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.

After the Gold Rush by Lewis Buzbee  More Info...

After the Gold Rush is filled with powerful, moving stories of families tested by forces inside and out. Even when life conspires to tear them apart, the family must cope, figure out what comes next. These are stories about life at its most quotidian—and most challenging— level, after the gold rush of love has become the business of living. The people in these stories, like the people around you every day, discover inner resources and solutions both unique and universal.

American Linden by Matthew Zapruder  More Info...

"There's an assumption in American Linden that we share an intelligent, intimate and necessary understanding. And that is shocking. It cuts to the core. If I were to look for someone to tell my troubles to, or to celebrate what bears celebration, I'd go find the poet who wrote this book. It is severe, it is steady, it is surprising. I like a book that takes my mind and gives it a good shaking ever so gently."

    —Dara Wier

The Animal Gospels by Brian Barker  More Info...

The Animal Gospels is a collection of lyric-narrative poems that explore faith, identity, loss, racism, the transience of being, and coming of age in the South at the end of the 20th century.

Many of the poems tap into the mythic and totemic power of animals in an attempt to bridge the gap between the past and the present, remembering and forgetting, personal history and public history. The book as a whole is shaped by an abiding faith in story, song, and the redemptive power of memory and imagination.

"Brian Barker's elegant ear, schooled in the cadences of southern speech, is tuned to an intensely physical musicality. But of course euphony alone isn't poetry; Barker bring his song to bear on difficulty, the desire to capture what can be held of happiness. Until, in the stunning final poem, "Monkey Gospel Floating Out to Sea," his work pushes into bold new territory, his splendid rhythms both broken and fiercely alive, inescapable, rescuing fragments of a life into music."

                — Mark Doty

Approximately Paradise by Floyd Skloot  More Info...

Approximately Paradise, Floyd Skloot's fourth collection of poems is concerned with the fluidity and fragility of memory. Moving between the worlds of health and illness, past and present, remembering and forgetting, stability and change, it tracks a hard-earned acceptance of life in all its mixed possibilities. Skloot writes movingly of finding happiness, love, and a sense of home while confronting the dangers, losses, and uncertainties of human life.

At the Drive-In Volcano by Aimee Nezhukumatathil  More Info...

“Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are as ripe, funny and fresh as a precious friendship. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements — animals, insects, sugar, cardamom, legends, countries, relatives, soaps, fruits — taste and touch. I love the nubby layerings of lines, luscious textures and constructions. Aimee writes with a deep resonance of spirit and sight. She's scared of nothing. She knows that many worlds may live in one house. Poems like these revive our souls. Read them, then say her glorious name over and over again like a charm of syllables — it's a poem of its own.”
                               Naomi Shihab Nye

Bellini In Istanbul by Lillias Bever  More Info...

The event at the center of this refreshingly conceived cycle of poems is Italian painter Gentile Bellini's sojourn in Istanbul in 1479. Poems undulate out from this experience as the poet carves poetic sculptures that explore the themes of art, archaeology, and the idea of cultural transmission. These insightful contemplations are delicately honed by the author's own experience in Turkey, ultimately fashioning a mirror to history that reflects the landscape of self.

Bend by Natasha Sajé  More Info...

Bend celebrates the pleasures of language with wit and great humanity.

Bend is a literary tour-de-force exploring themes of transformation.

Bend is fun to read; it offers its substance with a smile.

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.

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.

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.

Darkling by Anna Rabinowitz  More Info...

"Darkling is a book-length sequence of elegiac fragments, obsessive ruminations on the lives of the poet's Polish-Jewish parents, grandparents, as well as her own, filtered through the eyes of an extraordinarily clear-eyed contemporary witness."

    —Marjorie Perloff

New from the author of At The Site of Inside Out, winner of the Juniper Prize


2001 ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year, Finalist

Devoted Creatures by Bill Van Every  More Info...

"There's a directness here which comes straight from the unmediated gut, and there's a spiritual ferocity, too, which cuts the psyche open and exposes the wild, aching human heart. Like a true original, Bill Van Every has devised his own poetic grammar of truth, and he speaks it with disturbing, hilarious clarity."

    —Tony Hoagland

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

Distant Early Warning by Rad Smith  More Info...

Intimate moments saved and savored abound in these affecting, observant poems by the late Rad Smith. It is not his untimely death, however, that brings this volume to light, but his undeniable talent. An inquisitive soul with an engaging mind, his poems persuade us to pay more attention every day, and reap the rewards.

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

Embryos & Idiots by Larissa Szporluk  More Info...

In a world at war over fossilized myths, nothing is more urgent than that our myths be rewritten.  Larissa Szporluk’s Embryos and Idiots revitalizes the myth of the fall, fulfilling the lineage of Genesis and Paradise Lost.  Her Anoton continues the contemporary lyric legacy of Ted Hughes’s Crow, her gardens of Od that of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris.  More personal than poems that proclaim themselves so, Szporluk’s mythic lyrics also make themselves more public than most poems manage, calling down “Shame on the zealous / and jealous.  Shame on the half-fish god / who dined on himself and survived.”

      — H. L. Hix

Every Bird is One Bird by Francine Sterle  More Info...

"Here is a poetry of hope 'with a bruised hue,' of grace... Francine Sterle's language brings forth this carefully observed world with a precise and almost electrical fragrance. Her poems inform, illumine, and sustain this human life we share with the wider life of being."

    —Jane Hirshfield

Nominated for the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award

Co-Winner of the 2000 Tupelo Press Editor's Prize in Poetry

Everyone Coming Toward You by David Petruzelli  More Info...

These poems speak with a breezy candor and wit—reminiscent of Campbell McGrath's own narrative work. The language is warm and highly accessible, the themes inviting (working for a Long Island escort service, having the great Jackson Pollock reach into his baby crib), and the stories are compelling. These are stories the guy sitting on the next bar stool might tell you, if the guy had a poet's gift for language.

