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A brand new collection from award-winning poet Marianne Chan. A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker's experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What's achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.

While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent “afterward” of someone's death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep—whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that's happened in a life—all of the love and all of the loss—into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined—the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way.

From one of America's most beloved poets, a piercing new collection reflecting on the characters and encounters that haunt us through this life and into the nextLeading us into a city stirring with gravediggers and beggars, lovers and dogs, Charles Simic returns with a brilliant collection full of his singular wit, dark humor, and tenderheartedness. In poems that are often as spare as they are monumental, he captures the fleeting moments of modern life—peering inside pawnshop windows, brushing shoulders with strangers on the street, and walking familiar cemetery rows—to uncover all the beauty and worry hiding in plain sight. As the poet reflects on a lifetime's worth of pleasure and loss, he recalls instances when he “made excuses and hurried away,” and considers the way memory always trails just behind. No Land in Sight is a testament to all we leave in our wake and, simultaneously, all we hang on to: the passing minutes, the evening's stillness, and the many lives we inhabit in dim thresholds and bright mornings alike.

“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.” In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens'phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet's. It's ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

This “innovative” poetry collection “uses text and image to explore the strangeness inherent in everyday experience” (Publishers Weekly). “I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I place them hanging / on a wall back home? Something already slipping,” Kathryn Cowles writes. These poems surround a central question: how much of a moment is captured by the mechanisms we use to describe it? How much of the shore, the birds, the feeling? In pursuit of an answer, Cowles leads readers through a sequence of distinct landscapes (islands, plains, mountains, oceans), puzzling over and embracing the valley between literature and lived experience. Along the way, Cowles's language is light but recursive, rotating around beloved places: a new house, a garden, a seemingly endless plane ride, a battery-operated spit of lamb, a photograph of a battery-operated spit of lamb, dogs, Sue, Ohio. This collection defamiliarizes and refamiliarizes the “actual world,” while navigating toward the clear and substantial stuff of living. Arresting on both visual and textual levels, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World isa collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions.“Deftly shows that as we struggle to transform into language what we see and hear and feel, the results are inevitably incomplete; there's a gap between what we want to say and what we actually manage.” —Library Journal“The need to catalog, to document, and to mourn are all active forces in Cowles's poems... a work of grappling with the representational and the real and the thin boundaries between them.” —Colorado Review

An Open Book celebrates the power of poetry and reaffirms David Malouf as one of Australia's most celebrated and beloved writers. This is only David Malouf's third new poetry volume in nearly 40 years, so it is a significant publishing event. As one of Australia's greatest living poets, Malouf continues to meditate and reflect on themes of mortality and memory. The poems in An Open Book are attentive and evocative, vital and beautiful, revisiting and reimagining some of the key themes that have resonated with readers over his impressive career. Only a few of these poems have ever been published, so most of the collection will be completely new to readers everywhere. An Open Book is a perfect literary gift.

Les tombeaux de la mémoire est une image-symbole qui représente la tête de l'homme, conçue comme un vaste cimetière, jalonné de tombeaux, à l'intérieur desquels sont enterrées dans le secret le plus absolu, des idées et des pensées. Chaque poème peut être considéré comme un tombeau, et chaque titre de poème, une épitaphe qui renseigne sur l'identité de la personne qui gît dans ce tombeau. Le recueil devient une sorte de procès, avec cette pluralité de voix, tantôt teintées de douceur, tantôt piquantes et critiques.

