Past Praise for Mother Quiet: "The aim of poetry (and the higher kind of thriller) is to be unexpected and memorable. So a poem about death might treat it in a way that combines the bizarre and the banal: the Other Side as some kind of institution—a creepy hospital, an officious hotel or retirement home. Martha Rhodes takes such an approach in 'Ambassadors to the Dead,' from her abrupt, unsettling, artfully distorted, indelible new book Mother Quiet. Blending the matter-of-fact with the surreal, as a way of comprehending the stunning, final reality, Rhodes is an inheritor of Emily Dickinson's many poems on the same subject." —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

When her "smart" phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways—committing to and battling with—various principles and beliefs. Duhamel wrestles with foremothers and visionaries Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly as well as with pop culture figures such as Helen Reddy, Cyndi Lauper, and Bikini Kill. In dialogue with artists and writers such as Catherine Opie, Susan Faludi, and Eve Ensler, Duhamel tries to understand our cultural moment. While Duhamel's Scald can burn, she has more importantly taken on the role of the ancient Scandinavian "Skald," one who pays tribute to heroic deeds. In Duhamel's case, her heroes are also heroines.

For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of extinction and apocalypse figure prominently and obsessively in these pages, both in short lyrics and in several lengthy sequences. The poems also evidence the mastery of technique for which Wojahn is renowned, whether he is writing in fixed forms or in free verse. For the Scribe is the most ambitious and searching collection thus far from a poet who has been a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the William Carlos Williams Book Award.

Milk Black Carbon works against the narratives of dispossession and survival that mark the contemporary experience of many indigenous people, and Inuit in particular. In this collection, autobiographical details – motherhood, marriage, extended family and its geographical context in the rapidly changing arctic – negotiate arbitrary landscapes of our perplexing frontiers through fragmentation and interpretation of conventional lyric expectations.

In Spirit Boxing, Weaver revisits his working class core. The veteran of fifteen years as a factory worker in his native Baltimore, he mines his own experience to build a wellspring of craft in poems that extend from his life to the lives that inhabit the whole landscape of the American working class. He writes with an intimacy that is unique in American poetry, and echoes previous comparisons of his oeuvre to that of Walt Whitman. The singularity of his voice resonates here through the prism of his realization of self through a lifelong project of the integration of American and Chinese culture. The work is Daoist in influence and structure as it echoes both a harmonic realization of context and the intuitive and transcendent dance of body, mind, and spirit.

Bertrand Russell finds himself in purgatory, tumbling through literal representations of the worlds of ideas he examined in his classic text, A History of Western Philosophy, gulping much-needed air, for example, from Empedocles' bucket. Mistaking his erection for a planted flag, he declares the place Platonopolis, attempts to calculate his Pythagorean number, kills God (though he later sees evidence of His resurrection), and, Rousseau-like, turns away from reason and civilization, favoring the noble savage, only to march back into the concrete jungle as one of Nietzsche's savage nobles. In the end, however, he is all jumbled up and clucking like Einstein's cuckoo clock, until he perceives philosophy as music, hears its arguments as a symphonic procession of the electrochemical pulses produced within three-pound lumps—lumps self-amalgamated from the vomitus of stars—and revises his History.

Winner of the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetryHour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it "a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender." Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Miriam Bird Greenberg's stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth ("I'd spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling," she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg's experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society's edges. Beneath their surface runs a current of violence, whether at the hands of fate or men: she writes "Everyone knows // what happens to women // who hitchhike, constantly // trying a door to the other world made of lake / bottom or low forest, abandoned house // even wild animals / have rejected. " The result is a queering of On the Road, a feminist Frank Stanford at once vulnerable and canny. Richly textured, In the Volcano's Mouth is an extraordinary portrait of life on the enchanted margins.

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief? Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive. Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world. The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980-2014.Past praise from Philip Levine: "The poems are modest, straight forward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. .

Praise for Martha Collins: "A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century . .

Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant. That dilemma of human fertility and love facing ultimate destruction is orchestrated by the author's provocative voice and coiled lines, which fondle and handle the reader's heart and mind in a bright light. The book insists on connecting the three eras of human experience – Then, Now, and When – at every turn. Orbit continues the unique aesthetic of Vogelsang's first five award-winning books through its "oddly direct original persona," its "mind – prophetic, wild, loony," its "language of surveillance and trembling," and the poems' ability "to find and magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously" (comments draw from other poets' reviews.) Vogelsang's new book Orbit is a dialogue between daily life and transcendent vision, insisting on the reality of each.

In Energy Corridor, Houston, Texas is the macabre avatar for a nation that has systematically stripped political and economic power from the middle and lower classes. In these poems the speaker wrestles with the guilt and complacency of living in the world's wealthiest nation. It is easy in America to do nothing and suckle the trickling down of the rich, but these poems urge that we have a community responsibility to alter the way we act. Through varied lenses, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, from Goethe to contemporary electronica, from the 1982 Tylenol Murders to the Stanley Cup, these poems assemble the rhetoric of our cultural landscape into a call to arms. We must change our ways.

In this sixth collection by award-winning poet Sharon Dolin, Manual for Living offers three distinct approaches to life, each one riven by flashes of joy and despair, and all conditions in between. With a fresh slant on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the title section offers a part-serious, part tongue-in-cheek series of advice poems. An ekphrastic sequence based on the "black paintings" of Goya follows, as a darker meditation on life. The final section, "Of Hours," is a contemporary sequence of psalms where the possibility for redemption in prayer exists. As in all of her work, Dolin's lyric voice attends to language and the world equally. Her verbal sleights-of-hand offer readers insights for ways to live. Manual for Living is a wise book: drink deeply from it.

David Hernandez's Dear, Sincerely is his most intimate and dynamic collection to date, bringing the reader into poems that are simultaneously personal and universal, and sometimes political. With his characteristic dreamlike imagery, inventive rhythms, and biting wit, Hernandez's voice reaches toward us with an accessible profundity. Dear, Sincerely is an imaginative book that explores the Self, the collective We, the cosmos, and the murky division that separates one from the other.