollection / that becomes / the ground on which the present plays.' And we follow, drawn along a 'golden thread' between father and daughter that is at once binding and unwinding, the reweave of every Charlotte's Web. Here are poems, in the language of the luminous moment, full of the timeless, of time's surprise, of all that enraptures, all that sorrows, all that joys." Robert Murphy, author of From Behind the Blind"

Poetry. Norman Fischer's long poem takes as its place CHARLOTTE'S WAY, a house on the California coast, but mostly the poem takes things in. Fischer, a Zen priest, meditates on talk, the passing of time, the brain, catness, bills to be paid, poems, search parties, birds and myriad other subjects as they flicker in and out of thought. Terri Wada's design emphasizes the fluidity of Fischer's thinking; rather than turning from one page to the next, the chapbook opens out, filling both space and time.

Poetry. In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost's famous dictum about poetry. THE MOUTH OF THE BAY begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers on the coasts of southern Italy and Sicily--"There is no beginning and there is no end"--and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others. In "Elements," he breaks the coastal landscape into six elements--rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun--and writes a stanza for each, creating a series of 23 poems akin to abstract expressionist landscapes. In the long poem, "Wave Talk," he listens to small waves lapping against the rocks and writes the conversational phrases that appear in his mind. In the last section, "Foghorns," he responds to the blue sky and water of Frenchman Bay on clear days and the two-note foghorn at Egg Rock Light on foggy days. The poems end with delight in the sights and sounds around us, the words that appear within us.

Kinship, the new collection of poetry by the bilingual author, Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, weaves together some of the principal themes in modern Jewish history: ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism, exile, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel. Shrayer's richly orchestrated and formally elegant verse captures with poignancy and passion what it feels like to be a Jewish poet with Soviet roots, living in America during Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. Kinship is, ultimately, a pained and inspiring meditation on writing between languages and cultures.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Yiddish, Edited, and Introduced by Marcia Falk. WITH TEETH IN THE EARTH is the first full-length collection in English of the poetry of acclaimed Yiddish-American poet Malka Heifetz Tussman. Selected from her six books of verse and from a last unpublished manuscript, these poems reflect her love of nature, her deep enjoyment of the physical and sensual world, and her experience of spirituality. "[Tussman's] elegant, deft lyrics subvert the central myth of women's lives: the belief that happiness and fulfillment come from devotion to others.... Marcia Falk has gracefully and intelligently captured Tussman's subtle ironic tone" Miriam Levine, American Book Review."

From Publishers Weekly In one of the essays in this delightfully engaging self-portrait, poet-critic Simpson calls himself an "unnecessary man," a man without a definite place in the world. His refusal to bow to trends or schools may explain why this Pulitizer Prize-winning poet is not currently fashionable. In limpid, sharp prose he describes growing up in Jamaica when it was a British colony, love for his Russian actress mother, the "low emotions" of his remarried father and stepmother, who treated him like a boarder, his service in WW II, subsequent mental breakdown and partial amnesiaout of which he began writing poetry. When published in the New Yorker , he bemoaned that magazine's "tiresome air of facetiousness" and its heavy-handed editing of his poems. Critical essays gathered here offer unbuttoned cameos of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Auden, V. S. Naipaul. In the astonishing prose selections culled from his journal, Simpson reveals the poet's essential gift: a continual sense of wonder at the world's unpredictability. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.