National Network for Equitable Library Service

In Panicle, Gillian Sze makes her readers look and, more importantly, look again. It's a collection that challenges our notion of seeing as a passive or automatic activity by asking us to question the process of looking. The book's first section, 'Underway,' deals with the moving image and includes both poetic responses to film theory and lyrical long poems while also reimagining fairy tales. The next section, 'Stagings,' takes its inspiration from the still image and explores a wide range of periods, movements, and media.

A first collection of poems from the winner of the Cuffer Prize for short fiction. Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed is a haunting debut, a poetry collection thematically focused on discovering the structure (the figurative bones) beneath the appearance (or skin) of a situation. This poetry is at once memento mori--a reminder and celebration of our mortality--and a lyrical exploration of the spirituality of the mundane, the possibility for revelation found in the commonplace.

Both chronicle and confrontation, the poems of Jacob Scheier’s debut work out and through notions of loss. As the death of a young man’s mother instigates and informs these investigations, the realities of romantic failures become inextricably connected, and in the process More to Keep Us Warm maps the limitations, and breaking points, of the human heart. Questioning how and why we fall in and out of love becomes the collection’s haunting refrain.

In Letter from Brooklyn, Jacob Scheier examines love, loss, history, identity, protest, and popular culture. At the heart of his new poems is the notion that we understand who we are by where we have been. Here, a confessional voice digs deep into a radical Jewish heritage rooted in New York City. Everything is at once political and poetic, inseparable from intimate experience and personal heartbreak. Scheier moves from the inner worlds of grief and love to form a poetic dialectic between the familial and the historical.

Sexy, irreverent, and inventive

Lovesick Stormtroopers, dowsing Girl Guides, movie stars, pool hustlers, and the mad queen Ranavalona … With Knife Throwing Through Self–Hypnosis, Robin Richardson charts a path through a surreal otherworld that is at once carnal and aerial, fine–grained and crude. Yearning, unapologetic women who delight in the monsters they’ve created make these poems “a shield made of braids, / bassinet of broadswords,” and “a ghost-like choir where a love affair / becomes a pulp-book, plotted perfectly to end.”

A poetic masterclass from a writer at the height of his craft Kenneth Sherman's work has always displayed a vibrant lyricism, so it's no surprise that his powerful new collection contains a number of poems with musical motifs. In such pieces as 'Clarinet,' 'Transistor Sister,' and the book's titular poem, Sherman ponders our human transience while searching for 'a voice to stand time's test.' Sherman also confronts health concerns in a language that is Shaker-plain.

Intimate Letters comprises the seventh book of an ongoing long poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Its title borrows from a string quartet by Leoš Jánaček, a profoundly emotional piece written late in the composer’s life when he had fallen in love with a younger woman. It also points towards the intimacy of letters themselves, the visible pieces that make up language. This collection begins with love poems, then moves to a section (“Wretched in This Alone”) dominated by loss.

“Bennett’s artistry lies in his ability to create poems that shatter complacency with bricks of loaded language.” — Quill & Quire on Civil and Civic

“How are you doing, happinesswise?” This is the unifying thread, the casual-sounding but slant and penetrating question posed by these poems as they interrogate what we tell ourselves about happiness, about its opposite, and about ourselves in the process.

Canadian poetry, well done, with everything, to go. Hamburger Valley, California is David McGimpsey’s funniest and most compelling collection to date. With his unapologetic love of popular culture, he presents an elaborate lyric postcard, which explores, from a most unprivileged seat on the cheapest bus, love and (somebody else’s) fame. McGimpsey challenges the bonds of place in a global (American) economy — with personal warmth and characteristic wisecracking — daring to dream of escape not only to an impossibly meaty Southern California, but to the sous-sol of the poetic heart.

Gutted, Evie Christie’s powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” – a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) – it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things.