Nationally acclaimed poet, photographer, filmmaker, and novelist James Baker Hall has long been regarded as one of Kentucky's most profound artists. Hall's growing body of work is an essential part of Kentucky's literary tradition, and yet his poetry in particular transcends the borders of the Commonwealth.The Total Light Process collects poems spanning Hall's celebrated career as well as new poems that have never before been published. The subjects of Hall's poems range from humorous and revealing portraits of his fellow writers and friends Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, and Gurney Norman, to the traumatic experience of his mother's suicide when he was eight years old, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tragic murder of Matthew Shepherd.

Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, “probably a steakhouse.” The ability of dogs to smell the uncool. Hitler's barber imagines what might have been if only he'd leaned his weight into the razor. An oblivious Coronado narrowly avoids an ambush on the American plains. Freud lecherously lifts the skirt of a Mexican housekeeper who has far too much work to be bothered by “a pillar of modern thought. Or just some dirty old man.”In lesser hands such disparate elements might fly wildly out of control. But in David Shumate's understated, brilliant prose poems, they come together in miraculously vivid riffs.The narrator of the title poem rhapsodizes, “I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die. It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and drift downstream and see where I end up.” Shumate's deft and refreshing collection takes us to amazing places with its plainspoken meditations.

Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix's revolutionary bullet time.Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.

For nearly five decades, readers have been enthralled and enchanted by Peter Everwine’s calmly dazzling poems. He’s never been a writer clearly aligned with any single school or style, yet adherents of all schools and styles admire his graceful turns of phrase and intense vision. From the Meadow features selections from four previous collections, along with a group of new works. The poems, which include Everwine’s deft translations from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl, vibrate with the intensity of small truths distilled to their very essences.

Death haunts the pages of Natural Causes, but so does compassion and love. There is little darkness here, and less despair, despite the abundance of cemeteries, loss, and ghosts—both real and imagined.Mark Cox’s youthful bravado has given way in these poems to an assured sense of understatement. The weight of fatherhood, the loss of a grandmother, the fear of loneliness—these are the details around which Cox plumbs the depths of mortality and memory.Fully comfortable with the domestic tableau from which he writes, this is a poet never complacent. The penchants for metaphor and the resonant turn of phrase that informed Cox’s earlier work remain as vibrant as ever, indeed are heightened, as he masterfully affirms and celebrates the range of familial complexity and human connectedness.

esse Lee Kercheval writes with wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty in these autobiographical poems. Tracing the timelines of her life forward and backward, she offers a moving examination of the role of family and the possible/probable/hoped for existence of God—and how our perceptions of the divine can be transformed from a kindergartner’s dyslexically scrawled "doG loves U" to the ever-present but oft-ignored Dog Angel of the title. Ranging from a cross-country drive to bury her mother’s ashes at Arlington National Cemetery, to a family vacation in Spain, to an imagined final exam given by her children, Kercheval explores the vagaries of love, loss, faith, grief, and joy with a calm, convincing wisdom that permeates this resonant and wonderful collection.

Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They’re just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work-his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

An anthology of texts of Hispano-Arabic poems of exceptionally high literary quality and cultural significance. The texts are accompanied by literal translations and explanatory notes for the use of students of Arabic and Romance literatures.

Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

There is a proverb in China, hu kou ba ya, literally “pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth,” used to describe any extremely difficult task. When Shao Wei first arrived in the United States at age thirty-one, her desire to write poems in English seemed almost impossible. Pulling a Dragon's Teeth, a first stop on the successful journey toward that goal, is filled with the rhythms and visions of this exciting young poet. Shuttling between her childhood in a small mountain city on the shores of the Yangtze River (soon to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam Project) and adulthood in Manhattan, Shao Weicaptures the pains and joys of tradition and displacement familiar to any immigrant. Blending fairy tales, New York images, family stories, and the universal rites of passage associated with growing up, she paints a vibrant canvas of passion and imagination.

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway presents both new works and twenty-five years of celebrated verse and illustration in her latest volume, Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems. The poems mine common speech, folklore, film, the grotesque and the ordinary with unapologetic candor and ferocious intimacy. They are a testament to the power of contemporary monologue, filled with surprising inversions and unique takes on the risk of opening the front door. Cutting musically to the quick of a situation, each is filled with surprise, horror and, as they add up, moral consequence.

In a poetic voice that is at once reflective and lively, Sandra Kohler explores the patterns of everyday life and the inner drama of imagination. Though these poems are mostly set amidst the familiarity of a suburban household and the family garden, this environment appears far from mundane as Kohler peels away the veneer of domestic tranquility to reveal a world busy with human passion and the rhythms of the earth. Nature is present at every turn, an ethereal twin, as the narrator’s emotions take the form of cardinals in flight, a rushing river, or a potato sprouting from the dark.

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts-history, power, the personal and the social-that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching vision. From racehorses to waterwheels to great cities, Bogen illuminates "things that go," in both their dynamism and their inevitable decay. Luster traces the sheen of human activity that clings to the world around us: imperfect, irrevocably marred by time, but always gleaming.

Ostinato Vamps is Wanda Coleman's first book of poetry since the demise of her longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. It continues and enlarges the traits that have been her hallmark for more than three decades: a fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.Linguistically daring, lyrically breathtaking, stylistically bold, these poems both explore familiar territory and shatter stereotypes. Life is difficult, often unfair, but it belongs to the living, as Coleman reminds us in no uncertain terms. Racing between an earthy eroticism and fatalistic despair, filled with humor and tragedy, these poems are alive. They breathe. They challenge us even as they reward us for seeking the truth.

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."