"A poet to watch."—O Magazine "I tell the truth, but I try to be kind about it."—Camille Rankine in 12 Questions Named "a poet to watch" by O Magazine, Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms." From "Symptoms of Aftermath": …When I am saved, a slim nurse leans out of the white light. I need to hear your voice, sweetheart. I see my escape. I walk into the water. The sky is blue like the ocean, which is blue like the sky. Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.

"From the unique perspective of a U.S. Forest Service elite, a Type 1 Interagency "Hotshot" Crew (the "SEAL Team Six of the firefighting world"), poems weave together memory, urgency, and the passage of time. Features segments from actual incident reports, forcing readers to witness what it's like to stand before an inferno, walking with one foot in the black. An elegy for the self and the damage one sustains fighting wildfires"--

Forecast recovers early out-of-print work by Governor General’s Award-winning poet John Pass. The poems engage potentialities—travel, an orchard he cares for, evolving relationships, house-building, becoming a poet and husband and father. They’re grounded in place and time, but attuned, as he says, to constancy. Those for his young sons are poignant with the perilous hope of new parenthood: “asking courage of me / as never I needed nor knew it in sorrow.” Darker premonitions—dislocation, environmental damage, poetry’s shift from modernism to postmodernism—are mitigated throughout by the subtlety and solace of attentive expression. In “Apple,” Pass “contrives” to suspend time so that “Friends in the kitchen / re-reading Pound’s translations / of Rihaku” are still there days later when the tree outside blooms, concluding: “Only beyond / in the garden, that canopy // of fragrance, art’s / complement: coincidence. // Friends, come home. / There is everything.” Any fashionable irony is tempered—dispirited and optimistic. In “An Arbitrary Dictionary,” random words are selected to become poem titles, idiosyncratic definitions. Surprising complexity and insight often spring from their funny and irreverent first takes, as in “Tuck”: “No life for a fat man / with that once merry band gone wan / on a diet of personal aggrandizement / and Perrier.” The sequence’s experimentation foreshadows Pass’s expansive work in his later quartet, AT LARGE.

From the crashing boom of a thunderstorm to a gentle breeze on a sunny afternoon, the weather has a way of fascinating us every day. Nothing captures the magic of weather better than poetry. Young meteorologists and poets alike will love this collection of poems that capture the natural phenomena of weather. Even reluctant readers will be intrigued by the gorgeous illustrations that accompany the poems and enrich the text. Fun and accessible, this carefully selected collection is the perfect introduction to poetry, making this book an excellent tool for any language arts curriculum.