Books in the Phoenix Poets (CHUP) series

A book about belief - not belief in the unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems aims to discover infinitude in the most familiar places.

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.

Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses, bitterness stings our nostrils. The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Enchanting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares.

Explores what it feels like to live in America, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, the author renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.

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

From Tuscaloosa west to Mississippi then north to Memphis through country as unmusical as I was unloved by the decorous ardor of the South and the voice of one whose griefs were Cherokee, absentee, left in the Chevy and secret. She didn't love my love like Shiva's everywhere and blue and many-handed, some with knives and some with billet-doux.

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.

The notion of the disposable camera permeates the entire book, where the author considers the instabilities in even our deepest attachments. Here gulfs expand, for instance, between twins, between the musician and his instrument, between the recluse and his inconsolable solitude.

Includes poems that sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, this title celebrates communities both invented and real.

Connie Voisine's third book of poems, "Calle Florista," centers on the border between the US and Mexico and celebrates the stunning, if severe, desert landscape. Southern New Mexico's proximity to Mexico (indeed, it was "still" a part of Mexico until 167 years ago) is also an occasion for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Through a combination of directness and excision, the poems in this book oscillate between describing complex, private sensibilities, on the one hand, and, on the other, cracking the private self open (and vulnerable) to the wider world. The focus on the Mexico-US border is also a way for Voisine to experiment with the speaking voice in the poems: whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can properly tell the story of this place?