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POETRY

 Please check back often. Author bios and book information are being updated regularly.
Alphabetical by last name
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RICHARD DEMING
is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His first poetry collection, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night, appeared in 2016. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008) and Art of the Ordinary: The Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy (Cornell UP, 2018). His poems have appeared in such places as the Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and the Nation. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. (photo credit: Jean-Jacques Poucel)
Day for Night
Richard Deming's searching new collection of poems, takes its title from the cinematic term for shooting night scenes during the day. With a complex lyricism, these poems often explore the ways that art, in whatever form, creates the possibilities of an address by which we hope to encounter other people even as it reveals the impossibilities of ever truly knowing others or ourselves. Haunting the poems in echoes and allusions is Shakespeare's Hamlet and that play's profound meditation on skepticism and the role of art in knowing the self. The poems bring together high and pop culture, hope and loss, loneliness and belonging, melancholy and transcendence. 

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DENISE DUHAMEL’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), and Kinky (Orhisis, 1997). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Scald
When her “smart” phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways—committing to and battling with—various principles and beliefs. Duhamel wrestles with foremothers and visionaries Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly as well as with pop culture figures such as Helen Reddy, Cyndi Lauper, and Bikini Kill. In dialogue with artists and writers such as Catherine Opie, Susan Faludi, and Eve Ensler, Duhamel tries to understand our cultural moment. While Duhamel’s Scald can burn, she has more importantly taken on the role of the ancient Scandinavian “Skald,” one who pays tribute to heroic deeds. In Duhamel’s case, her heroes are also heroines. 

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​PETER GIZZI
is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Archeophonics (finalist for the 2016 National Book Award), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011, and Threshold Songs. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships in poetry from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. His editing projects have included o-blek: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and, with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. 
Archeophonics
Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one’s emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: “poetry, like music, is not just song.” It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “into transient examples of shaped behavior.” Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.

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FRED MARCHANT is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (2017). Earlier books include The Looking House, Full Moon Boat, and House on Water, House in Air. His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize. Marchant has translated works by Vietnamese poets Tran Dang Khoa, Vo Que, and Le Chi, among others. He has also edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. An emeritus professor of English, he is the founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston. He is the winner of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets "whose work is an inspiration to other writers."
Said Not Said
In this important and formally inventive new poetry collection, Fred Marchant brings us into realms of the intractable and the unacceptable, those places where words seem to fail us and yet are all we have. In the process he affirms lyric poetry’s central role in the contemporary moral imagination. As the National Book Award winner David Ferry writes, “The poems in this beautiful new book by Fred Marchant are autobiographical, but, as is always the case with his poems, autobiographical of how he has witnessed, with faithfully exact and pitying observation, the sufferings in the lives of other people, for example the heartbreaking series of poems about the fatal mental suffering of his sister, and the poems about other peoples, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, written about with the noble generosity of feeling that has always characterized his work, here more impressively even than before.” Said Not Said is a poet’s taking stock of conscience, his country’s and his own, and of poetry’s capacity to speak to what matters most.

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​JENNIFER MILITELLO
is the author of four collections of poetry, including, most recently, A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), called “positively bewitching” by Publishers Weekly, and Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the best books of 2013 by Best American Poetry. She is also the author of Knock Wood, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Nonfiction Award and forthcoming from Dzanc Books in August of 2019. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, POETRY, and Tin House, and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and The Manifesto Project. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.
 
A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments
Award-winning poet Jennifer Militello's third full-length collection, A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments, casts a smokescreen of selves. Fragmentary letters addressing illness and struggle are interspersed with ventriloquisms in the voices of mythological heroes and long-dead composers, ancient goddesses and murdered girls. Intricate "dictionaries" offer multi-layered definitions that, like layers of clothing or ancient amulets, are meant to provide shelter from a world that cannot be controlled. This captivating book stitches together a plethoric identity so as to examine the disguises we all wear.

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MARGE PIERCY’s nineteenth poetry book is Made in Detroit (Knopf). The eighteenth, The Hunger Moon: New and Selected ed Poems 1980–2010, is in paperback. Piercy has published seventeen novels, including Women on the Edge of Time; He, She and It; Three Women; Gone to Soldiers; and most recently, Sex Wars. PM Press published her first collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc., and My Life, My Body, a collection of essays and poems, and an interview. They republished Dance the Eagle to Sleep, Vida, and Braded Lives with new introductions by Piercy. Her memoir is Sleeping with Cats, published by Harper Perennial. Her CD, Louder: We Can't Hear You (Yet!); The Political Poems of Marge Piercy, was published by The Leapfrog Press in 2004. Most of her opus is available as e-books. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages, and she has given readings, workshops, and lectures at over five hundred venues here and abroad. Every June she holds a juried intensive poetry workshop in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She also gives memoir workshops with her husband, Ira Wood. Both her poetry and novels have won various awards and prizes. 

Made in Detroit
A treasure trove of new poems by one of our most sought-after poets: poems that range from descriptions of the Detroit of her childhood to her current life on Cape Cod, from deep appreciations of the natural world to elegies for lost friends and relationships, from a vision of her Jewish heritage to a hard-hitting take on today’s political ironies. In her trademark style, combining the sublime with the gritty, Marge Piercy describes the night she was born: “the sky burned red / over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives. / The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.” She writes in graphic, unflinching language about the poor, banished now by politicians because they are no longer “real people like corporations.” There are elegies for her peer group of poets, gone now, whose work she cherishes but from whom she cannot help but want more. There are laments for the suicide of dolphins and for her beloved cats, as she remembers “exactly how I loved each.” She continues to celebrate Jewish holidays in compellingly original ways and sings praises of her marriage and the small pleasures of daily life. This is a stunning collection that will please those who already know Marge Piercy’s work and offer a splendid introduction to it for those who don’t.

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​ELENI SIKELIANOS is the author of nine books of poetry (most recently What I Knew) and two hybrid anti-memoirs. She has received many awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Poetry Series, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. Sikelianos has collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists (She performed parts of The California Poem with composer Philip Glass and has acted in films by Ed Bowes.), and her work has been widely anthologized and translated. At nineteen, she left the US and spent the next year and a half traveling, often by thumb through Europe, Turkey, and across Africa, landing in Paris, where she lived and worked for a year. Dedicated to the many ways poetry can manifest in communities, she joined the Literary Arts faculty at Brown University in 2017.

What I Knew
What I Knew engages activities and knowledge that can’t be mined or verified by search engines or easily surveilled. Sourced from poetry’s ancient materials of dream, memory, story, and experience, What I Knew aims to create a site of resistance to, and refuge from, our current overflow of information and fact-checking, where private desires and whims cannot be commodified. It seeks alternative, personal forms of globalization rather than the public forms we know
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​PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
is the author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award, 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl. He is currently a faculty member in English at Bennington College.
 
Thief in the Interior
Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences.
 


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