National Network for Equitable Library Service

The third collection by the prize-winning Asian American poet Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes is a sequence of lyrical, personal narratives that continue Pineda's exploration of his biracial identity, the haunting loss of his sister, and the joys — and fears — of fatherhood. With a title inspired by Emily Dickinson, Little Anodynes offers poems as "respites," as breaks in the reader's life that serve as opportunities for discovery and healing.

DéLana R. A. Dameron searches for answers to spiritual quandaries in her first collection of poems, How God Ends Us, selected by Elizabeth Alexander as the fourth annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. Dameron's poetry forms a lyrical conversation with an ominous and omnipotent deity, one who controls all matters of the living earth, including death and destruction. The poet's acknowledgement of the breadth of this power under divine jurisdiction moves her by turns to anger, grief, celebration and even joy.

New and Selected Poems includes more than fifty poems from Marjory Wentworth's previous three collections, Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle, plus 28 new poems. This collection serves as a capstone to Wentworth's tenure as South Carolina poet laureate, a title she has held since 2003. Thematically Wentworth's poems invite us to view nature as a site of reflection and healing, to consider the power of familial bonds and friendships, and to broaden our awareness of human rights and social justice.

The Poet's Holy Craft represents the first full-length analysis and interpretation of William Gilmore Simms's poetry. Matthew C. Brennan demonstrates the comprehensiveness of Simms's romanticism by examining Simms's poetics, his experimental sonnets, and his deep affinity to William Wordsworth, which especially shows in Simms's pioneering attitudes toward nature and ecology.

Selected by David Baker, Green Revolver is the fifth annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize and the first published collection by Worthy Evans. These verses resulted from a spontaneous outpouring of poems, pent up during a fourteen-year hiatus from the craft during which Evans worked as a professional reporter, writer, and editor.

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships and death.

The best art has the uncanny ability not only to give pleasure to those who view it but also to inspire a desire to respond. The best artists are a force for all art, and renowned Gullah artist Jonathan Green's work has inspired a wide range of responses from artists around the world. In Seeking we see how Green's art prompts works of poetry, prose, and memoir.

Mudtown was a working-class neighbourhood tightly wedged between once busy docks, factories and the escarpment along the east shore of Owen Sound Bay. It was regularly inundated with mud during spring rains. Beyond Mudtown, Rob Rolfe’s third collection of poetry with Quattro Books, is an imagined visit into past and present-day Mudtown, the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula and places beyond.

Tragic-comedic genius emerges in this first book by Chris D’Iorio, kaleidoscopically vivid poetry that is commoditized with the placid title of Without Blue, innocently confessing a condition of lack-lustre lack. A few disarmingly personal lyrics usher us into a book that seems rather sincere and contemplative. Then the intensely capable drive of the poet shifts gears into his Grand Prix artistic race that pits the mud of cynicism against poetry’s slickly navigable satirical engine of agency.

The title Night Vision refers firstly to the night vision goggles that enable soldiers to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, and secondly to a vision of the political and ecological night that threatens humankind, but also to the faint possibility, grounded in personal relationships and cultural values, that we will see through and somehow transcend this night. The book is a major expression by a veteran poet of searchingly reflective and finely articulated thought.