Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2012 With muscular language and visceral imagery, Club Icarus will appeal to sons and fathers, to those tired of poetry that makes no sense, to those who think lyric poetry is dead, to those who think the narrative poem is stale, and to those who appreciate the vernacular as the language of living and the act of living as something worth putting into language.

My name is Icarus for a reason. If there’s a way to screw up a plan, I’m your man. Case in point: Falling for the man I’m supposed to seduce and ferry to his death. Adam Devlin, aka the Devil. A vigilante ex-cop and a thorn in the side of the mobster blackmailing me. Should be easy. Except Adam’s longing for intimacy—for submission—is irresistible. Seduce him, yes. Lead him to his death, world of no. There’s only one solution to save us both: kidnap the Devil. I mentioned my name is Icarus, right? Three guesses how this plan will go. Bet you only need one. Icarus and the Devil is a steamy M/M urban fantasy romance novel. It features two danger-magnet men trying to stay alive and failing to stay away from each other. Chaos ensues on their way to happily ever after.

Trying to make sense of a disordered world, Stefanie Wortman's debut collection examines works of art as varied as casts of antique sculpture, 19th-century novels, and even scenes from reality television to investigate the versions of order that they offer. These deft poems yield moments of surprising levity even as they mount a sharp critique of human folly. "These poems seem haunted by a mostly nameless melancholia. In The Permanent Collection, however, turns its grim geography of prisons, mortuaries, and tawdry suburbs into something close to classical elegy. 'In sunken rooms,' Wortman writes, 'on scratchy rugs, maybe we’ve never known happiness.' It’s that 'maybe'—the smart hedge—that renders her poems complex, often beguiling, but never without a gesture of redemption. This should be part of any serious poet’s permanent collection."— Chad Davidson, author of The Last Predicta and judge

“There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably—yet language in some way remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain. Ranging between Atlanta, Georgia, and the Eternal City of Rome, these poems offer a poignant chronicle of haunting by a mother who is simultaneously present and absent even before her death. The centerpiece of the book is a poem in nineteen sections entitled ‘Majestic Diner’ that strives to answer its own epigraph, from George Herbert: ‘My God, what is a heart?’ Elsewhere, the poet writes ‘Humankind / cannot bear to be cheated out of our most guarded truths,’ paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s dictum that ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ and part of what makes this book memorable are the clear-sightedness and charity with which those truths are anatomized.”—Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge

A futuristic reimaging of the classic Greek myth, as a boy ventures through deep space and challenges the awesome power of black holes. The beauty of the book lies in the images, provided by NASA and the Hubble Space telescope, and printed on board rather than paper.