"Stone, Paper, Knife centers on the loss of an old love and the beginning of a new love, a woman's politics and identity rooted in the land and expressed in poems of grieving, of loving,a nd of deep and fundamental connection with the sources of life and the survival of our species and our world."--on upper cover.

"She is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. A storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life."--Back cover

The fourth volume of the San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, All That’s Left is a powerful collection of poems for social justice by street-poet-turned- laureate Jack Hirschman. The volume opens with Hirschman’s autobiographical inaugural address, which vividly traces his career as poet, translator, and agitator. Included are several of Hirschman’s earlier poems, marking successive stages of his poetic development. The poems following the address were composed during his tenure as poet laureate, covering contemporary outrages like post-Katrina New Orleans and the Virginia Tech tragedy, paying homage to fallen poetic comrades like Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman, and exploring more personal dimensions of love.

Plutonian Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda’s tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year’s eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air

A 99-year-old Beat-era novelist is reactivated into writing when his sons send him poems by US Mail. Thus begins Father Verses Sons, a stunning poetic correspondence about life and death, and about men bumbling towards love

Poetry. Award-winning poet Alison Stone draws from the tarot in her latest collection. These 78 poems range from the archetypal (The Fool, The Magician, etc.) to the everyday situations of love, work, ideas, and conflicts that make up our lives. Mythical figures from past and present appear--Prometheus and Persephone represent court cards, as do Lou Reed and Steve Jobs. By turns witty and heartbreaking, this book goes down easily enough to be devoured in one sitting yet reveals greater depths with each subsequent reading. Stone's accessible lyrics move and entertain us with the struggles and joys of what it means to be human.

What does it mean to be a woman--a lover, mother and artist? In "Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. "Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.