Spill by Michael Chitwood  More Info...

Locket by Catherine Daly  More Info...

Psalm by Carol Ann Davis  More Info...

The Flute Ship 'Castricum' by Amy England  More Info...

"Whether it's Japan or Chicago, the white rooms of an empty house or the empty walls of monastery, a vivid magical-realist sense of possibility laces these evocative locations together ­ swiftly ­ England's work is new form of traveling."

    —Cole Swensen

Victory and Her Opposites by Amy England  More Info...

Victory and Her Opposites is generous with the gift of discovery. These pages offer up a rich collage of archaeology reports inspired by the excavation of the temples to the great gods at Samothrace. Reading these "reports" is like experiencing a great archaeological dig through the eyes— and imagination—of an endlessly fascinating writer and artist.

Duties of the Spirit by Patricia Fargnoli  More Info...

Duties of the Spirit is comprised of deeply moving, lyrical and unforgettable explorations of the joys and fears that come with growing older in America.

"These poems are stamped with an energetic and outgoing attentiveness to the world. This, so much more than just the humming examination of the self, is what makes writing a sacred thing. Who does this is a true poet, and few do it better than Patricia Fargnoli."
    
    — Mary Oliver

Calendars by Annie Finch  More Info...

"Annie Finch is an American original, a master of control who shows no fear of excess, and none of quietness either. With a perfect-pitch ear for the American tongue, she is a formalist as much in the tradition of Robert Duncan and Bernadette Mayer as of Hart Crane and John Berryman. Calendars is a marvelous book, filled with poems whose directness and simplicity are deceptive — they have depths and delights that appear to go on forever."

    —Ron Silliman

Tupelo Press is pleased to provide a free, downloadable (325K PDF) Reader's Companion to Annie Finch's Calendars. Click on the image or the link to download.

Mating Season by Kate Gale  More Info...

"Drive out past the edge of town while twilight gathers. Don't speed too fast past the house with the falling down porch, vines creeping under the eaves, shotgun blasted TV on the weedy front lawn. Dim your headlights and creep onto the driveway, 'til you hear ice tinkling in the half-full glass, the laconic argument spilled from the kitchen. Come closer, sounds of sex from an upstairs window, whispered prayers from behind the bathroom door. If you stay past dark, you might hear weeping. In Kate Gale's Mating Season, life is lived without the illusion of romance or sentiment, yet the urge for grace is an addiction still not kicked. Its language brings you into a world of fetid beauty. Its odors cling to you long after you put the book down."

    —Terry Wolverton

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets
Edited by Ray Gonzalez  More Info...

"As more poets write prose poems, one of the most common reasons they give for turning to them is that their fluent composition offers a "freedom of expression" lined poetry often restricts. To many, this sounds like a contradiction stemming from the eternal belief that any kind of good poetry has no boundaries. Yet those that write prose poems insist the act of placing their poems into sentences and paragraphs gives them a fresh approach to content and form."

    —From the introduction by Ray Gonzalez

Other Fugitives & Other Strangers
by Rigoberto González  More Info...

Follow Rigoberto González into these poems and you'll come to a place where a kiss is a fig or a rock, where a fist is a rose, or a finger is a barb on a hook. Inside this dazzling kaleidoscope of words, González whirls us through the delights and terrors of erotic love, and into the forbidden, hidden, dangerous body of desire. He was brave enough to write these unflinching, brilliant poems. Are you brave enough to read them?

    —Minnie Bruce Pratt

Time Lapse by Alvin Greenberg  More Info...

"What's wonderful about Alvin Greenberg is that he never steps into the same set of narrative conventions twice. In Time Lapse, he appropriates and manipulates those of crime fiction, academic satire, tryst novel, and more to deeply impressive effect, turning the story of a fastidious, contemplative, amoral professional hitman (and professor of modernist literature) into a metafiction about the nature of writing and a philosophical exploration about the nature of contingency, time's passing, and death in our culture of violence. The result is both handsome and haunting, a challenge to us all to think about our shadow selves and a pure plain pleasure to read."

    —Lance Olsen, author of Girl Imagined By Chance

Inflorescence by Sarah Hannah  More Info...

Sarah Hannah follows her critically acclaimed first volume of poetry, Longing Distance, with Inflorescence, a compelling memoir-in-verse for her mother, Boston Expressionist painter Renee Rothbein, and their intense relationship in which they struggle with Rothbein’s mental illness and eventual death from cancer. Hannah’s characteristic love of traditional poetic forms, wit, and fascination with the natural world continue to manifest in this sometimes shocking story that cannot fail to move scores of readers, including anyone who has cared for the sick, dealt with mental illness, or lost someone close to them. However, Inflorescence is far more than a narrative of sickness and loss. Through rich language and use of metaphor, most often that of wildflowers, their common names and lore, Inflorescence often treats its subject matter obliquely, making the personal and particular universal. In all, Hannah’s second volume of poetry examines unflinchingly the deep and difficult love between a mother and daughter, stares death in the face, and transforms a unique story into a series of luminous, transcendent truths.

Longing Distance by Sarah Hannah  More Info...

"This is an extremely moving work. I'm struck by her intelligence of emotion, and her unmistakable voice. These poems are at once determined, vulnerable, and fierce; she looks it all straight in the eye. Shadow and lover beware: these poems will fix you. Sarah Hannah is a true original. I love this book."

