Poets At Work

“Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today.”—Philip Levine

The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is “continually engaging and, at her best, luminous” (San Diego Union-Tribune).

–From W.W.Norton

Fueled by motion and emotion, Neil Aitken’s The Lost Country of Sight is literally and figuratively a moving collection. His winding roads and ghost cars move us over the landscapes of identity and personal history with stirring meditative grace. There is a song at the beginning of every journey, Aitken tells us in one poem even as he says in another, these are journeys we never take. This poet is both our wise, wide-eyed tour guide and our dazed, day-dreaming companion in this rich, mature debut.

–Terrance Hayes

Kara Candito’s prize-winning debut collection a “garish/human theatre” comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the “glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves” and Puccini’s Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.

This collection of both new and previously published poems showcases Eady’s enormous range as a chronicler of contemporary American life—class, race, family, gender, jazz and blues, and the distinctions between urban and rural environments all play a role in these impeccable lyrics. Eady’s plain- spoken, pragmatic voice is accessible yet distinct, and the experiences he describes (being a victim of discrimination, watching a tough-minded father die, surviving prostate cancer) manage to seem both intimate and universal. Eady writes of being “a black, / American poet” whose “greatest weakness / is an inability / to sustain rage.” But, given the breadth and nuance of his palette, perhaps that is his greatest strength.”
– The New Yorker