Books published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press

"Deborah Pope's poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized, whose very personal visions yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry's fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope's skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given"--

"Dan Rosenberg's third collection of poetry moves from loss into parenthood, exploring the roles of husband and father: their limits, their possibilities, and how they intersect with the wider world. Grounded in the familial, these poems wrestle with the political and the ecological, with heritage and hope, reimagining the breadth of home and what it means for one man to raise another to love it"--

"Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin's "A priori" and "A posteriori" as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature's permanence and nature's solid independence from our attachment"--

"The poems in Internal West practice a careful empiricism, offering a science of the human, a way to understand the world through watching and listening. Becker's poems are as much in the Eastern European tradition of Daniel Simko as the American tradition of George Oppen. As the poet herself has stated, her main themes are the complete truth of what her life has been; of feeling alone even in supposed relationships"--

"Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar's finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don't favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery-instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions"--

"Mangrove forests grow on coastlines, with root systems that hold them upright in the unstable grounds where land and water meet. That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove draws on the in-between nature of these trees to explore spaces between-between a foot and the floor, a cup of coffee and its dish, a face and the shoulder of a couple on a motorbike. These are poems that dwell in the tidal movement between saying and what's left unsaid"--

"Yes and No is a book about looking back and looking forward. Many of the poems deal with the loss of friends and relatives whose spirits remain in the poet's life in memory and even apparition. As the title connotes, the collection is about affirmation and negation: there are love poems and poems of the devastating loss of love and poems of passion and the dwindling of it. A spiritual thread runs through the book as well, as seen in the opening poem, "Prayer at the Masked Ball," and in the question asked in the title poem: "are we connected to the infinite, or not?"--

A reissuing of Sadoff's seminal 1978 volume of poetry

From Brazil's Bay of All Saints to Philadelphia, from Florida's brutal humidity to the drought-scorched Cape Verde Islands, Bartram's Garden takes in the pulse and ache of the natural world: the bittern balanced in the swamp, cashew fruit's astringent flesh. With a gardener's eye for color and motif, and a mother's open-hearted sensibility, these poems explore vivid landscapes both intimate and foreign.

In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.

French poetry by Patrice de La Tour du Pin along with the English translation by Jennifer Grotz

From the poet wrestling the saleswoman behind the counter at the chocolate shop for a plate of free samples to Cain slaying Abel in Iraq to appease his savage God, from a dinner with friends spoiled by the intrusion of a gnat to a bungled job at the bakery to antic, surreal sexual encounters to T.S. Eliot eating a bagel and lox and then fox trotting with a slip to Bob Dylan quaking like a duck, these comic visionary poems succeed in transforming even the most ordinary event into a parable of our struggle to retain our humanity in this "soiled world," where torture, war, deadly epidemics, genocides natural disasters, and mass deaths have become commonplace. Working in Flour reveals the tragic comic dimension of our existence in lyric poems infused with a historical consciousness. The wildly hilarious moment is set against the tragic losses that haunt our lives. The characters in this book might have walked right out the pages of a Gogol or Isaac Babel Story. So much sadness and pain and yet the poems will make you laugh out loud.

The debut collection of poetry by Rachel Richardson.

In Magpies, Lynne Barrett's characters move through the past decade's glitter and darkness. From the Internet's fragmented pages to a gossip columnist's sweet poison to an ABCs of a hurricane season, these stories explore story forms and storytelling as a means of connection, betrayal, and survival for characters who learn, sometimes too late, the value of what's grasped and what's lost.

A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offer a paradoxical, moving elegy of things we left--or that left us--behind, not just the toys that grow obsolete, but a lost cat, a name, a monarch wing, a melting glacier, all the children at Terez n--an "immensity" that "recedes so incrementally we can't-- / we just can't / put a human face on it." Eimers looks closely at what we lose and how we let go of it, sorrowfully or with secret relief, or some irresoluble hope of recovery.

The poems in Stuart Dischell's prizewinning first collection, Good Hope Road, inhabit a geography of seeming contradictions where lyric and narrative, personal life and mythic yearning, the domestic and the historic, the elegant and the impure converge. Like Joyce's Dubliners, the twelve poems of the opening sequence, "Apartments", reflect a wide panorama of contemporary urban consciousness, Dischell's subjects are wronged lovers, thwarted citizens, an idealistic veteran, bickering relations - all with their entangled, fractious alliances. As a counterweight, "Household Gods", the book's second section, presents lyric and dramatic monologues whose scenes are the shore, the city, and the countryside. Here are homages and elegies, poems of childhood, betrayal, and loss. Observant and compassionate, Good Hope Road introduces a striking and powerful writer.

From mermaids to lovers to skinny dogs to dervishes, Heather Hartley's second collection, Adult Swim, gathers together unlikely characters whose different stories explore the connections we share--love, loss, and laughter. Engaging, playful, and often with a dark sense of humor, the brutal and beautiful, sensual and spiritual, live side by side in poems that shift that from lyric to sonnet to elegy.

Magicians, wig makers, sculptors, perfumers, choreographers, and composers all help conjure the worlds of Frank's second collection, The Spokes of Venus. These poems offer a landscape shaped by the tensions between the act of making and the art of observing. If music and art are the sisters of poetry, this collection is a chorus--a glorious one--of siblings arguing and singing.

These poems grapple with conflicts arising from a world in which the personal, political, cultural, and aesthetic are deeply entangled and often troubling. Charara does not shy away from the tensions, unease, doubts, regrets, or bafflement of this world; and his wide-ranging focus brings together people from all walks of life--a father obsessed with the boxer Muhammad Ali; a girl missing since the 1970s; a mother and daughter trapped in a submerged vehicle; and a suicide bomber, his witnesses, and victims. This collection shows us the mind of an inventive poet undertaking his work with careful consideration, authority, and heart.

In a series of stylized, highly visual vignettes employing puppetry, poetry, and surrealism, the Weird Sisters from Macbeth explore the stories of women who disappear, whether by choice or force. Inspired by history, astronomy, and Shakespeare, Witches Vanish examines the nature of change and the value of human life.