Wesleyan University Press is virtually celebrating what would have been Joseph Ceravolo 87th birthday! Ceravolo began writing poetry in 1957 while serving in the US Army in Germany. After earning a degree in civil engineering, Ceravolo studied poetry with Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Often associated with poets in the New York School such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Ceravolo’s collections include Fits of Dawn (1965), Millennium Dust (1982), and The Green Lake is Awake (1994), among others. He was the first recipient of the Frank O’Hara Award. Ron Silliman notes that Ceravolo’s later work reveals him to be “one of the most emotionally open, vulnerable and self-knowing poets of his generation.”

To read Ceravolo’s work, we direct you to Collected Poems, edited by his wife Rosemary Ceravolo and former Wesleyan University Press editor Parker Smathers; published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.

Celebrate Earth day with Wesleyan University Press’s EcoPoetic publications! Poets consider ecological and social collapse and our shared responsibilities in the contemporary moment.

Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene compiles terms—borrowed, invented, recast—that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship.

To continue the Poetry Month celebration, we would like to highlight two recently released anthologies! These works extend the boundaries of typical poetry pieces and we are pleased to honor them.

Best American Experimental Writing 2020, guest-edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Carmen Maria Machado, is the sixth edition of the critically acclaimed anthology series compiling an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre-defying work. Featuring a diverse roster of writers and artists culled from both established authors—including Anne Boyer and Alice Notley—as well as new and unexpected voices, like Kamden Hilliard
and Kanika Agrawal, BAX 2020 presents an expansive view of today’s experimental and high-energy writing practices. A perfect gift for discerning readers as well as an important classroom tool, Best American Experimental Writing 2020 is a vital addition to the American literary landscape.

SETH ABRAMSON, an assistant professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of fourteen books. His most recent works are the New York Times bestsellers Proof of Conspiracy and Proof of Collusion.

JESSE DAMIANI is Deputy Director of Emerging Technology at SNHU and a Forbes contributor. CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the memoir In The Dream House, both from Graywolf Press.

JOYELLE MCSWEENEY is the author of ten books of poems, fiction, drama and essays, and is the co-founder of the international press, Action Books.

. . .

North American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language is an important new addition to the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends our reading of each poet beyond the constraints of any one aesthetic, school, or movement; this volume pushes readers to see beyond the binary of lyric and language. What unites the varied approaches of these writers, is a commitment to creating new fields, new idioms, new vernaculars, and new forms. Key areas of conflict and concern, among the eleven poets, include genre and the nature of the lyric, connections between gender and aesthetics, and the nature of poetic language. Among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Catherine Cucinella on Marilyn Chin, Meg Tyler on Fanny Howe, Elline Lipkin on Alice Notley, Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine, Brian Teare on Martha Ronk, Michael Cross on Leslie Scalapino, Lynn Keller on Cole Swensen, Khadijah Queen on Natasha Trethewey, Lisa Russ Spaar on Jean Valentine, Julie Brown on Cecilia Vicuña, and Richard Greenfield on Rosmarie Waldrop. A companion website will present audio of each poet’s work.

LISA SEWELL a professor of creative writing at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. KAZIM ALI is a professor of literature and writing at the University of California, San Diego.

Poets: Marilyn Chin, Fanny Howe, Alice Notley, Claudia Rankine, Martha Ronk, Leslie Scalapino, Cole Swensen, Natasha Trethewey, Jean Valentine, Cecilia Vicuña, Rosmarie Waldrop

Essayists: Catherine Cucinella, Meg Tyler, Elline Lipkin, Kamran Javadizadeh, Brian Teare, Michael Cross, Lynn Keller, Khadijah Queen, Lisa Russ Spaar, Julie Brown, Richard Greenfield

. .

At Wesleyan we are always celebrating poetry. This poetry month we take time to reflect on some of the books that have come out over the past year. This has been a difficult, unusual year. It has been an awkward year for many who have published new books; a year full of doubts and unexpected challenges. Today we’re thinking about three poetry collections that deserve some special attention.

Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems of Alfred Arteaga collects the poetry of a leading avant-garde Chicano poet: Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008), whom French philosopher Gilles Deleuze regarded as “among those rare poets who are able to raise or shape a new language within their language.” In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing. His poetical work, presented as a whole here for the first time, pursues a steadily unfolding project that draws on the vast tradition of Xicanx writing—from the eighteenth-century poet and nun Sor Juana de la Cruz to his contemporaries in the Chicano Renaissance. Arteaga’s poetry is a sustained, exemplary unfolding of Xicanx poetics out of the historical situation of radical border- and language-crossing. Arteaga’s work remains virtually the only work of this rhetorical orientation and theoretical sophistication carried out in the field. His poetry speaks more than ever to a moment in which border-crossing, cultural diversity, language-mixing and a multi-cultural vision of America are critical issues. You can listen to the late poet reading from his work here. 

