A dazzling volume that gushes with the rhythms of life and language, from award-winning poet Charlie Smith. Moving through shades of darkness and light, Charlie Smith captures a refracted view of a disturbed, disintegrating world. Demo explores landscapes both natural and urban, probing the places where the two overlap. Its narrator is at once wanderer and witness, living among streets where flowers are covered with dust and smells of Mexican food and Chinese cooking fill the air. The poet finds a resurgence of life in the ruins, reminding us once again “that we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief” (David Kirby, New York Times).

This text provides an excellent introduction to the poetry of Meleager. His 132 epigrams are encompassed in a little more than 800 lines, allowing a complete reading within a reasonable time. Also included are notes, vocabulary, and proper name and epigram source indices.

An Electric Literature “Most Anticipated Poetry Book of 2021” From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s newest collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories. “‘You tell me how I was born what I am,’” demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley—of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless. With astonishing formal range, Dēmos also documents the intolerance that dominates American society. What can we learn from mapping the genealogy of a violent and loud collective? How deeply do anger, violence, and oppression run in the blood? From adapted Punnett squares to Biblical epigraphs to the ghastly comment section of a local news website, Dēmos diagrams surviving America as an other-ed American—and it refuses to flinch from the forces that would see that multitude erased. Dēmos is a resonant proclamation of identity and endurance from one of the most intriguing new voices in American letters—a voice singing “long on America as One / body but many parts.”

A major new guide to writing and understanding poetry

Les Murray's Collected Poems displays the full range of his poetic art. This volume contains all the poems he wants to preserve, apart from the verse novel Fredy Neptune, from his first book The Ilex Tree (1965) to Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). In tracing Murray's artistic development, it shows an ever-changing power, grace and humour, as well as great versatility and formal mastery. "He is, quite simply, the one by whom language lives." - Joseph Brodsky "There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures and yet so intimate and conversational." - Derek Walcott

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

Poet and cartoonist Austin Kleon has discovered a new way to read between the lines. Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction—eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry. Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," Newspaper Blackout will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane. Newspaper Blackout contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.