App Store

Google Play

{{seriesTitle}} - La serie de libros

CO -Device Banner Block 894x1036

Descubre un mundo infinito de historias

Escucha y lee

Baba Badji

In Ghost Letters, one emigrates to America again, and again, and again, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one grows up in America, and attends university in America, though one also never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; one wrestles with one’s American blackness in ways not possible in Senegal, though one never leaves Senegal, the country of one’s birth; and one sees more deeply into Americanness than any native-born American could. Ghost Letters is a 21st century Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, though it is a notebook of arrival and being in America. It is a major achievement. —Shane McCrae

Parlor Press, LLC

Free Verse Editions

Ghost Letters

Laura Wetherington

What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning—for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
"There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition." —Peter Gizzi

Parallel Resting Places: Poems

Daniel Tiffany

Bobbing alongside Margery Kempe—an illiterate medieval mystic who dictated the first autobiography in English—the ragged voice of Cry Baby Mystic finds itself drawn into strange predicaments that are not its own and ferried into abandoned spaces by the gearing of stardom and shame. The revolving sentences overheard by the reader--a muffled chorus of Brechtian aftershocks--survive only as traces of sorrow now craved by all who have known it: sound gossiping the unsound, the excess of the pilgrim. A person climbs out and never comes home.

Cry Baby Mystic

Elizabeth Jacobson

“Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson’s poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book. ” —TONY HOAGLAND | “

This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn’t—to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture—an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. 

Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems. ” —MARIANNE BORUCH | “Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can’t help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson’s work does, so effortlessly in paradox. 

I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says—the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now. ” —ANNE MARIE MACARI | Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker’s intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson’s poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.

Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air

Felicia Zamora

& in Open, Marvel grapples with wonder in everyday existence. A sense of quietness through seasonal change threads the interlaced contemplations in the collection, which approach the twice-removed space we occupy from the physical world. The act of mind and body is experienced as a journey for both writer and reader. How we are all elements in fall. How we are all purpose. How what makes us connects us. How there are lovely works beyond us, which in turn, include us. How we plead to ourselves, See . . . just see.

& in Open, Marvel

Hannah Craig

"Hannah Craig's This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers. Every word here is earned. And little, if anything, escapes this poet's heart, mind, or eye. History works through a keen imagination. These poems make us feel and listen differently, and images coalesce line by line and dare us to reside where fierce empathy and beauty abide."—Yusef Komunyakaa

This History That Just Happened

Nicholas Pesquès

This is a book about a color—the vivid, explosive yellow of the English broom that blooms outrageously, uproariously, all over the mountain that dominates the view from Nicolas Pesquès' window. In this loping long poem, Pesquès views this color as installation art—as if the word YELLOW were written in enormous letters covering the hillside. It's an installation that brings issues of language to the fore, offering an occasion for the writer to juggle the immediate presence of color with the more mitigated presence created by language.

Overyellow, an Installation

Cole Swensen

Christopher Sindt

Christopher Sindt’s System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt’s earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California—working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners—to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. 

It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster

System and Population

Ethel Rackin

The miniature poems that comprise Go On, Ethel Rackin’s second collection, constitute distilled moments in time that paradoxically extend our field of concentration and vision. Focusing on various kinds of survival—personal, political, environmental—Go On asks what it means to endure in unsure times. By turns collaged, diaristic, and panoramic, the poems that make up this collection combine to form a kind of crazy-quilt of lyric association and connection.

Go On

Derek Gromadzki

Reading itself is travel in Derek Gromadzki’s first book, Pilgrimage Suites, an outing across an insular medieval landscape as rich in its registers of language as in its flora or fauna. This book is neither history nor story, though it retains characteristics of each. Like history, it perpetuates retrograde speculation while maintaining the narrated sequencing of incident that is the common stock and trade of story. In the heyday of medieval pilgrimages, English underwent radical changes. 

The Latinate speech of Church officialdom ran roughly up against a vernacular with deep Germanic and Brythonic roots. These suites track an imagined journey over the landscape that staged the violence of this conflict, whereon strikingly beautiful monuments stood in the aftermath. To the cultural clashes and assimilations materially manifest in the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals travellers still venerate today, Gromadzki offers an overlooked parallel through creative strife with sound. 

He uses the momentum generated in running the lexical and rhythmic possibilities of English’s varied sources together to stretch and sustain the lyric over a pastoral background to push each of these two modes past its respective limits.

Pilgrimage Suites

Shim Bo-Seon

Like many younger Korean poets, SHIM BO-SEON writes in an allusive, indirect style about topics that are in themselves familiar, eating rice, taking off clothes, living in an apartment block, struggling with human relationships. He captures some sparkling moments of joys and sorrows, hopes and frustrations that have been concealed in daily life in rather modest and witty words. 

