Poetry

This third volume continues the series begun in 2000. This blending of historical fact and poetic myth reveals the best and the worst of a great nation.

This collection portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures--Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable

Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion--against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: "Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us." Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.

All that remain to us of Sappho's poems are fragments, some only a handful of words. Burn Lyrics incorporates these extant fragments into fully-fleshed poems in entirely contemporary voices, underscoring the flexibility of language and the ways we make compelling meanings out of our limited experiences of the world.

Burn Lyrics is an entirely original accomplishment. Benjamin Landry has reached into the past and its erasures, and brought into our time and place something new and strange. This collection transforms poetry into lived experience-full of atmosphere and physicality and mysterious specificity and music. Landry is a poet of uncommon gifts, one who has uncovered or discovered an entirely unexpected path for this art form. Burn Lyrics began as a remarkable urge, and it is now a spellbinding and transformative reading experience for the rest of us.
Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Infinitesimals

Benjamin Landry crafts an eco-lyric voice that celebrates everyday life yet remains "realistic about the future of the coastline." Throughout Burn Lyrics, the speaker walks barefoot amongst family and strangers, wolves and goats, hummingbirds and pigeons, greenswards and dandelions, storms and fires. At the end of this journey, the old lyric self sheds its skin and the book becomes a new self to call and return the body home.
Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory

You might think that a poem housing a fragment of sacred text-Sappho's incandescent shards-would be a thing relatively inert in itself: at best a reliquary, at worst a golem. But Benjamin Landry splendidly shatters such preconceptions in this brilliant collection. The landscapes are so captivating, the perspectives so enticing, the emotional currents so swift and strong that you notice, only in passing, that a text you thought long dead has quickened, miraculously, into breathing, exuberant life.
Monica Youn, author of Ignatz and Blackacre

Benjamin Landry's Burn Lyrics both fleshes out the mystery of and satisfies the desires awakened by Sappho's fragments. We are sated at every turn. He is a master not only of the line but also of the heart. Landry offers a new lens through which to view the world; "it's the sort of thing that colors your personal heaven," and, as a reader, I'm left to wonder if this is possible, can the poem curate so much emotion in a world filled with so many distractions, but then I turn another page and realize, "Sometimes, it happens this way."
A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A