"An "astounding" (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems - Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition In this ­­­powerful debut collection,sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet's personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately,Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax's innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it"--

"Written well into mid-life, Songs for a Summons are explorations and observations of a writing life. David Guterson is the author of Snow Falling on Cedars, recipient of the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, East of the Mountains, Our Lady of the Forest, The Other, and Ed King. Songs for a Summons is his first poetry book."As is true when David Guterson enriches our lives and literature with memorable stories and essays, he is on these pages a poet acutely, even achingly, aware of the beauty and sometimes absurdity of the natural and unnatural forms that surround us. He is awake to the experience of illusion and impermanence, loneliness and suffering. And always in these well-crafted works, where language performs at its highest level, he is awake to the possibilities of love, gratitude, redemption, and the importance of self-acceptance. With each elegant poem in Songs For A Summons, Guterson liberates our seeing, our senses, and beckons us to live more fully, more authentically, more deeply."-Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage"--

" "Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." --James Longenbach, The Nation The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble--or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups--among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois--speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye." "--