Books like Never by Jorie Graham

Nine Horses gathers Billy Collins’s latest poems, blending everyday observations with playful lyricism and quiet reflection.

In her first entirely new collection of poems since Materialism (1993). Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham returns with great clarity and passion to her lyrical roots - and builds a rich musical meditation of desire. In these poems, Graham approaches a host of characters, each of them an embodiment of sexual, emotional, political, or spiritual desire - desire searching for its place in an age of betrayed values, an age when dreaming has been rubbed thin by reason, frayed by the speed of facts. Here error is explored as an heroic form of finding one's way - a wandering toward truth, a pilgrimage guided by the body's strictest longing. Here lovers stay alive in sexually-charged encounters; here, too, angels are overheard muttering warnings. Here are Pascal and his wager, Akhmatova and her refusal, and a few soldiers sleeping before a sepulcher while something incomprehensible happens behind their backs.

Tony Hoagland’s collection of witty, intimate poems examines modern American life, advocating clarity and reinvented affection while staying ‘unincorporated.’

Rika Lesser through-composes her books of poems; they are not albums but unities. They are meant to be read in one sitting and can be fearfully intense. In Etruscan Things she followed the circular map of the Etruscan heavens. In All We Need of Hell she seeks to escape the locked boxes of psychiatric wards and medical categorizations. When she succeeds - and she must - it is through art to life. These poems will inevitably be compared to those by other poets who have struggled with depressive illnesses. Rarely, however, does a poet address such topics as illness, mental illness, suicide, and death as singlemindedly as Lesser does here.

Jeffrey Yang’s debut collection, *An Aquarium*, blends vivid imagery of marine life with profound reflections on war, environmental harm, language, and history, as a father’s wisdom guides his newborn son.

ix, 47 pages : 21 cm

Alice Notley's latest collection explores the complex intersection of the visible and unconscious through a seedy detective dialogue.