September publications

“Observing the ‘he and she' of Kristi Maxwell’s Re- at close range is like watching animals mate in the wild; we recognize the patterns of their daily intercourse as universal, such as when, ‘in unison, spoons move to their mouths . . . Like they are tracing intentionally the flight pattern of a bird.’ But also universal to couples is constant flux, the give and take of two people morphing around and into and out of themselves and each other to maintain the balance of what they’ve created together. Maxwell captures this in lines that constantly move and evolve, too: ‘When he is an ox, she alternates / between onyx and field to be tediously / plowed.’ And: ‘in the acre allotted to masculine which is nonetheless a mask / she frisked with her tongue to find the stash / of him who is both and not.’ Maxwell’s is a rich, playfully serious (and seriously playful) language that shape-shifts right in step with ‘him and her,’ leaving us agape at the layered acrobatics of what keeps a couple in sync. —Laura Sims

January publications

Sancta by Andrew Grace

“Sancta is about a retreat (to a cabin in the woods)—but this is no Walden Pond. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Grace appears to have his eyes taped open to witness ‘Puddles blitzed by blood fly hatch’ and the rest of nature's bounty. The language pops and sizzles. Here the poet’s perennial project of attention is raised to the pitch of pain and is enjoyable (for the reader) nonetheless.” —Rae Armantrout

“A meditative daybook (and sometimes nightbook) in a tradition that runs from Thoreau through Merrill Gilfillan, Andrew Grace’s Sancta inhabits margins: of waking consciousness, of the lake by which the speaker makes his home. Grace is a poet of consummate attention, one who ‘win[s] victories over the ordinary eye,’ for whom ‘the sparrows resume their bright, ruined Assisi’ each day.” —G.C. Waldrep

Chinoiserie by Karen Rigby

The 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner, selected by Paul Hoover. “Karen Rigby sees with feeling the magic of things shaped by language. Her desert is a ‘lion-colored seam’; skaters circle ‘on Brueghel’s platinum lake’; and ‘a man carries sperm like a black suitcase.’ But here also are the musical cadence, subject range, and ceremonial precision of true poetry. Such words can be recognized, through two thick walls, for the subtlety of their murmur: ‘Of creamware, only stacked and brittle confusion. / We bargain daylight out of black bread.’ This is, quite simply, a gorgeous and powerful book.” —Paul Hoover

March publications

From its dedication “for the word ‘this’” to its cascading sentences that demand “Explain yourself to this dot • “ or observe “The first word was a command,” Vitiello’s unique Obedience creates a reading experience of poetry that borders on the compulsive. “Through the power of his innate perversity, Chris Vitiello makes obedience both impossible and irresistible. By turn wry, knowing, pained, astonished, and yes, even wise, Vitiello turns the imperative mood, line upon line, against itself, freeing us from our own gloom and, like some last ditch Pre-Socratic, restoring to us, through an extraordinary attention to words, grammar, shape, number, and life, the authority of our own deep wonder.” —Joseph Donahue

My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

“Exploration begins with an imported meadow and ends with desire’s promise.  It’s the arc explorers must continually chase and resist, will and reject.  In My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer, Paige Ackerson-Kiely knows what we’re up against, and she understands its belatedness.  All we can have is to attempt, to try, as the living and the dead join in our want, our futility.  “[T]he only thing I could recognize was my own hunger,” she writes, but there are a host of characters in this chorus of the I, both known and unknown, family and strangers, near and estranged.  It’s a brilliant, ongoing journey of hope and crisis.  And it’s a brilliant book.” —John Gallaher

Enigma and Light by David Mutschlecner

“A serial poem, a poetics, a discourse on philosophy and religion, an essay about visual art, and an extended meditation on form and devotion—Enigma and Light is all of these, itself a form of devotion through whose graceful lines ‘thought rolls and turns.’ Aware that ‘we have come/close as we can/to severing being//from meaning,’ Mutschlecner’s poems attempt to restore to our language an ontological strangeness that comes from the ‘flood of otherness in faith.’ Even where their language is most in thrall to mystical paradox, even ‘where emptying / is most full,’ these poems aim to lift our spirits through praise whose precision makes it prayer. ‘Let meaning bless measure,’ Mutschlecner writes, ‘and measure/meaning.’ Reader—in this book, they do.” —Brian Teare