The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop by Kevin Coval
Description: Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.
It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.
The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.
The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.
A Sand Book by Ariana Reines
Description: Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning. In her long-anticipated follow-up to Mercury, Ariana Reines has written her most ambitious, visceral, and satisfying work to date.
Papi Doesn’t Love Me No More by Anna Suarez
Description: Anna Suarez’s debut collection, Papi Doesn’t Love Me No More explores themes of love, loss, sex work, and abuse. Anna Suarez utilizes folklore and myths to explore who Papi is and what he means to her. Her poetry is a friend, lover, and confessional narrative celebrating the cathartic power of desire and the self.
The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write by Gregory Orr
Description: In this moving, playful, and deeply philosophical volume, Gregory Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes (“Ode to Nothing,” “Ode to Words”) and slips effortlessly from personal trauma (“Song of What Happens”) to public catastrophe (“Charlottesville Elegy”).
The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr’s place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.
Between Here and Home by Matt Daly
Description: Between Here and Home stitches together a narrative through soliloquies from several inhabitants of an imagined rural valley in the American West. Distance and wind make the fabric thin but not always easy to tear.
28 Paradises by Patrick Modiano
Description: Published in English for the first time, 28 Paradises is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel prize–winning author Patrick Modiano (born 1945) and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss (born 1951). 28 Paradises is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of its authors, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, Modiano’s poem captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are 28 dreams in this book―visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured in her brightly colored gouaches, each paradise has been refashioned as a poem by Modiano.
Zehrfuss’ paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem or a lover, relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing―poetry inspired by paintings―this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.
Breth by Bill Bissett
Description: breth presents both new and selected poems from legendary Canadian sound, visual, and performance poet bill bissett. bissett’s innovations have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century.
This volume, the largest in Bill Bissett’s publication history, includes more than a hundred illustrations and visual poems, many of them appearing in print for the first time, as well as a foreword by fellow poet Tim Atkins (author of _Folklore_ and _On Fathers < On Daughtyrs_), a bibliographical “a r c h i v e,” and an index of poem titles.
Time by Etel Adnan
Description: On October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.
Robert Schumann is Mad Again by Norman Dubie
Description: In his newest collection, Robert Schumann is Mad Again, Norman Dubie explores human suffering in a narrative unlimited by time and space. From the fields of a fallen Jerusalem, to the sci-fi prison of the Ukraine’s Crater Lviv, Dubie has crafted a kaleidoscope of reserved places and experiences throughout history. His ekphrastic work, a continual expansion of a legacy seeking to test “the limits of the lyric,” spirals across the boundaries of nonfiction and the surreal, the artistic and the scientific. Norman Dubie reconciles the violence of cobbled streets and abandoned houses with the mysterious hum of the arts, “singing to nearly/ everyone who will listen.” This collection pays homage to the voices of classic writers, artists, and scientists, where the likes of Francisco Goya, Paolo Uccello, and the collection’s namesake evaluate this unnerving world, suspended in balanced chaos. Simultaneously solemn and experimental, Dubie’s latest poems embrace his anxieties of aging and death, capturing a haunting sense of wonder that lingers like a cold touch and draws compassion for humanity’s future.
The Golden Goblet by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Description: The Golden Goblet traces Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poetry from the idealism of youth to the liberation of maturity. In contrast to his rococo contemporaries, Goethe’s poetry draws on the graceful simplicity of German folk rhythms to develop complex, transcendent themes. This robust selection, artfully translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner, explores transformation, revolution, and illumination in Goethe’s lush lyrical style that forever altered the course of German literature.
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