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Daniel Sloate (1931-2009) was a prolific poet, playwright and translator.

This is a posthumous collection of poems. Though Axel Soestmeyer did not live to see the poems into print, this edition Chr(45) faithful to his intentions Chr(45) makes public the complex expression of an emotional thinker and intelligent lover. His mastery of vocabulary and the liberties he took with syntax and rhythm permit him to control a vital inspiration that could easily have slipped into vulgarity.

The poetic vision of "A Taste of Earth, A Taste of Flame" is timeless. It is also a work rooted in the thought of our own era. Though man does not escape his predicament, our own era has perhaps made him more aware than ever before of his destiny. But here the poet's anguish cannot make him blind to the pro-digious beauty of a world in which the gods of salvation and redemption are absent. This collection is a superb expression of the intensity of this awareness. And the ultimate happiness that lies in knowing, in awareness is what Daniel Sloate illuminates for us in his poetry.

In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sudden cancer. She was fifty-three. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That's the anecdote. Afterwards -- if an afterwards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamorphosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead.

Most contemporary poets wear their cultural and artistic influences on their sleeve. Picking up a book in an English language bookstore, it is easy to see where the poet is coming from, either geographically, or culturally (ironic and formal; confessional and free etc). This may seem reductive until you read a book like the one you have in your hands. Put simply, Mia Lecomte is a quietly dazzling poet on her own terms. She is fed by multiple cultures, she is widely read, but her writing is unique and absolutely genuine. You won’t have read anything like this.

In unflinching lyrics, Sue Chenette confronts her father’s depression and death. Probing memories, fingering mementos – a square nail, a sketch on a napkin – she examines them for what they may reveal of the father she was sure she knew, deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems are a journey through grief, both a search for the father she loved and a searching look into a father/daughter relationship.

The publication of Rooms The Wind Makes completes a cycle of four poetry collections, the preceding volumes being No Cold Ash, Even This Land Was Born Of Light, and When Rivers Speak. James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains.

If you tore off the tops of canola --yellow canola flowers -- would you jump in a tub of canola margarinejust to make the best of despair? Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on all things 'poetic' and 'poetical.' Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word 'aubade'! They're all here, in a serial, State Fair-bound collection of lyrics set in the working­-class belvedere of Asbestos Heights.

John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with four friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy. Andy is an artist. Well, he is if you define art as something that people don't want but the artist wants to give them anyway. His work includes the Double-Murder Gun, which is just as likely to kill the shooter as the intended victim.

Gods, giants, violence, the undead, theft, trolls, dwarves, aphorisms, unrequited love, Valkyries, heroes, kidnapping, dragons, the creation of the cosmos and a giant wolf are just some of the elements dwelling within these Norse poetic tales. Committed to velum anonymously in Iceland around 1270, they were flash frozen from much-older oral versions that had been circulating throughout Northern Europe for centuries. The Poetic Edda is an epoch-making cache of mythological and heroic tales that have compelled Wagner, Tolkien, Borges and Auden, among many others.