Juxtaposes the ridiculousness and absurdities of daily life with the imagined life through poems about finding a lost cat and not being invited to a party.

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

"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.

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

In his tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (LIBRARY JOURNAL) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Stephen Dunn received a 1995 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Literature. His most recent publications are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and WALKING LIGHT: ESSAYS AND MEMOIRS.

"Sherpatude no. 26: 'Humor is a combat multiplier ...' Has your war become workaday? Does life on the Forward Operating Base (FOB) now seem commonplace? Armed with deadpan snark and poker-faced patriotism -- and rooted in the coffee-black soil and plain-spoken voice of the American Midwest -- journalist-turned-poet Randy Brown reveals behind-the-scenes stories of U.S. soldier-citizenship. From Boot Camp to Bagram, Afghanistan. And back home again." --

“Essential to contemporary poetry collections.”—Library Journal In his fourteenth collection, Stephen Dunn, “one of our indispensable poets” (Miami Herald), continues to probe brilliantly the unsaid and the elusive in the lives we live, in language that Gerald Stern has called “unbearably fearless and beautiful.”