Books in the Kuhl House Poets series

This poetry is about the people and events that pass through a life, leaving a void; about finding a presence in that absence, and waking up to the realities of the moment. It is concerned with discovery and confrontation, and uncovering and witnessing.

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.

Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation.

Looks at the question of ownership, of the words with which we define ourselves and each other, and of whose and what claims are legitimate. This work is a lyric which is grounded in the New American tradition of poets such as John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson.

Devising a formalism rather than concerning itself with discovering the what, this book is about discovering how to say what needs to be said.

It is nineteenth-century California, and the missions are still burning after the Americans establish the Bear Flag Republic; it is the twenty-first century, and the miners of '49 are relegated to a mural in an arcade. This title takes us on a journey where Native Americans are 'missing persons' outside a diorama of their ancestors.

Reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.

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.