National Network for Equitable Library Service

Common Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks towards what comes next.

Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire is a suite of poetic blueprints for imaginary plays that would be impossible to produce – plays in which, for example, the director burns out the sun, actors murder their audience or the laws of physics are defiled. The poems in a sense replace the need for drama, and are predicated on the idea that modern theatre lacks both ‘clocks’ and ‘fire’ and thus fails to offer its audiences immediate, violent engagement.

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province. The manatee wades out of the water and roars at the sightseers. That one of them owes him a drink. From the beach below the boardwalk, cock-a-doodle-do! What about a Christmas bowlcut over by the mangrove manatees! Because in Florida there are Floridians.

What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema? These and other questions are answered in the new long poem from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell.

Nothing slips by Brecken Hancock’s deft ear as she seductively plumbs the depths of the evolution of bathing, doppelgängers, the Kraken and the minutiae of family with all its tragic misgivings. The poems in Broom Broom pervert the rational, safe parts of the world to extoll and absorb the sweep of human history.

Croak is a frog-and-girl opera in three parts, played out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons, all set to a contemporary pop song. It parades, mutilates and reacquaints Kermit the Frog with Girl 00010111, Michigan J. with Aristophanes, and biblical plagues with caged canaries in a vaudevillian play of time, culture, gender and narrative. Combining vivisection and classical literature, empirical observation and philosophical speculations, Sampirisi's grotesque characters splash and sparkle before moving toward their inevitable narrative end.

something like wait for mein the braille of scarstonight can i suggest a little punctuationcircle half-moon vertical line of astonishmenta pause that transformslight and breath into language and threshold of fire Even as vowels tremble in danger and worldly destruction repeats itself on the horizon, Ardour reminds us that the silence pulsing within us is also a language of connection.

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant ‘image’ of the poem.

This groundbreaking anthology offers a broad and representative introduction to some of the most exciting, fresh voices on the contemporary poetry landscape by gathering together generous selections from the work of 85 younger American poets. The poets selected were born after 1960, published their first book within the last 10 years, and have no more than three books published. Some are the recipients of numerous awards, while others, who are making their first appearance, are quickly making significant contributions to twenty-first-century poetry.

Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.