Mister Goodbye Easter Island

An unconventionally brilliant, darkly funny debut.

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

A first-person account of the Iraq War by a solider-poet, winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award. Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James’ own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner’s yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

Treating subjects from landscape to sculpture to a 19th century technical encyclopedia, the poet is fascinated with light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury—things transparent, evanescent, impossible to grasp. Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down. From “The Invention of Streetlights” Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own. There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin. and light entire rooms. . Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man. on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn. and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched. Notre Dame seem small. . Now the streets stand still. . By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium. to photograph a midnight ball. “Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

These soulful lyrics use allusive imagery and ecumenical diction to consider the pastoral as a life to inhabit, not an artifact or idealized place to visit. Here, the specter of loss makes a world more precious—notions of home and love must be ever-evolving as colts are stillborn and pigeons slaughtered, apple blossoms frozen in spring and dead lambs burned in diesel fire. But, these poems insist, there is beauty in the soil and beauty in birth—and death in birth, and beauty in death, as well. And Upon the Earth No Wind Pigeons erupting from a barn. Twenty-three ewes stand at once, ice-chunks clinking in their wool. I call, soft, call loud but the mare treads the snow blue. Am I born to constant hazard? Wood becomes more than wood simply by its burning. Steam rises up from the land— I call but do not move. The moon rising shines even upon all things and I can’t tell which is mare and what’s weather. Silence in eaves ever after. “It is rare to see a poet work so hard in the physical world—serious farm labor—and still catch a fleeting glimpse of the spirit. Kevin Goodan does this convincingly because his language is so precise and his mind knows when to jump and when to stand still. This is a remarkable book.”—James Tate Kevin Goodan received his BA from the University of Montana and his MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His poems have been -published in Ploughshares and other journals.

This vivid, incisive, feminist debut skewers Filipina American gender roles with its delightful sense of humor.

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.

In his fourth collection, Gaspar's unique narrative idiom--lush, songful, insistent--firmly establishes him as a distinct, important voice.

Urban experience drives the savvy, energetic lyrics of Tom Thompson's impressive second collection.

This neo-baroque, hypnotic debut reads like transcribed fever dreams, employing elements of film noir and surrealism.