"Brilliant ....certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English."—Anthony Hecht, author of The Darkness and the Light An exuberant and bold series of poems drawing on the poet's life in the Catskill Mountains. Questions of exile and belonging figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world. In the chainsaw—the book's central image—all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical brilliance.

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

"Lisa Hiton's AFTERFEAST grapples with big stuff--painful history, gorgeous and fraught geographies, elusive sexual identity--in an authentic, dauntless voice that lends to these large subjects a gripping intimacy. To read these poems is to stand among haunted ruins on 'the hot slab of history,' to witness different kinds of survival, how disappeared and durable spaces endure alike in time, and in a mind. I envy readers their first entry into the ripe world of this book. A stunningly mature debut--symphonic and bracing and profound."--Maggie Dietz Poetry. Jewish Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies.

Chainsaws in the Cathedral gathers together the finest of Peter Trower's poems about the friendships and dangers of the West Coast logging life. The poems reveal Trower's marvellous tonal range, his ear attuned to the rhythms of the flesh and the wilderness.

“Superb. . . . Every page of this narration bears examples of Lasdun’s own poetic mastery. . . . Shockingly vivid.”—Time Out Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young East German, whose yearnings for love, glory, and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. By a series of increasingly dangerous maneuvers, he makes this fantasy come true, his past seemingly locked behind the Berlin Wall and a new life of unbounded bliss ahead of him. But then his world begins to fall apart.