Books in the Kuhl House Poets series

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.

With their extravagant musicality, Triplett's poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled "supply chain" that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world.

Reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker's son's remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it "looks like garbage."

Was it a crater or a sinkhole?"" asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin's Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation.

As time beings, what we have is the time being, the present moment, however compromised, however shattered. Buchanan's characteristic combination of wry humour, nerve, empathy, wisdom, and outrage exposes the laughably absurd and the evisceratingly tragic all at once.

"To survive romantic love, the woman served the other woman desert dirt with shells as the truck stop receded into the distance" - so observes the mordantly detached voice of a women, an extravagantly pained, self-and-other-lacerating imaginative journey dedicated 'to relationship'.

Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The traces she finds--the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world's nations convening to reject the full stop--retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.