American Aperture: poems contains 70 poems on the social conscience of America. Once again, Charles Edward York explores the issues facing modern America in the 21st century. His poetry offers a candid, no-holds barred look at relationships, injustice, poverty, sex, bigotry and more.

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In "Outgoing," the speaker erases his brother's answering machine message to save his family from "the shame of dead you / answering calls." In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, "a flower / of smoldering filaments." A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, "a tinfoil lake," "vegetables / dying in the crisper." Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

Through Positive Eyes features photographs and stories from ten cities around the world by 130 HIV-positive "artivists," many using cameras for the first time. Originated as part of the global MAKE ART/STOP AIDS initiative, this project paints a vivid picture of the AIDS epidemic--after its initial outbreak, and as treatment becomes more widely available. It testifies to the resilient spirit of those facing the challenges of HIV.

Daguerreotype portraits with praise poems written to accompany the photographs. Subjects include Laurie Anderson, Cecily Brown, Gregory Crewdson, Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Philip Glass, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bob Holman, Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Peyton, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, James Siena, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, James Turrell, Robert Wilson, Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage, and Chuck Close. Also includes Rexer's joint interview with photographer Close and poet Holman.

Poems.

A Latina feminist chronicle of the Vietnam War era in documentary poems that highlight the voices of women relegated to the margins of history.

In a “trenchantly observed and moving debut” (John James, Kenyon Review), Anders Carlson-Wee mines nourishment and holiness from the darkest of our human origins. Explosive and incantatory, The Low Passions traces the fringes of the American experiment through the eyes of a young drifter. Pathologically frugal, reckless, and vulnerable, the narrator of these viscerally compelling poems hops freight trains, hitchhikes, dumpster dives, and sleeps in the homes of total strangers, scavenging forgotten and hardscrabble places for tangible forms of faith.