Winnowed from a distinguished career, then distilled, then polished and winnowed again, the poems in You Are Here are Leon Stokesbury’s best from fifty years of published work. The selections from his earlier volumes are as fully realized as one would expect from the winner of the AWP Poetry Competition and the Poets’ Prize. But it is in Stokesbury’s new work, collected under the heading “These Days,” that he reveals something completely different. From a carnival sideshow to Hitchcock’s Mount Rushmore, from John Keats’s backyard to the miseries of a failed crematorium operator, every turned page divulges a particular we didn’t see coming. You Are Here is like a sideshow of this modern world, even when we discover, amazed, our selves looking back at us. “Why do we still only stand here?” Stokesbury asks in one of his earliest salvos. The poems in this collection give such varied answers that readers will have no idea what the next page holds, only that they will find themselves somewhere new.

Poetry. THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY is written as a swansong to a generation that has lost the will to perceive the linear progression of time; a generation that is a collapse of occasions, wherein no discernible or dominant motif is present because Now is the mixture of all times, when every trend that ever was is the current mode. Crossing platforms, from mirror to various pulsing LED screens and back, Jon Leon taps sublimity, rousing our daily patois to orgasm without interruption. THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY is a portrait of the artist as a young verb. Like R. Kelly covering Les Chants de Maldoror.--Bruce Hainley Jon Leon has crafted a cold and funny porno-dystopia that 'sends up' poetry while also behaving like a strict modernist manifesto-a Stein or Pound reveille, with P.T. Barnum bravado, making it new. Reading THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY, I think of the dungeon (Marquis de Sade and Dennis Cooper); I also think of the penthouse (Joan Didion and Frederick Seidel). Leon's voice--if it is indeed a voice, or his-- is charmingly post-sentiment; he evacuates poetry's resources in order to stage, with hilarious, memorable, deadpan showmanship, a bildungsroman of the artist-as-void. Leon's subject is the rôle of the 'poet, ' a Rimbaud with the resumé of a Russ Meyer.--Wayne Koestenbaum This thick work is so blindingly over-the-top in how it hits on all the stuff the kids love these days, stuff that comes from a real place of daring integrity but can also land like callowness taken as a drug. Either way it's great, I inject it. Porn-intellect-fashion-longing and I heart flat-affect. Easy to imitate, hard to aspire to, and I'm trying it now.--Rebecca Wolff

After his mother, hurrying to her tuba lesson, tells him that a poem will cure his pet fish's boredom, a little boy tries to find out what a poem is by asking friends, neighbors, and other members of his family.

Reproduction of the original: A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

"I wonder, then, what freedom is. Is it a place? Is it a thought? Can it be stolen? Can it be bought?" As powerful as it is beautiful, Freedom, We Sing is a lyrical picture book designed to inspire and give hope to readers around the world. Molly Mendoza's immersive, lush illustrations invite kids to ponder singer/songwriter Amyra León's poem about what it means to be free. It's the perfect book for parents who want a way to gently start the conversation with their kids about finding hope in these very tense times we are living in.

Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, "Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five." The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama. Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.