In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize--even to envy--a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman's eternal city of Zion....

With a unique voice in American potery, Emily Dickinson is known for her short poems, which are full of acute observations.

After two years spent in the Kurdish North of Iraq, Patrick Woodcock has returned with his eighth collection of poetry, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains. Resisting both summary gestures and grief tourism, these poems form a sustained poetic journal of both Woodcock's own experiences and those of the Iraqis who befriended him, as it paints a picture of the birth of a new Kurdish state. With poems that are at once deadly serious and poignantly humorous,...

Repair is body work in C.K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, & the secrets that separate & join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French...

Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan....

Exciting in its taut energy and inventive comedy, Murray Edmond's The Switch is a long poem in forty-nine parts which proceeds, not in a straight line, but in a dazzling display of repetitions, rearrangements and transformations. It's a game, a show, an entertainment and a meditation about love and the passage of time.--Provided by the publisher.

Published on the cusp of the new millennium, Maori poet Robert Sullivan's third book of poems, Star Waka, explores themes of journeying and navigation, moving back and forth in time and focus to confront colonisation, contemporary political issues and personal questions of family and identity. It came with some strings attached: each poem had to feature either a star, a waka (canoe) or the ocean. Within these parameters, and in 2001 lines, Sullivan...

The poems in Today is the Piano's Birthday are spare, imagistic and suggestive. They cover a range of tones and subjects, moving from love lyrics to a focus on insanity, death and despair. A poem, Michael Harlow says, is: 'a construct of language and space, so that one word discovers another, one perception creates another; so that the poem declares and extends the relationship between the maker and his experience, subsequently between the reader...

Vivid sketches full of unexpected detail communicate bizarre, humorous, and magical cultural clashes in this first collection from a rising poet who draws from her personal experiences as the child of an immigrant. A woman stranded at home with small children listens to the radio for company in wry, colorful poems about domestic life. Summers in seaside cottages, the dramas of suburban life, and the memories of childhood are among the scenarios explored...

A sense of the romance in music, art, love, and landscapes permeates this lyrical collection from a sophisticated poet. The southern mountains of New Zealand and the towns and countrysides of Italy are among the landscapes evoked in one section. Specially commissioned for this collection, line drawings and photographs from regional artists such as Anne Noble, John Reynolds, Seraphine Pick, and Denis O'Connor are included with a contemplative response...