John Freeman's first poetry collection charts the impact of place on human experience. In Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome, and the foothills of a childhood hometown, Freeman navigates legacies of ruin and construction, illness and memory. Warm, mournful, and distinctly urban, Maps offers a compassionate perspective from the experience of one American embroiled in empire.From'You Are Here:'The city grindsits molars at night, carefully minedexplosions boring cavities beneathManhattan, while other linesride all hours in yellow light, glidingto stops at the zebra-painted beamhalfway down each platform,conductor always pointing up, as ifto say, yes, you are here.'At the intersection of art and heart, this magnificent sheaf of voyages leads us through the di fficult and picturesque atlas of a life.... This is an enduring and rapturous account of a life's journey to plumb the depths of the known in order to reveal the hidden and unknown.'—D.A. Powell'What is mapped here, in John Freeman's exquisite and robust poetry debut, are the territories of loss, pain, violence, and reckoning that make up a life. And also those of love, remembrance, and unabashed passion that make that same life livable. Maps is a consolation and a delight.'—­Tracy K. Smith'John Freeman's astonishing book of poems shows us first an America that could once and sometimes still be experienced in a vacuum, removed from the brutal struggles that are the daily life of much of the world. Then he takes us into that world, where human tenderness is martyred and buried, day after day. In Freeman's hands the most minimal scenes, the smallest gestures, record our persistence and fragility. Disconsolate, loving, burdened by memory, undeceived but somehow still doggedly hopeful, these poems help us to see a world we're just beginning to map.'—Mark Doty John Freeman is an American writer and literary critic. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary biannual, and author of two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist. He has also edited two anthologies of writing on inequality, Tales of Two Cities and Tales of Two Americas. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York, where he teaches at The New School and is writer-in-residence at New York University. The executive editor at LitHub, he has published poems in Zyzzyva, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

On the Surface of Silence offers for the first time in English the final poems of Lea Goldberg, pre-eminent and central poet of modern Hebrew poetry. These extraordinary texts, composed in the last years and even last days of the poet's life and published posthumously after her untimely death, exhibit a level of lyrical distillation and formal boldness that mark them as distinctive in the poet's oeuvre. Often employing a fragment-like structure, where the unspoken is as present and forceful as the spoken, stripped of adornments and engaging the reader with an uncompromising, even disarming, directness, Goldberg's last poems enact and manifest a poetics of intrepid truth-telling. The play between revelation and concealment, the language precision and the unflinching end-of-life gaze transform these texts into powerfully moving, and often surprising, poems. The book itself, in the original format as masterfully edited by Tuvia Ruebner and with drawings by Goldberg herself interspersed among the poems, is a significant and beautiful artifact of modern Hebrew culture. This bilingual edition, with translations by award-winning translator Rachel Tzvia Back, brings us poems from a singular poetic voice of the 20th century - poems which will enrich, reflect, and stir the reader's heart.

In her second book, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of Canada to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals—on the streets, by rivers, in museums, on playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie—Oliver reflects on issues of exile, memory and identity, while traveling back into her own past.

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Ethiopian American Mahtem Shiferraw's Fuchsia examines conceptions of the displaced, disassembled, and nomadic self. Embedded in her poems are colors, elements, and sensations that evoke painful memories related to deep-seated remnants of trauma, war, and diaspora. Yet rooted in these losses and dangers also lie opportunities for mending and reflecting, evoking a distinct sense of hope. Elegant and traditional, the poems in Fuchsia examine what it means to both recall the past and continue onward with a richer understanding.

The dog of memory, an animal more often unbiddable and capricious than it is comforting and predictable, roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Helen Farish's native Cumberland and further afield – mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens – and people, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days.Farish's doggèd and deeply moving mediation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose'poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke.'The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by'liquefying high-sky heat.'Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring.Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.'Intimates is a passionate book. Its theme is ancient (the unthinkable pain of lost love) and Farish thinks hard about both pain and happiness. Much of Farish's art lies in concealment. The economy of her poems and her confidence in their means enable her to speak with convincing directness where other poets might lapse into gestures'– Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times'Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand is an original extremely intelligent working through of a complex relationship between two artists and their work. I loved the poems. The sequence works so well as a story and is so nuanced I felt completely absorbed in it. And full of admiration for Farish's great skill.'– Melvyn Bragg

This book is Anthony Thwaite's self-professed final collection, filled with poems that are wistful and even playful. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends—especially the poet Peter Porter—and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning.

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood—commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own—a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing'the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true.'Water and light are constant images in this book, apt conduits to the past. Memories are refracted'in the faces of old regrets.'But they are not wholly lost for they inform the present; they continue'beating loud.'The Folded Heart is a lyrical compression of language, precise, intensely felt.