Winner of the 1999 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry given by the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Winner of the Midland Society of Authors Award for Poetry 1999 In this latest, long-awaited collection, Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, tenderness, a dose of terror, and an occasional swerve into the surreal, these poems probe the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape - the effects of our past patterns and influences on the world of the present. By turns humorous and dark, straightforward and oblique, these poems are inventive and intelligent without forsaking accessibility.

As its title proclaims, Eve’s Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to “find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold.” Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught us. These narrative and lyric poems celebrate desire, marriage, and domestic life; they visit sexual terror and consider sickness and death. Construing all of life as a journey that takes us from innocence to knowledge, this work suggests that the maps that we need for this journey may be found written on our own bodies. Kasdorf writes of a life’s migrations, tracing paths that joyfully enlarge our definitions of love and longing - sometimes embracing conventional values and sometimes subverting them.

Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry PrizeOver the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. Picnic, Lightning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."

il cuore : the heart is a major new collection of poetry by Kathleen Fraser, one of the most significant poets of the last generation and a writer of unusual courage and inventiveness. From the intimacy of early poems to the syntactic play of her much-praised book, when new time folds up (1993), Fraser's work examines fields of possibility, where the visual, theoretical, and lyrical collide. This book provides a generous selection of work both new and old, tracing the development of her poetics over the last three decades. Rich with detail, these poems radicalize intention by embracing error, as in "boundayr," and reassert language innovation as a feminist strategy. They lead us toward "the infinity of a door only slightly ajar" and have established Fraser as one of America's preeminent experimental writers.

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

Those who have traveled know the experience of extended time and sharpened perception. Muriel Rukeyser's account of Puck Fair — the last existing pagan festival of the goat — captures just that state of consciousness. Set in County Kerry, Ireland, The Orgy evokes this great American poet's journey of sensual and psychological transformation in the midst of a lush account of Irish culture and tradition. With a preface by Sharon Olds.

The Falling Hour is the fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. It is a fiercly elegiac and even apocalyptic book, culminating in a series of blistering elegies written after the sudden death of Wojahn’s wife, the poet Linda Hull. In these poems, the process of mourning and lamentation is examined in all of its intricacy, rage, and sorrowful ambivalence.

Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossãand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.

Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language marries life. Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the possibility of a native -- and feminine -- language.

Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic juxtaposition between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century. Don Bogen calls the work an archeology, and uses details f life in past eras as a way of penetrating the surfaces of history. In his account, everything known is both encumbered with and defined by the past. Short poems in this collection cohere around the long title poem, which explores the nineteenth century through more than thirty sections in different voices and styles, including lists, mock letters, brief narratives, and lyric passages. The result is lively and illuminating.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith - Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth - in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

Adrian Oktenberg breaks the media-induced numbness that surrounded the war in the Balkans, and makes it impossible to resist or deny this genocide. Echoing the voices of Charlotte Delbo, Walt Whitman, Cavafy, Tory Dent, Carolyn Forche, and many others, this collection presents the duality of the brutalities and experiences of war beside life in an American landscape marked with the ripening tomatoes of summer and news of devastation in foreign cities with unpronouncable names.

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Muriel Rukeyser explores the vital force of poetry and the arts in American culture. She opposes elitist attitudes and addresses Americans’ fear of feeling, which contribute to a devaluation of poetry and the arts in the U.S. Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this collection of essays makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life.

The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.