Brooks Haxton’s poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings. In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says: Whorls of a magnetic field exfoliated under the solar wind, so that the northern lights above me trembled. No: that was the porch light blurred by tears. With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love. A master of moods—as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers—Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page. ISAAC’S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M. From the dark tree at his window blossoms battered by the rain fell into the summer grass, white horns, all spattered down the throat with purple ink, while unseen birds, with creaks and peeps and whistles, started the machinery of daybreak.

Brooks Haxton's poetry has celebrated for thirty years our troubled pleasures in the daily world. This new collection, titled after a meditation on the cry of the snowy tree cricket, gives us his most moving response to the ferocious beauty of nature and to the folly and magnificence of human undertakings. In the opening poem, the poet comes home drunk without his key, collapses in the yard, and looks up to where, he says: Whorls of a magnetic field exfoliated under the solar wind, so that the northern lights above me trembled. No: that was the porch light blurred by tears. With this self-deprecating wit and tenderness toward human failings, these poems search through history into the wilderness of our origins, and through the self into the mysterious presences of people we love. A master of moods--as when a poem of grief after the death of a friend becomes a sprightly litany of her favorite wildflowers--Haxton is a poet who summons essences of thought and feeling in a few words, creating both narratives and miniatures that are rich in possibility beyond the page. ISAAC'S ROOM, EMPTY, 4 A.M. From the dark tree at his window blossoms battered by the rain fell into the summer grass, white horns, all spattered down the throat with purple ink, while unseen birds, with creaks and peeps and whistles, started the machinery of daybreak.

A native of the Bay Area, Ross J. Farrar is an internationally renowned singer, songwriter, and lyricist for the post-punk band, Ceremony. In his debut book of poetry, Farrar conjures a narrative voice that evokes Alan Vega of the band Suicide and other New York school artists as he contemplates life outside of music. Farrar’s poems glide between hazy evocations of being young on the West Coast, working at an adult bookstore, and drinking with friends, alongside layers of darker experiences: visiting the graves of friends and loved ones, leaving Cheree, the 2016 election. He mulls over the lost landmarks of his youth in San Francisco and a relationship both heart-wrenching and ultimately failing.

More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

For over fifty years, Hazo’s poetry has meditated on themes of mortality and love, passion and art, and courage and grace in a style that is unmistakably his own. In this new collection, he offers his most candid reflections on the passage of time and the tenderness of the present moment. By turns convivial and introspective, these poems explore the complex synchronicity between life and art, and the connections between the personal and the political. With sharp clarity and deep emotion, Hazo continues his pursuit of wisdom and discovery through the act of expression.

Mississippi has produced outstanding writers in numbers far out of proportion to its population. Their contributions to American literature, including poetry, rank as enormous. Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide showcases forty-seven poets associated with the state and assesses their work with the aim of appreciating it and its place in today’s culture. In Mississippi, the importance of poetry can no longer be doubted. It partakes, as Faulkner wrote, of the broad aim of all literature: “to uplift man’s heart.” In Mississippi Poets, author Catharine Savage Brosman introduces readers to the poets themselves, stressing their versatility and diversity. She describes their subject matter and forms, their books, and particularly representative or striking poems. Of broad interest and easy to consult, this book is both a source of information and a showcase. It highlights the organic connection between poetry by Mississippians and the indigenous music genres of the region, blues and jazz. No other state has produced such abundant and impressive poetry connected to these essential American forms. Brosman profiles and assesses poets from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Grounds for selection include connections between the poets and the state; the excellence and abundance of their work; its critical reception; and both local and national standing. Natives of Mississippi and others who have resided here draw equal consideration. As C. Liegh McInnis observed, “You do not have to be born in Mississippi to be a Mississippi writer. . . . If what happens in Mississippi has an immediate and definite effect on your work, you are a Mississippi writer.”