Books in the Phoenix Poets series

This volume brings together James McMichael's poetry and includes works that have previously remained unpublished. James McMichael is the recipient of a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award.

"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.""--

"In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--

Features poems that are haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century.

Ranging among traditional, open, and newly invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, this title begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.

A sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry.

A book of poems that takes us on a journey through wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities.

The author has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against - and with - his genius for metrical variation, thus becoming an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry and which gives him access to an immense variety of feeling.

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of a personal, familial, or national significance, "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography. Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind through a beautifully constructed poetic voice.