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Simon West

Compelling poems that celebrate language as it encounters the nameless variety of the natural world, from Australia to Italy

An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. West’s intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity. Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean. Again and again, language and the senses throw themselves into the nameless riot of the world, from eucalypts and clouds to a medieval bell tower and the sounds a pencil makes as it crosses a page.

Princeton University Press

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

Prickly Moses: Poems

Myronn Hardy

From an award-winning poet, an exciting new collection that explores exile and return, from North Africa to North America

In Aurora Americana, Myronn Hardy, an American poet who moved back to the United States after living for years in Morocco, reflects on exile and return as he describes the experience of leaving North Africa and rediscovering a North America both recognizable and unrecognizable. What does it mean to feel exiled both away from and at “home”? What does it mean to miss something?

In forms such as the sonnet, ghazal, and triolet, Aurora Americana takes up the distant and recent past of the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to the deadly “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. But the book also meditates on smaller, momentary encounters across racial and national barriers, from evocations of Francophone Africa to a screening of Black Panther in Portugal for a mostly white audience. Allusions to Fannie Lou Hamer, Frantz Fanon, Prince, John Coltrane, Alessandro de’ Medici, Ahmed Zaki, Modesto Brocos y Gómez, Nasser Zefzafi, and others anchor the collection. With poems set at or near dawn, Aurora Americana explores an ominous yet hopeful new morning in America, one in which potential cataclysm exists alongside possibility and change.

Aurora Americana: Poems

Robert Pinsky

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:
CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING

Robert Pinsky

Against weather, and the random
Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws
Of biography, chance, physics--
The unseasonable soul holds forth,
Eager for form as a renowned
Pedant, the emperor's man of worth,
Hereditary arbiter of manners.

Soul, one's life is one's enemy.
As the small children learn, what happens
Takes over, and what you were goes away.
They learn it in sardonic soft
Comments of the weather, when it sharpens
The hard surfaces of daylight: light
Winds, vague in direction, like blades

Lavishing their brilliant strokes
All over a wrecked house,
The nude wallpaper and the brute
Intelligence of the torn pipes.
Therefore when you marry or build
Pray to be untrue to the plain
Dominance of your own weather, how it keeps

Going even in the woods when not
A soul is there, and how it implies
Always that separate, cold
Splendidness, uncouth and unkind--
On chilly, unclouded mornings,
Torrential sunlight and moist air,
Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky

From An Explanation of America:
LAIR

Robert Pinsky

Inexhaustible, delicate, as if
Without source or medium, daylight
Undoes the mind; the infinite,

Empty actual is too bright,
Scattering to where the road
Whispers, through a mile of woods …

Later, how quiet the house is:
Dusk-like and refined,
The sweet Phoebe-note

Piercing from the trees;
The calm globe of the morning,
Things to read or to write

Ranged on a table; the brain
A dark, stubborn current that breathes
Blood, a deaf wadding,

The hands feeding it paper
And sensations of wood or metal
On its own terms. Trying to read

I persist a while, finish the recognition
By my breath of a dead giant's breath--
Stayed by the space of a rhythm,

Witnessing the blue gulf of the air.

An Explanation of America

Susan Stewart

From a sequence, "The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden":

Gihon, that compasseth the whole land

At the first frost we found our sheep with strangled hearts, lying on their backs in the frozen clover, their eyes wide open as if they were surprised by a constellation of drought or endless winter. The wolves walked into the snow, like men who have given up living without love; cows would no longer let go of their calves, hiding them deep in the birch groves. Everywhere the roads gave off their wild animal cries, running toward the edge of what we had thought was the world. And the names of things as we knew them would no longer bring them to us.

Yellow Stars and Ice

Alicia Ostriker

From A Woman Under the Surface:
MOON AND EARTH

Alicia Ostriker

Of one substance, of one
Matter, they have cruelly
Broken apart. They never will touch

Each other again. The shining
Lovelier and younger
Turns away, a pitiful girl.

She is completely naked
And it hurts. The larger
Motherly one, breathlessly luminous

Emerald, and blue, and white
Traveling mists, suffers
Birth and death, birth

and death, and the shock
Of internal heat killed by external cold.
They are dancing through that blackness.

They press as if
To come closer.

A Woman Under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems

Ann Lauterbach

From Before Recollection:
TRANSCENDENTAL POSTCARD
Ann Lauterbach

The outlook such that time is told on waking,
Without aid of cock or clock's crow.
In fact all the birds are elsewhere,
Poised on glossy page or in some fall
Migration. Sun up over mountain is precision,
Then mist travels, exhaling day.
All else, all change, is air,
Dew relenting on the blades
And mirror rhymes
Where water bears resemblance:
A strut of hues to pale even Revlon's alchemy and,
In the center of its glaze, a cauldron of sky-cast blue.

Before Recollection

Troy Jollimore

A new collection of poetry from the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

… we are fixed to perpetrate the species—

I meant perpetuate—as if our duty

were coupled with our terror. As if beauty

itself were but a syllabus of errors.

Troy Jollimore's first collection of poems won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was hailed by the New York Times as "a snappy, entertaining book, " and led the San Francisco Chronicle to call him "a new and exciting voice in American poetry." And his critically acclaimed second collection expanded his reputation for poems that often take a playful approach to philosophical issues. While the poems in Syllabus of Errors share recognizable concerns with those of Jollimore’s first two books, readers will also find a voice that has grown more urgent, more vulnerable, and more sensitive to both the inevitability of tragedy and the possibility of renewal.

