National Network for Equitable Library Service

For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis's lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions the linguistic roots of the hypothetical, both as they apply to the Scientific Method and its faith in certainty, and to the word's alternate meaning, as something that is merely 'supposed to be true,' and often, over time, is proved false.

Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook's poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind.

Jon Paul Fiorentino's new collection is a whip-smart poetic investigation of anxiety in all its many manifestations. Anxiety caused by geography, anxieties of influence and looming worries about loss inform the poems as they weave narrative threads that highlight both the treachery of language and its necessity in shaping human experience.

Winner of the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Write for buyers. Write for bosses. Think hyper. Think branding. Tell your visitor where to go. Poetry and ‘plain language’ collide in the writing machine that is Human Resources. Here at the intersection of creation and repackaging, we experience the visceral and psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Pilfered rhetorics fed into the machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, culture, work and communication.

These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, where the act of living becomes more and more like watching a film in which we play no role.

I learned the secret of serenity by waterboarding daffodils. My Buddha is landfill. My mantra choked from a bluebird’s neck. It’s ruthless, the pursuit of happiness. Eighteen seconds have elapsed. This collection is a universe where minimalism and maximalism work in harmony. Ethics, economics, glamour and alternative physics are just a few of the vehicles Besner uses in her jaundiced pursuit of knowledge and joy. At the collection’s core is a series of brilliantly illuminated poems patterned on a scientific study of synaesthesia and Fisher Price refrigerator magnets.

Invited to a quiet Swiss château by the enigmatic Tatiana Beaujeu Lehmann, Anne begins to slowly write a novel in a language that is not hers, a language that makes meaning foreign and keeps her alert to the world and its fiery horizon.

Jen Currin’s acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in her new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new territory. These poems push life’s barely hidden strangeness into the light, and present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event. In Hagiography, mind and sense and the world they move through are interwoven to create a mysterious, familiar, vexing and continuously fascinating human drama.

Fidget is writer Kenneth Goldsmith's transcription of every movement made by his body during 13 hours on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997. It is a hypnotic work, strangely compelling and disorienting at the same time; you'll never think about your body in the same way again. Originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art as a collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann, Fidget attempts to reduce the body to a catalogue of mechanical movements by a strict act of observation.

How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics? DOWN takes junk language – with cameos by Frank O’Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations – and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal sentiments in this playful collection. ‘I’ve believed in Dowling’s poems for a long time with you. Or maybe you’re just now catching up to how the genius is working her machine on our minds?