The circular movements of concealment and revelation of the mystery that an individual experiences are evoked in turn, always lightly. As a poet-critic, Shim fills his lines with the melodies of plain speech, with subtle thoughts about relationships in the world. Shim made his poetic debut in 1994, but he only published his first collection fourteen years later in 2008. FIFTEEN SECONDS WITHOUT SORROW is a translation of that first volume, containing the poet’s earliest, freshest poems.

Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow

Chung Eun-Gwi

Geraldine Monk

At the heart of this collection of poems is the nature of water; water as giver and taker of life, luxuriant and lethal in equal measures. It is set against the backdrop of the shipping forecast and weaves the myths and legends of the ancient Mesopotamians through a litany of migrations down the ages to the present day.

They Who Saw the Deep

Matthew Cooperman

By turns skeptical and ecstatic, musical and sprung, Spool is a formally adventuresome love poem to marriage, language, parenting and illness in the early 21st century.

Spool

Jennifer Atkinson

Jennifer Atkinson’s The Thinking Eye, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself—how places and lives become “landscapes” and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory—enlarge and focus our seeing. 

If it’s true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, she sees the same thing, then what Atkinson sees is an earth filled with violence and beauty, human malice and ten thousand separate moments of joy. Clearly in love with the earth and the (English) language—all those inter-dependent lives and forms—Atkinson pays attention to both with a Bishoppy eye, a Hopkinsy ear, and an ecopoet’s conscience. Behind the book’s sharp images and lush music creaks Chernobyl’s rusty Ferris wheel.

Thinking Eye, The

Carolyn Guinzio

Sometimes an echoing or answering poem, sometimes a second voice, the “ghost text” in Spine mimics and examines the difficulty of processing information from multiple sources at once. The distraction that accompanies reading ruptures the experience of these poems. Too much and too little co-exist here: the challenges of living in rural areas that technological advances have left behind throw into relief the disorienting speed with which the world is changing.

Spine

Valerio Magrelli

A darkly humorous exploration of the human body and its various functions in poetic prose, Valerio Magrelli’s The Condominium of the Flesh, a personal chronicle of his clinical experience, catalogues a life history of ailments without ever being pathological.

Condominium of the Flesh

Clarissa Botsford

Allison Funk

"The poems in Wonder Rooms, this powerful, heart-breaking, elegantly composed collection, are like the cabinets within such a room. Each is its own intimate interior space, where a reader is invited into the unknown. Some of these poetic spaces hold natural histories—crickets, dangerously beautiful corals, Provençal snails. Others open to the terrors of love and motherhood, still others to the chaotic orders of the bestiary. This is an amazingly gorgeous and intelligent book—a wonder, a pleasure, and an invitation to inward voyage." —Jennifer Atkinson

Wonder Rooms

Monica Berlin

Beth Marzoni

WINNER OF THE NEW MEASURE POETRY PRIZE, Selected by CAROLYN FORCHÉ | Free Verse Editions, edited by Jon Thompson | “What to make of this grand experiment over months and miles of river by two poets, not one—Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni—plus whatever third spirit they’ve invented together? Like music from the 8th century written by Anonymous, that haunting ubiquitous voice, these poems feel unsettlingly interchangeable, keep coming like the country’s longest river dream-documented here in a rich rush, dense with repetition and sorrow by poets who ‘think like a glacier or a stone, sand … years / like consistent rain.’

The Mississippi never had better companions or more devoted ones, save Mark Twain perhaps, or more to the point, his troubled, star-crossed Huck. The sense of human and nonhuman history, even prehistory stuns, keeps bothering this shared-solitary work. ‘Wake to any weather & know that / long ago there also was. ’ I’ll take that as rare solace. ” —MARIANNE BORUCH

No Shape Bends the River So Long

Sarah Sousa

“The poems of Sarah Sousa’s Split the Crow employ archaeology as a means of giving voice not only to the land, but to long-gone peoples. We discover the objects that individuals were equipped with for their final journeys, as well as witnessing their tales. Sousa’s work picks up where conventional history has left off, giving voice to urgent testimonies. 

‘The Lost People, ’ states, ‘On the train coming east, / not knowing what else to do, boys sang / the death songs our warriors sang riding into battle, ’ just one of many instances where Native American accounts find a ready home in Sousa’s poetry. Split the Crow is a collection of tremendous magnitude that calls upon the past as a way to reconsider our present moment. ” —Mary Biddinger

Split the Crow

Jesús Losada

“The Magnetic Brackets … is one of the liveliest and truest poetical testaments that a reader can tackle in these times of disbelief, of half-truths, of vacuity and passivity in thought. For this is one more gift from the book: where thought and feeling are perfectly merged.” 
— Antonio Colinas.

Free Verse Editions - La serie de libros

Free Verse Editions - La serie de libros

Free Verse Editions libros en orden

Escucha y lee