ALFRED ARTEAGA (1950–2008) is a renowned Chicanx poet and scholar whose work stretches across cultural and linguistic barriers. He was professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. DAVID LLOYD is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and author of several books on postcolonial and cultural theory, literature, poetry and poetics. CHERRÍE MORAGA is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English.

Mezzaluna: Selected Poems gathers work from Michele Leggott’s nine books of poetry. As reviewer David Eggleton writes: “Leggott shows us that the ordinary is full of marvels … which, stitched, flow together into sequences and episodes that in turn form an ongoing serial, or bricolage: a single poem, then, rejecting exactness, literalism, naturalism in favor of resonance, currents, patterns of ebb and flow.” In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal. She focuses on appearance and disappearance as modes of memory, familial until we lose sight of that horizon line and must settle instead for a series of intersecting arcs. Leggott writes with tenderness and courage about the paradoxes of losing her sight and remaking the world in words.

MICHELE LEGGOTT was the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-2009 and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013.

The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass Thomas’ entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.

LORENZO THOMAS (1944−2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. He was a critic and poet, who published many volumes of scholarship as well as numerous essays, including several histories of the Umbra group, ALDON LYNN NIELSEN is the author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. He is the George and Barbara Kelly professor of American literature at Penn State University. LAURA VRANA is assistant professor of English specializing in African American literature and poetry at the University of South Alabama.

We are saddened to learn of the passing of Jo Miles Schuman, co-editor of A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson. Here is a remembrance from Jo’s daughter, Elisabeth:

“Jo Miles Schuman, passed away in the wee hours of Wednesday, March 17, 2021. Jo was most at home in the country, an avid bird watcher, dedicated gardener, and a passionate and perfection-driven artist. She filled our lives with stories of animals, the natural world, and the arts.

She took as much pleasure in your interests and accomplishments as in her own, and always had many projects hopping at once. Whether she was cooking up a fish dinner, spending time on her beloved island, building another bookshelf, or working on a new print in her studio, she kept incredibly busy. Two amazing traits she had were her abilities to find missing items and her ability to fix anything broken.

She will be greatly missed by her husband Howard, who just turned 93, her three children, her relatives, friends and neighbors. She was a one-of-a-kind soul.”

A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson is a unique and beautifully illustrated anthology, pairing poems from one of America’s most revered poets with evocative classic ornithological art. Emily Dickinson had a great love of birds—in her collected poems, birds are mentioned 222 times, sometimes as the core inspiration of the poem. However, in existing anthologies of Dickinson’s work, little acknowledgment is made of her close connection to birds. This book contains thirty-seven of Dickinson’s poems featuring birds common to New England. Many lesser-known poems are brought to light, renewing our appreciation for Dickinson’s work.

April is Poetry Month! Celebrate by checking out some of WUP’s recently published collections.

In Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson departs from the traditional nature poem, reclaiming a much older tradition and drawing into poetry’s orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems test how far the lyric can go as an answer to our crisis, even calling into question poetic form itself. Roberson was honored with a Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

In Magnified, Minnie Bruce Pratt writes a collection of love poems that draw us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. Even as she asks, “What’s the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain,” the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: “Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us.”

The poems in Now It’s Dark by Peter Gizzi are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, “Gizzi’s poetry is an example of how a poet’s total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion.”

Xicancuicatl:Collected Poems collects the poetry of leading avant-garde Chicanx poet Alfred Arteaga (1950–2008). In his five published collections, Arteaga made crucial breakthroughs in the language of poetry, basing his linguistic experiments on the multilingual Xicanx culture of the US Southwest. His formal resources and finely tuned ear for sound patterns and language play remain astonishing.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers the emergence of new life (twin granddaughters) into an increasingly toxic world. Armantrout was a Finalist for Big Other Book Award and a Finalist for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collections for Conjure.

A Forest of Names: 108 Meditations Ian Boyden collaborates with artist Ai Weiwei to remember the 5,000 children killed in an earthquake in China. Each poem is a poetic meditation on the image and concept suggested by the etymology in the Chinese characters. This act of poetic translation is both a heartbreaking tribute to people whose names have been erased, and a healing meditation on how language suggests a path forward.

Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter’s Un-American moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart. Geter was recognized as a Finalist for the PEN American’s Open Book Award and a Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry Collection.

Using long poems, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, RENDANG by Will Harris is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.

Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Phillis Wheatley. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history. Jeffers is the winner of the NAACP Image Award for Poetry Collection, a Finalist for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collections, a Finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Longlisted for National Book Award.

Mezzaluna gathers work from Michele Leggott’s nine books of poetry. In complex lyrics, sampling thought and song, voice and vision, Leggott creates lush textured soundscapes. Her poetry covers a wide range of topics rich in details of her New Zealand life, full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal.

Edges & Fray: On language,presence, and (invisible) animal characters is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. Experimental and deeply grounded, its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

We celebrate Women’s History Month by honoring amazing work by Camille Dungy, Hafizah Geter, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Honorée FFanonne Jeffers, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rae Armantrout, Evie Shockley, and Kerri Webster. View a sampling of poems here

The collection of love poems in Magnified draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens “to swivel out and magnify” the beauty in “the little glints, insignificant” that catch her eye: “The first flowers, smaller than this s.” She also chronicles the quiet rooms of “pain and the body’s memory,” bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, “What’s the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain,” the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: “Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us.” This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.

Minnie Bruce Pratt (Syracuse, NY), an LGBTQ writer and activist originally from Alabama, is the author of nine books of poetry, creative nonfiction and political theory. She is a Managing Editor of Workers World/Mundo Obrero newspaper.

Camille Dungy is the author of several books including, most recently, Trophic Cascade , as well as Smith Blue, Such on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. She also currently serves on the advisory board for Sixteen Rivers Press, Iron Horse Literary Review, Orion Magazine, and University Press of Kentucky Contemporary Poetry and Prose Series. Her poetry and essays have been published in dozens of journals, magazines, anthologies, and edited collections including The Ecopoetry Anthology, The Rumpus, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and more. Dungy earned a BA in English literature, with an emphasis in creative writing from Stanford University and a MFA in creative writing/poetry from University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She currently teaches creative writing as a professor at Colorado State University.

Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States (2019–2021), is an internationally known poet, performer, writer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She has released four award-winning CD’S of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year for Winding Through the Milky Way in 2009. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the Arrow Dynamics.

Harjo’s latest titles include Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play with a Circle of Responses, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Crazy Brave, winner of 2013 American Book Award, Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversation with Joy Harjo, For a Girl Becoming, which received both a Moonbeam Award and a Silver Medal for the Independent Publishers Awards, The Good Luck Cat, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, and In Mad Love and War, winner of 1991 American Book Awards.

Her writing has garnered many awards including the Camaiore International Award, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, IAIA American Book Award, 2013 PEN Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, Eagle Sprit Achievement Award, New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and earned her BA in creative writing (1976) at University of New Mexico and MFA (1978) at University of Iowa.

Also by Joy Harjo, Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo  and Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, The Age of Phillis, is long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for poetry. Her previous poetry collections include The Glory Gets, Red Clay Suite, Outlandish Blues and The Gospel of Barbecue. Jeffers’ first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, is forthcoming from Harper in 2021.

Jeffers is Critic at Large for The Kenyon Review and has acted as an editor for Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life and for PMS: Poetry/Memoir/Story: The Black Women’s Issue. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and other; and has been anthologized in Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Poems of the American South, and elsewhere.

In addition being long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award, Jeffers has received numerous awards and honors, including the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction for an Alabama Writer in 2018, a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary art.

Also by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Outlandish Blues and The Glory Gets.

Kerri Webster is a poet and professor raised in Idaho. She holds a BA in English with Honors from Boise State University and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Indiana University.

Webster is the author of three collections of poetry: The Trailhead (Wesleyan University Press, Grand & Arsenal, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, as well as two chapbooks, Psalm Project and Rowing Through Fog. Grand & Arsenal was selected by Jane Mead for the Iowa Poetry Prize, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone was selected by Elizabeth Robinson as the winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Whiting Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, and, earlier in her career, awards from Crazyhorse, River Styx, and the BellinghamReview. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including the Boston Review, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and American Poet. Most recently, she held a Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts in 2016.Webster was a Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an Adjunct Instructor at the College of Western Idaho. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University.

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and editor. She received her BA in English and economics from Clemson University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Hafizah’s poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Boston Review, Longreads, and McSweeney’s Indelible in the Hippocampus, among others.She is the author of, Un-American .