    —Annie Dillard

"The distance of longing, the proximity of oblivion: the motives that animate these poems are the contours of perception in a mortal coil. Sarah Hannah is a physiologist of sight, devoutest scribe to the almost-seen, the intimated world, even, or especially, as that world is about to be lost. She is also a worker of wonders. See how, in her hands, the sonnet becomes an instrument of twenty-first-century meditation. See how the fish in the marketplace "in greens and ices swimming" suddenly brings to life again the "river lined with briars.""

    —Linda Gregerson

Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker by Phan Nhien Hao  More Info...

The work of exile poet Phan Nhien Hao, although he is not permitted to publish in his native Vietnam, is exceptionally well known there. Swaying between poems of the immigrant experience and poems that recollect his homeland's trauma after the war, his strong, sometimes surreal voice is always intoxicating.

This is a dual language edition (Vietnamese and English).

The Next Ancient World by Jennifer Michael Hecht  More Info...

"Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World - a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems."

    —Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate

A House Waiting for Music by David Hernandez  More Info...

"A House Waiting for Music is a remarkable collection of poems. David Hernandez is like a hip, urban William Stafford--his quiet, subtle poems force us to see what we often miss, lost in the rush of our lives. He has a deft touch for finding the striking juxtaposition, the odd fragment of grace. Hernandez embraces the world, even when it seems irredeemable and without mercy, and he celebrates the small daily miracles of survival. The music of these warm, intimate poems resonates, and lingers."

    —Jim Daniels

Storm Damage by Melissa Hotchkiss  More Info...

"Melissa Hotchkiss's poems have the powerful defamiliarizing quality of certain Eastern European films. One careful, oddly lighted take after another—focusing on the very minute, ordinary things—suddenly releases an enormous spookiness, sadness, or longing."

    —Alan Williamson

Red Summer by Amaud Jamaul Johnson  More Info...

$16.95 pb
ISBN 13: 978-1-932195-32-3

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Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky  More Info...

Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, "I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it." One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing.

The Garden Room by Joy Katz  More Info...

$9.95 pb
ISBN 13: 978-1-932195-36-1

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You Can Tell The Horse Anything by Mary A. Koncel  More Info...

You Can Tell the Horse Anything is a collection of prose poems that explores the many manifestations of longing - true love, spiritual redemption, a good night's sleep - the list is long and varied. The poems give voice to an array of characters who inhabit the sometimes rocky terrain between the commonplace and the absurd and they do so with humor and great lyricism.

Abiding Places by Ko Un  More Info...

In Abiding Places, Korean poet Ko Un has transfigured his homeland in lovely, observant, and penetrating poems uniting ancient and modern, secular and spiritual, art and politics, South and North. When his former political cellmate Kim Dae-Jung became President of Korea in 1998, Ko Un became the first citizen from the South to be invited to tour the North. From that visit came this deceptively simple and deeply engaging book.

Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs  More Info...

One must look to the great American novelists — Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty — to find a writer whose work illuminates a very specific region. No American poet in recent memory has accomplished the transcendent act of writing completely out of a place without succumbing to regionalism, until Davis McCombs in his brilliant debut, Ultima Thule (named “the finest Yale Poets selection in years” by Publishers Weekly), and now in his second book, Dismal Rock. Ultima Thule explored the subterranean world of Mammoth Cave; Dismal Rock lifts the reader from that vast underground labyrinth into the magical and vanishing terrestrial world above it, opening with a brilliant sequence of poems called “Tobacco Mosaic,” which explores the terrible beauty of that most American commodity, tobacco.

While always firmly rooted in the sloping topography of South Central Kentucky, McCombs ranges seamlessly into unexpected territory in the book’s second half, giving us poems with subject matter as diverse as Rossetti robbing his wife’s grave, the Elgin Marbles, and the genius of Bob Marley.

McCombs’s voice is brilliantly and deliberately restrained; its compassion is singular in current American letters.

$16.95 pb
ISBN: 978-1-932195-48-4

Bright Turquoise Umbrella by Hermine Meinhard  More Info...

What better way to follow a child into womanhood than through the shifting, magical landscape of portents and signs? In Bright Turquoise Umbrella, Hermine Meinhard shakes up the physical world, leaving us mesmerized. Leaving us changed. She possesses the secret of dreams, and like a Sherpa for the soul, helps us climb to a place that is lyrical and enchanting, lighter than air, even when revealing something utterly shocking. Fish make prophecies, beheaded women sing, and time turns boundless. This is poetry that rewires our experiences—what we most treasure and what we most fear—in a way that reaches us organically, that sets us buzzing.

In these utterly intriguing poems, vivid, disquieting, even violent images collude with a gentle lyrical voice to produce an unusually affecting poetry. These poems transfix us as Hermine Meinhard takes our hand — for she is nothing if not gentle—and leads us deep into the unconscious—hers, and ours.

Why is the Edge Always Windy? by Mong-Lan  More Info...

Mong-Lan's second book of poems, Why Is The Edge Always Windy?, is a book of revelations, nightmares, and love poems, cross-cultural and historically compelling. Imagistic, surreal and penetrating, her writing cuts to the quick. Whether writing of Vietnam or 9/11, Mong-Lan's language is inventive and muscular, at times philosophical and elegiac. Grounded in the rhythms of the heart and the world, the poems are lyrically intense with an edgy intelligence.