Joel Fry's poems chart a deeply interior quest. Though the object is predictable-understanding, love, friendship, hope-the poems are highly original. Deep within, where external and internal landscape merge, where easy solutions like monetary success and comfortable suburbia go down before a sharp irony, we meet fleeting memories of a childhood farm, a creek beside which boys played, rare moments of love where a couple sits on a porch. We also meet loneliness, despair, glimpses of truth, and a pervasive joy in the act of creation. The poems are disciplined, intuitive, paradoxical, richly imagined-repaying, over and over, the attention and agility required of those who would follow the poet. Fry leaves us "poised on the edge of a mystery / [we] cannot command, a chorus [we] cannot escape." Harry Moore, author of Time's Fool and Bearing the Farm Away

Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail. This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review) "Love Poem" A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours. from "Gathering the Bones Together" A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming… "Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."--The New York Times Book Review Gregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry. Also Available by Gregory Orr: Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence

What is the price of a life, a stolen culture, a stolen heart? In formal and nontraditional poems, Reparations Now! asks for what is owed. Moving between voices and through intersecting histories, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones offers perspectives both sharp and compassionate, exploring the difficulties of navigating our relationships with ourselves and others. From the murder of Mary Turner in 1918 to a case of infidelity to the oppressive nationalist movement of the present, Jones holds us accountable.

Mary Gordon Duffee's father, Matthew Duffee was born in Ireland and immigrated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1823. In Tuscaloosa he operated a popular tavern, and he later bought a resort hotel at Blount Springs. Mary Duffee was born in Alabama in 1840 and spent many summers with her family at the resort. It was the journey to and from Blount Springs that inspired Duffee's best-known work, Sketches of Alabama, which originally appeared as fifty-nine articles in the Birmingham Weekly Iron Age in 1886 and 1887. She also contributed articles to several out-of-state newspapers, wrote guide books, advertising copy, and poetry. She died in 1920. This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee's obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald.

Grounded in technical mastery, the poems in Out of Speech address issues both universal and timely. In this series of ekphrastic works, Adam Vines explores themes as varied as exile, family, disease, desire, and isolation through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first century painters, including Picasso, Hopper, Rothko, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Artschwager. He also goes within and beyond these works of art to explore characters set in the present-day museums, from a bored docent to a misinformed “explainer” of an artwork’s meaning. Combining these two views—one that looks at the painting and another that looks around it—his poems affirm the artist’s insights into the complexity of being human.

Poetry. "Rather than introspection, sensationalism, or mere entertainment, remembering becomes an act of engagement, one that propels the poet toward a fierce intellectual and moral reckoning. And we in turn are held rapt by the lyric enactments of this poet who takes dangerous materials into his hands; who stubbornly pulls at the poisonous sumac obscuring a furnace's ruins; who probes old wound, transfiguring them into new patterns. MURDER BALLADS is wondrous and essential reading, a compelling debut" Jane Satterfield."