This original, illuminating, and sometimes quite funny poetry anthology is primarily concerned with a fundamental and familiar question: How can we tell good poetry from bad? To illustrate precisely why these 101 poems, many of them well-loved classics, are so accomplished and remarkable, the prize-winning poet, author, critic, and veteran teacher Snodgrass herein rewrites them―wrongly. De/Compositions tellingly presents these rewrites next to the originals―by poets ranging from William Shakespeare to William Stafford―and thus we can more fully appreciate the artistry of these astonishing poems word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza. This book will appeal to anyone studying the craft and/or creativity that good poems demand.

De/Compositions

Literature & Fiction

SNODGRASS, W.D.

History & Criticism

Graywolf

Linda Gregg's first two books - Too Bright to See &amp; Alma - are, at long last, available again-this time in a single volume. In this book, we witness the awakening of one of the finest American poets of her generation.

Too Bright to See / Alma: Poems

Gregg, Linda

Poetry

"Lawnboy is, quite simply, the real thing, a novel of mystery and great beauty." ―Michael Cunningham
They all thought I was good-natured, upright and responsible, generous, affectionate, and kind, and of course I could be those things, but there was much more to me than that, a side that unnerved even myself, and this side included William. Seventeen-year-old Evan's adventure begins with mowing a neighbor's lawn, a summer job that leads him into an unpredictable world of desire and betrayal. Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he make a choice between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky wanders the lush and tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.

Lawnboy

Lisicky, Paul

United States

The visceral new work by Katie Ford, whose poems "possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night" (The New York Times Book Review) 
If you respect the dead and recall where they died by this time tomorrow there will be nowhere to walk. ―"Earth"
With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes―those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.

Colosseum

Ford, Katie

Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize
* Winner of the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature * * A Publishers Weekly "First Fiction" Pick for Spring 2012 *
"A crazy ambidextrous delight. A drunk and totally unreliable narrator runs alongside the reader insisting him or her into the great fictional possibilities of cricket."--Michael Ondaatje
Aging sportswriter W.G. Karunasena's liver is shot. Years of drinking have seen to that. As his health fades, he embarks with his friend Ari on a madcap search for legendary cricket bowler Pradeep Mathew. En route they discover a mysterious six-fingered coach, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about their beloved sport and country. A prizewinner in Sri Lanka, and a sensation in India and Britain, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka is a nimble and original debut that blends cricket and the history of modern Sri Lanka into a vivid and comedic swirl.

Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Karunatilaka, Shehan

Literary

Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism All That Man Is traces the arc of life from the spring of youth to the winter of old age by following nine men who range from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable, vital, pitiable, and hilarious, these men paint a picture of modern manhood. David Szalay is a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos. In All That Man Is, a Man Booker Prize finalist and the winner of the Gordon Burn Prize and the Plimpton Prize, he brilliantly illuminates the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe.
“Szalay’s prose . . . is frequently brilliant, remarkable for its grace and economy . . . [All That Man Is] has a new urgency now that the post-Cold War dream of a Europe of open borders and broad, shared identity has come under increasing question.” ―Garth Greenwell, The New York Times Book Review
“Szalay does so much and so well that we come to view his snapshots of lives as brilliant, captivating dramas.” ―Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“A 100-megawatt novel: intelligent, intricate, so very well made, the form perfectly fitting the content. When I reached the end, I turned straight back to the start to begin again.” ―The Sunday Times (London)

All That Man Is

SZALAY,DAVID

* One of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2020 * Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Li-Young Lee The More Extravagant Feast focuses on the trophic exchanges of a human body with the world via pregnancy, motherhood, and interconnection--the acts of making and sustaining other bodies from one's own, and one's own from the larger world. Leah Naomi Green writes from attentiveness to the vast availability and capacity of the weedy, fecund earth and from her own human place within more-than-human life, death, and birth. Lyrically and spiritually rich, striving toward honesty and understanding, The More Extravagant Feast is an extraordinary book of awareness of our dependency on ecological systems--seen and unseen.

More Extravagant Feast

Green, Leah Naomi

A resplendent life in sonnets from the author ofFour-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize "The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing uswhat we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip,frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of "beauty or relief." Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and--in a word--frank.

frank: sonnets

Seuss, Diane

About the Author\nJenny Xie is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.\n* FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY *\nThe astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” (The New Yorker)\nShaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory―historical, collective, personal―stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.\nThe Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.

Rupture Tense

Xie, Jenny

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