Once more the anthropologist of our American scene brings us his reports from the present. With a ruthless gaze, Tony Hoagland attends to all the details of modern frailty and human joy. "What is wrong with you?" he asks of "His Majesty Mr.-Boombox-In-My-Jeep" driving the beach road at 2 AM. What is wrong with all of us? these poems want to know and set off finding out. Don't Tell Anyone is a chronicle of life, love, marriage, sex and shopping as only Tony Hoagland is able to render such things. His poems speak conversationally as if your good friend is telling you a story, but there is great wit and inventiveness behind each of them. Don't tell anyone -- tell everyone about these poems.

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation: sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion. With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,” Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction reveal that defeat is a natural prelude to grace and loss a kind of threshold to freedom. “A remarkable book. Without any rhetorical straining, with a disarming witty directness, these poems manage to transform every subject they touch, from love to politics, reaching out from the local and the personal to place the largest issues in the context of feeling. It’s hard to think of a recent book that succeeds with equal grace in fusing the truth-telling and the lyric impulse, clarity and song, in a way that produces such consistent pleasure and surprise.”—Carl Dennis “This is wonderful poetry: exuberant, self-assured, instinct with wisdom and passion.”—Carolyn Kizer “There is a fine strong sense in these poems of real lives being lived in a real world. This is something I greatly prize. And it is all colored, sometimes brightly, by the poet’s own highly romantic vision of things, so that what we may think we already know ends up seeming rich and strange.”—Donald Justice “In Sweet Ruin, we’re banging along the Baja of our little American lives, spritzing truth from our lapels, elbowing our compadres, the Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe we’re unhappy in a less than tragic way, but our ruin requires of us a love and understanding and loyalty just as deep and sweet as any tragic hero’s. And it’s all the more poignant in a sad and funny way because the purpose of this forced spiritual march, Hoagland seems to be saying, is to leave ourselves behind. Undoubtedly, you will recognize among the body count many of your selves.”—Jack Myers

There is a vision of power at the center of James Franco's first chapbook of poems, Strongest of the Litter. Power here is both generative and frightening, self-consuming and bracing. It is the artist's power of self-making. These poems, thoroughly beautiful and spare, have the texture of contending angles. Authenticity can be achieved only through different voices: in an investigation of the range and strength of American art, in homage to Williams Carlos Williams, in awe at the cost to American actors of their art (notably Taylor, Clift, De Niro and Brando), in the celebration and limitation of Kowalski love -- "I'm a raging Kowalski whose / Temper can be measured by // How little I can give. / How abusive my reticence." Pervasive in these eloquent poems is the power of memory, the collective memory of Hollywood and specific memories of the poet's own past.

The new poetry collection by Tony Hoagland, the award-winning author of What Narcissim Means To Me and Donkey Gospel In Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland is deep inside a republic that no longer offers reliable signage, in which comfort and suffering are intimately entwined, and whose citizens gasp for oxygen without knowing why. With Hoagland's trademark humor and social commentary, these poems are exhilarating for their fierce moral curiosity, their desire to name the truth, and their celebration of the resilience of human nature.

An eagerly awaited new collection of poems by contemporary favorite Tony Hoagland, author of "Donkey Gospel." Hoagland levels his particular brand of acute irony not only on the personal life, but also on some provinces of American culture.

Straight James / Gay James, actor James Franco’s new chapbook of poems, explores the facets of his public and private personas. Straight James / Gay James is a poetic bildungsroman—raw, candid, and uninhibited. James Franco writes about life as an actor, sexuality, questions of identity, gender, family, Gucci, Lana Del Rey, James Dean, Hollywood, and more. His poetic style varies from the imagistic to the prosaic. The chapbook also contains an interview of “Gay James” conducted by “Straight James.” Yes, Straight James asks the question: “Let’s get substantial: are you f*****g gay or what?”

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me The parade for the slain police officer goes past the bakery and the smell of fresh bread makes the mourners salivate against their will. —from "Note to Reality" Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland's fifth collection of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.