Poems such as "Ache and Echo," "The Black-Capped Chickadees of Martha’s Vineyard," and "When You Lift the Avocado to Your Mouth" explore loss, regret, and the nature of beauty, while the culminating long poem, "Vertigo, " is an elegy for a lost friend as well as a fantasia on death, repetition, and transcendence (not to mention the poet’s favorite Hitchcock film). Ingeniously organized into sections that act as reflections on six quotations about birdsong, these poems are themselves an answer to the question the poet asks in "On Birdsong": "What would we say to the cardinal or jay, / given wings that could mimic their velocities?"

Syllabus of Errors: Poems

Fiona Sze-Lorrain

A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history

In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.

The Ruined Elegance: Poems

Eléna Rivera

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City

Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.

Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

Scaffolding: Poems

From an award-winning poet, a collection that explores the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics

In Radioactive Starlings, award-winning poet Myronn Hardy explores the divergences between the natural world and technology, asking what progress means when it destroys the places that sustain us. Primarily set in North Africa and the Middle East, but making frequent reference to the poet’s native United States, these poems reflect on loss, beauty, and dissent, as well as memory and the contemporary world’s relationship to the collective past.

Hardy imagines the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa as various starlings dwelling in New York City, Lisbon, Tunis, and Johannesburg, flying above these cities, resting in ficus and sycamores and on church steeples and minarets. Inhabiting the invented voices of Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Kaufman, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, the poems make references to Miles Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Tamir Rice, Ahmed Mohamed, and Albert Camus, and use forms such as ghazal, villanelle, pantoum, and sonnet, in addition to free lyricism. Through all these voices and forms, the questing starlings persist, moving and observing—and being observed by we who are planted on a crumbling ground.

A meditation on the complexities of transformation, cultures, and politics, Radioactive Starlings is an important collection from a highly accomplished young poet.

Radioactive Starlings: Poems

Miller Oberman

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English

An exciting debut collection of original poems and translations from Old English, The Unstill Ones takes readers into a timeless, shadow-filled world where new poems sound ancient, and ancient poems sound new. Award-winning scholar-poet Miller Oberman’s startlingly fresh translations of well-known and less familiar Old English poems often move between archaic and contemporary diction, while his original poems frequently draw on a compressed, tactile Old English lexicon and the powerful formal qualities of medieval verse.

Shaped by Oberman’s scholarly training in poetry, medieval language, translation, and queer theory, these remarkable poems explore sites of damage and transformation, both new and ancient. “Wulf and Eadwacer,” a radical new translation of a thousand-year-old lyric, merges scholarly practice with a queer- and feminist-inspired rendering, while original poems such as “On Trans” draw lyrical connections between multiple processes of change and boundary crossing, from translation to transgender identity. Richly combining scholarly rigor, a finely tuned contemporary aesthetic, and an inventiveness that springs from a deep knowledge of the earliest forms of English, The Unstill Ones marks the emergence of a major new voice in poetry.

The Unstill Ones: Poems

Dora Malech

A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms

In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.

“Stet,” from the Latin for “let it stand,” is a proofreading term meaning to retain or return to a previous phrasing. The uncertainty of changes made and then reconsidered haunts Stet as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and the limitations of spelling. How does one “go back” on one’s word or “stand by” one’s decisions? Can a life be remade or revised, or is the past forever present as in a palimpsest? Embodying the physicality and reproductive potentiality inherent in the collection’s forms and figures, Stet ends expectantly, not searching for closure but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what comes next.

By turns troubling and consoling, Stet powerfully combines lyric invention and brilliant wordplay.

Stet: Poems

Austin Smith

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune)

Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop.

In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.

Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

Flyover Country: Poems

Kathleen Graber

An impressive new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Taking its title from Heraclitus's most famous fragment, The River Twice is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. The world presented in these poems is a fluid one in which so much—including space and time, the subterranean realm of dreams, and language itself—seems protean, as the speaker's previously familiar understanding of the self and the larger systems around it gives way. Kathleen Graber’s poems wander widely, from the epistolary to the essayistic, shuffling the remarkable and unremarkable flotsam of contemporary life. One thought, one memory, one bit of news flows into the next. Yet, in a century devoted to exponentially increasing speed, The River Twice unfolds at the slow pace of a river bend. While the warm light of ideas and things flashes upon the surface, that which endures remains elusive—something glimpsed only for an instant before it is gone.

The River Twice: Poems

Eleanor Wilner

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry

Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.

In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air—a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.

Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017

Nate Klug

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as “a seduction by way of small astonishments”

Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the “immiserated quiet” of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, “The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables.”

Hosts and Guests: Poems

The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as "a master of musicality and enlightening allusions." In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls "creating between liberties." With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, "I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn." Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl—each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.

Rain in Plural: Poems

Tawanda Mulalu

The debut collection of an exciting new voice in poetry

Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor.

The speaker of these poems probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring—one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image: “The stars also suffer. Immense and dead, their gasses burn / distant like castanets of antebellum teeth. My open window / a synecdoche of country.”

Please make me pretty, I don't want to die: Poems

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a new collection of philosophical, elegiac, and wry meditations on film, painting, music, and poetry itself

Earthly Delights begins with an invocation to the muse and ends with the departure of Odysseus from Ithaca. In between, Troy Jollimore’s distinguished new collection ranges widely, with cinematic and adventurous poems that often concern artistic creation and its place in the world. A great many center on films, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The title poem reflects on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, while another is an elegy for Gord Downie, the lead singer and lyricist for the cult rock band The Tragically Hip. Other poems address various forms of political insanity, from the Kennedy assassination to today’s active shooter drills, and philosophical ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s musings on beauty to John D. Rockefeller’s thoughts on the relation between roses and capitalist ethics. The book’s longest poem, “American Beauty,” returns repeatedly to the film of that name, but ultimately becomes a meditation on the Western history of making and looking, and—like many of the book’s poems—an elegy for lost things.

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets - The book series

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets - The book series

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets books in order

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