Books in the Phoenix Poets series

From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton, this book tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness.

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.

A collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, which leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation.

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.

A collection of poems that focus on feelings of intimacy and familiarity.

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

A meditation on the body as a source of joy, anxiety, and regeneration, this collection extends the capacity of the lyric to articulate human feeling while considering the complications of love, both human and divine, and the distinctions between them. It is more deeply an attempt to focus on the process of human creativity in general.

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.

Offers a collection of formal poems and measured free verse unified by its investigation of our poetic, mythic, and scientific fascination with birds of prey: hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, and falcons. Drawing on his own experience working at a raptor rehabilitation center, the author shows these killing birds to be mirrors for humanity.

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 The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates.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.

Features an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. This book fuses the poet's point of view with Walt Whitman's to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC.

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?

It has been seventeen years since Lloyd Schwartz has published a book of original poems, so there is much anticipation from his fans. In "Little Kisses," Schwartz takes his characteristic tragi-comic view of life to some unexpected and sometimes disturbing places. Here we find heart-breaking and comic poems about personal loss (the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, for example, or his mother s failing memory, or a precious gold ring gone missing); uneasy love poems and poems about family; and poems about identity, travel, and art with all their potentially recuperative powers. The book also contains some memorable translations, jokes, and wordplay, as well as formal surprises, all of which Schwartz s readers have come to relish in his verse. His books have been all too few and far between; this new one after so very long is sure to be greeted by an eager readership."

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.