In Praise of Fragments is a collection of various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592-1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for many years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Suffrant.

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.

AntigoneKefala is one of the elders of Australian poetry, highly regarded for theintensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of the small numberof poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing inits effects. Fragments is her firstcollection of new poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998, andpossibly her last. It follows her prose work Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008) of which one critic wrote, 'Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leavesone almost singing with the pleasure of it'. This skill in capturing the momentis just as evident in Fragments,though the territory is often darker now, as the poet patrols the liminalspaces between life and death, alert to the energies which lie in wait there.And such energies! "Up, in the blue depth / a bird cut with its wings / thelight / such silk, that fell / and rose, heavily, / singing through the air.' AntigoneKefala has written four works of fiction, including The First Journey,The Island and Summer Visit, and four poetrycollections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebookand Absence: New and Selected Poems as well as the non-fiction work Sydney Journals. Born in Romania ofGreek parents, she lived in Greece and New Zealand before coming to Sydney.

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over. Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art. Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.