An editor for Little A and TOPPLE Books from Amazon Publishing, Geter is currently an Axinn Fellow in Creative Narrative Nonfiction at New York University from 2019 to 2021. She also serves on the planning committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival and lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is working on a novel about coming to America and a full-length nonfiction project about the intersection of anti-blackness, climate change, language, borders, and the aftermath of American slavery in daily life. She has taught at Manhattanville College, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Columbia College Chicago

Rae Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has also taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco State University.

Her books include Conjure, Wobble, which a finalist for the National book Award; Partly: New and Selected Poems; Itself; Just Saying; Money Shot; and Versed, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Next Life and Up to Speed were selected by Publishers Weekly as best poetry books of their given years.

Armantrout has been published in many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Scribner’s Best American Poetry of 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008, and 2011, and in such magazines as Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She has also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (2008), the Fund for Poetry (1999 and 1994) and the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1989).

She was born in Vallejo, California, and earned her AB at University of California at Berkeley (1970), and her MA at San Francisco State University (1975). She lives in Everett, Washington.

More books by Rae Armantrout pictured above.

Evie Shockley has published multiple books of poetry, including her latest collection semiautomatic and the new black, winner of the Black Caucus of ALA’s Literary Award for Poetry, and a half-red sea , in addition to two chapbooks. She is also the author of a book criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.

Shockley has had essays and reviews published in such journals as Callaloo, African American Review, and Indiana Review. Her poetry has appeared in MELUS, Harvard Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, among many other publications. She has sat on a number of panels and given many presentations at a variety of conferences including the “Césaire at 100!” forum, MLA, the American Studies Association Conference, and the American Literature Association. She has read at the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Barnard College, University of New Mexico, and at a number of other universities and literary venues.

Also by Evie Shockley, the new black.

Brenda Hillman is Professor of Creative Writing and holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California, in Moraga, California. In addition, she is a member of the permanent faculty of Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2016.

Hillman has published ten collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press: Cascadia , Pieces of Air in the Epic, (winner of the William Carlos Williams Award), Practical Water (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry), and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (winner of the winner of the 2014 Griffin Prize for Poetry). Her newest title, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days was published in February of 2018.

Hillman edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood . She has co-translated and edited works by Ana Cristina Cesar, Jeongrye Choi, Ashur Etwebi, and Richard O. Moore. Hillman has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; two Pushcart Prizes; a Holloway Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley; and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in several editions of The Best American Poetry.

She has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; two Pushcart Prizes; a Holloway Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley; and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in several editions of The Best American Poetry.

Brenda Hillman’s Web site is: http://www.brendahillman.net

An online reader’s companion is available at:brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu

More books by Brenda Hillman pictured above.

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“Ed Roberson’s new collection, Asked What Has Changed, answers this question with the keen observations his poetry is known for, in a dancing syntax that, also characteristically, never fails to challenge and surprise.  The poems flutter through images at a dizzying pace and offer a cornucopia of subtle takes on the sonnet, adding a sturdy but flexible sonnet-stanza to our tradition’s stock of forms.  From his current vantage point, twelve stories above Lake Michigan and eight decades into an African American life, Roberson’s view encompasses what is, at once, the mark of his apartment’s “luxury” status and the “source of Chicago’s smelly tap water.”  Another breathtaking contribution to his inquiry into how black aesthetics can sharpen our understanding of local and global ecosystems, this work teaches us not simply to look, but to see.”

–Evie Shockley, author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry

Award-winning poet Ed Roberson confronts the realities of an era in which the fate of humanity and the very survival of our planet are uncertain. Departing from the traditional nature poem, Roberson’s work reclaims a much older tradition, drawing into poetry’s orbit what the physical and human sciences reveal about the state of a changing world. These poems test how far the lyric can go as an answer to our crisis, even calling into question poetic form itself. Reflections on the natural world and moments of personal interiority are interwoven with images of urbanscapes, environmental crises, and political instabilities. These poems speak life and truth to modernity in all its complexity. Throughout, Roberson takes up the ancient spiritual concern—the ephemerality of life—and gives us a new language to process the feeling of living in a century on the brink.

ED ROBERSON is a contemporary, award-winning poet, Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University, and the author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World.

Did you miss AWP 2020 due to the pandemic? Did you miss the virtual conference in 2021? Catch up on what you may have missed from our booth! Click on any of the images to order from HFSBooks.com. Use code QAWP21 to get 30% off all orders and receive free shipping (USA only) on orders of $50 or more.

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