Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryThe Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America. He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and what it means to live in a country and time where it is impossible to disengage oneself from world events—where, in fact, the quest for identity is an act that requires one to rewrite history in personal terms.

The Real Enough World speculates about the invention of self and world in the act of writing poems. Like orchestral movements, the poems vary in tonal qualities and speed, moving from sensibility-driven, antic poems through a deeply personal series of narratives to poems of philosophical reflection where landscape and love operate as tropes for each other. Underlying the whole is the poet's sense that the material of life, as well as language, is insoluble and impermanent-humorous, tragic, absurd, joyous. Even when the mood of the book is most surreal, it is grounded in its accounts of the real enough.

Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers, and translators, including John Ashbery, D.J. Enright, and Douglas Dunn.

Ninety miles separate Cuba and Key West, Florida. Crossing that distance, thousands of Cubans have lost their lives. For Cuban American poet Virgil Su\u00e1rez, that expanse of ocean represents the state of exile, which he has imaginatively bridged in over two decades of compelling poetry. \u0022Whatever isn't voiced in time drowns,\u0022 Su\u00e1rez writes in \u0022River Fable,\u0022 and the urgency to articulate the complex yearnings of the displaced marks all the poems collected here. 90 Miles contains the best work from Su\u00e1rez's six previous collections: You Come Singing, Garabato, In the Republic of Longing, Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, as well as important new poems. At once meditative, confessional, and political, Su\u00e1rez's work displays the refracted nature of a life of exile spent in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. Connected through memory and desire, Caribbean palms wave over American junk mail. Cuban mangos rot on Miami hospital trays. William Shakespeare visits Havana. And the ones who left Cuba plant trees of reconciliation with the ones who stayed. Courageously prolific, Virgil Su\u00e1rez is one of the most important Latino writers of his generation.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's \u0022Imagine\u0022 to wrestle with the world as it is: \u0022no hell below us, / above us only sky.\u0022 It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations. Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to \u0022Try to praise the mutilated world,\u0022 as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation.In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier works, Sure Signs and One World at a Time (1985). Taken together or read one at a time, these poems clearly show why William Cole, writing in the Saturday Review, called Ted Kooser "a wonderful poet," and why Peter Stitt, writing in the Georgia Review, proclaimed him "a skilled and cunning writer. . . . An authentic 'poet of the American people.'"

James Still first achieved national recognition in the 1930s as a poet. Although he is better known today as a writer of fiction, it is his poetry that many of his essential images, such as the "mighty river of earth," first found expression. Yet much of his poetry remains out of print or difficult to find. From the Mountain, From the Valley collects all of Still's poems, including several never before published, and corrects editorial mistakes that crept into previous collections. The poems are presented in chronological order, allowing the reader to trace the evolution of Still's voice. Throughout, his language is fresh and vigorous and his insight profound. His respect for people and place never sounds sentimental or dated.Ted Olson's introduction recounts Still's early literary career and explores the poetic origins of his acclaimed lyrical prose. Still himself has contributed the illuminating autobiographical essay "A Man Singing to Himself," which will appeal to every lover of his work.James Still, the first poet laureate of Kentucky, recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and many other awards and honors, is the author of numerous works, including his masterful novel River of Earth.Ted Olson, associate professor of Appalachian studies and English at East Tennessee State University, is the author of Blue Ridge Folklife and the editor of CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual.

Denise Duhamel's much anticipated new collection begins with a revisionist tale--Noah is married to Joan of Arc--in a poem about America's often flawed sense of history. Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two M\u00f6bius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects. At the book's center is \u0022Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted,\u0022 a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of \u0022Mille et un sentiments,\u0022 modeled on the lists of Herv\u00e9 Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with \u0022Carb\u00f3 Frescos,\u0022 written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century. Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies--to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence. Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated \u0022Whirlpool Suite\u0022: \u0022Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline.\u0022 In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.

Mary Blachford Tighe was born in Dublin in 1772 and became a poet by the age of seventeen. Her enormously popular 1805 epic poem "Psyche; or, The Legend of Love" made her a fixture of English literary history for much of the nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, however, Tighe was better known for her influence on Keats's poetry than the considerable merits of her own work. The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe restores Tighe to the general canon of English literature of the period. With over eighty-five poems, including the complete Psyche, and extracts from several journals, both by and about Tighe, Harriet Kramer Linkin's annotated edition is the most complete collection of Mary Tighe's work to be published in one volume.

Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions-those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable.In poems such as “Six, Sex, Say,” she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife “with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit” in “Flesh, Bone, and Red,” to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in “Ode on My Mother's Handwriting.”Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and “orangutans in the guise of men.” As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems “are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive.”

In her second collection of poems, Rachel Zucker returns to a more autobiographical stance and writes about the particulars of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood-experiences that radically surprised her. But this is no simple reportage. With candor, humor, and compassion, Zucker discovers a new poetic territory: a landscape between story and fragment, a way of telling that is neither confessional nor intellectually detached. At the cliff-edge of narrative, a high place where language is the rope and falling the perception, Zucker's poems are unsentimental, true to the disjunctive experiences of loving, giving birth, raising a child, being lonely, being alive. A poetry of the body, of desire, about human frailty and strength, The Last Clear Narrative fills a void in the history of women writing about everyday experience and speaks to the nature of narrative itself.

Nationally acclaimed poet, photographer, filmmaker, and novelist James Baker Hall has long been regarded as one of Kentucky's most profound artists. Hall's growing body of work is an essential part of Kentucky's literary tradition, and yet his poetry in particular transcends the borders of the Commonwealth.The Total Light Process collects poems spanning Hall's celebrated career as well as new poems that have never before been published. The subjects of Hall's poems range from humorous and revealing portraits of his fellow writers and friends Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, and Gurney Norman, to the traumatic experience of his mother's suicide when he was eight years old, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tragic murder of Matthew Shepherd.

Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, “probably a steakhouse.” The ability of dogs to smell the uncool. Hitler's barber imagines what might have been if only he'd leaned his weight into the razor. An oblivious Coronado narrowly avoids an ambush on the American plains. Freud lecherously lifts the skirt of a Mexican housekeeper who has far too much work to be bothered by “a pillar of modern thought. Or just some dirty old man.”In lesser hands such disparate elements might fly wildly out of control. But in David Shumate's understated, brilliant prose poems, they come together in miraculously vivid riffs.The narrator of the title poem rhapsodizes, “I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die. It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and drift downstream and see where I end up.” Shumate's deft and refreshing collection takes us to amazing places with its plainspoken meditations.

Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix's revolutionary bullet time.Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.