Grove Press Poetry

The prize-winning poet and author of Partial Eclipse continues his investigation of urban metaphysical pathos in this collection. Transit Authority is made up of three sequences that mark the early and late junctures of the twentieth century: the first, a series of poems that investigate the early part of the century; the second, meditations based on the 1930s photographs by Berenice Abbott; and the third, "Reckoning," in which, with spare lyricism, Sanders meditates on where this century has brought us. Sanders looks with rueful intrigue at a landscape inundated with near misses and has-beens. While it is tempting to turn away from the common predicament, his poems quietly urge us to keep looking. As the poet concludes, though "things aren't what they should be according to the map... we have to press on in search of our bearings."

A witty and formally versatile collection of poetry exploring life, faith, and history by the Witter Bynner Prize-winning poet. With Dead Men's Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection of poetry to date. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante's terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, all delivered in a casually conversational voice. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure lyric inspiration of biblical verse, these poems range in theme from Italian hill towns to contemporary art installations in Los Angeles to the vanished Jewish world of the Ukraine. Her effortless humor and sharp insights take us from imaginings of the future to recovery of the past, and her distinctive voice becomes a fusion of the sublime and the down-to-earth.

In With a Moon in Transit, Jacqueline Osherow has given us her most accomplished poetry to date. Integrating the strengths of her earlier work-humor, honesty, artifice, testimony-into compelling poems of great vigor and charm, she combines the often antithetical impulses of lyric and narrative verse. The result is an aesthetic largely her own, one that permits Osherow to treat emotionally charged events and elaborate ideas with remarkable control. Osherow's observations are by turns gossipy, grand, sober, and hilarious. She sustains a disarming tone and manages to assimilate elements of both high and popular culture without apparent strain. While firmly rooted in the Hebrew Bible, her verse is also informed by authors as various as Dante and Dickinson. Yet for all that these poems are alive to the literary past, they remain sensitive to the rhythms of conversation and the tones of everyday speech. Osherow's poems are composed with great clarity and rigor, but they never cease to sound casually spoken.

In his critically acclaimed debut collection, Timothy Donnelly pairs an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance with a stunning formal mastery. The title poem conjures an imaginary play, populated by objects, that forms an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. In "Accidental Species," he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica by way of a heartbreaking lover's complaint. For its thoughtfulness, range, and sheer energy, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable work from one of our most original young poets.

Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books.

The poems in Sarah Lindsay's debut, Primate Behavior, have been hailed as "dark-edged . . . with a buoying sense of respect-for the different, the unexpected and the challenging" (Publishers Weekly). Her new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history's curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus's descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay's poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience.

This poetry collection by the acclaimed author of Citizen presents an "inexhaustibly complex, varied, and... grimly inventive" meditation on maternity (Verse). In Claudia Rankine's Plot, an expectant mother, Liv, and her husband, Erland, find themselves propelled into one of our most basic plots: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. Liv's respect for life, however, makes her reluctant to bring a new life into the world. The couple's electrifying journey is charted through dreams, conversations, and reflections. A text like no other, it crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue and prose, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. This stunning, avant-garde performance enacts what it means to be human, and to invest in humanity.