The Flammable Bird by Elena Karina Byrne  More Info...

"Elena Karina Byrne's The Flammable Bird is a powerful and exquisite colleciton of poems. Geaceful and lyrically complex, this work invites us into the layered realms of consciousness, into both the sublime pleasures and the raw psychological densities of contemporary experience. Like the phoenix, Elena Karina Byrne lifts herself—and us—high above the ash of our dissappointments and regrets. A marvelous debut."

        — David St. John

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

The Garden Room by Joy Katz  More Info...

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

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The Gathering Eye by Tina Barr  More Info...

"These daring poems - by turns ferocious, opulent, combustible, delicate - undertake many projects. They testify to brutalities visited upon body and spirit, trace the jagged shapes of past terrain, and, in the book's lush middle section, 'Red Land, Black Land,' investigate the complicated sensuality of contemporary Egypt.

Daughter, sister, lover, foreigner - however refracted, Tina Barr's vision is steadfast: actual things make the world, and she honors their profusion at every turn. Infused with both spririt and intention, these poems embody their deepest belief: 'all that is outside can also be woven in.'"

    —Lia Purpura

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

I Want This World by Margaret Szumowski  More Info...

"These poems are straightforward and accurate, imaginative and bold; they reveal a quest that crosses numerous borders of the mind and the body."

    —Yusef Komunyakaa

Ice, Mouth, Song by Rachel Contreni Flynn  More Info...

Ms. Contreni Flynn is a storyteller with an uncanny gift for transforming the everyday details of our lives, using language that shocks and surprises. Says Stephen Dunn,"Ice, Mouth, Song has a haunting beauty to it. . . . Flynn will not pretty-up her world, nor will she be defeated by its harshness. She's written a book that makes easier the difficult task of judging contests."

The Imaginary Poets edited by Alan Michael Parker  More Info...

The Imaginary Poets presents exceptional work from major poets who delight in assuming a new persona. But the book's ultimate goal is to explore the nature of creativity: what is it to make a poem? to make up a poet? To "translate" a work—is that rewriting or writing? What about translating a work that never existed? What does it mean if you create the creator? In the tradition of Pessoa and Borges, The Imaginary Poets delves delightedly into the very act of invention with a wink, a smile and tremendous respect for the art.

"Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are considered—and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so. Thus charged were the twenty-two contributors to this volume, who in response produced poems "translated" from eighteen languages including Dirja, Vietnamese, Yiddish, and even from Egyptian hieroglyphs, poems that may be read in the grand literary tradition of heteronyms and alter egos..."

        — Alan Michael Parker

Contributors include Aliki Barnstone, Josh Bell, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Martha Collins, Annie Finch, Judith Hall, Barbara Hamby, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Garrett Hongo, Andrew Hudgins, David Kirby, Maxine Kumin, Khaled Mattawa, D.A. Powell, Kevin Prufer, Anna Rabinowitz, Victoria Redel, David St. John, Mark Strand, Thom Ward, Rosanna Warren, and Eleanor Wilner

In The Mynah Bird's Own Words by Barbara Tran  More Info...

"In The Mynah Bird's Own Words is a remarkable volume. An assemblage of lined poems and prose poems, it is a compact and concentrated, lyrically delicious collection that comes very close to having the sweep of a novel. The long, central sequence, Rosary, is astonishing. It builds a powerful narrative arc, and yet its each part, each impeccable verse paragraph is discrete and beautiful. Things in these poems take on symbolic values that loom ever larger as we see how each connects and returns us to the larger story. And yet, even the poems outside the centerpiece sequence are part of that same whole, so that by the time we reach the concluding poem, Art,in which a woman practices the craft of what one might call seductive invisibility, we are made to see that poem, and that woman's craft, as very like this poet's art. This collection is part sleight of hand, but all highly crafted. It is, in a word, magic."

    —Robert Wrigley, Judge, First Annual Tupelo Press Chapbook Competition

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.

Locket by Catherine Daly  More Info...

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

The Making of Collateral Beauty by Mark Yakich  More Info...

Idiosyncratic, wry and unique, this small volume is both companion to and descendant of Yakich's award-winning Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group, Waiting to Cross. Each poem here shares a title with a poem in the previous book. Each poem expands on its namesake poem—gives the background—but a background you've never imagined! When a poet as vital and innovative as Yakich is telling the story behind the poem, the vignettes and characters that emerge from behind the scenes are as exuberant and playful as the originals. Another Tupelo book that looks at the meaning of what it is to create.

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

Masque by Elena Karina Byrne  More Info...

"Instantly ticklish and slowly narcotic, the language of Elena Karina Byrne’s curious index of masks in her book nearly confounds the rigour of its ancient form, the poetic catalogue. Yet one cannot help but trail the voice threading through these veils made of words, as once Luciferian and terribly vulnerable to its own power, as it escorts the reader, and abandons her, into a dappled space reminiscent of one of Tolstoy's great Russian balls—a social and erotic prospect distilled to meteoric gestures. One can only yield to the naked hermeticism of this book”

        — Daniel Tiffany

“The Greeks highest compliment to Odysseus was to call him ‘myriad-minded.’ Shall we say of Elena Karina Byrne's amazing sequence that it is ‘myriad-masked?’ By turns poignant, intricate, ingenious — Byrne’s poems explore and dramatize the theme of mask into a multiplicity of insights and imaginings almost as rich as consciousness itself.”

        — Gregory Orr

Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil  More Info...

"When language, sensory experience, and imagination meet and mingle in an inventive and convincing way, we have the ingredients for those moments of grace that characterize important poems. Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Miracle Fruit is rich in such luscious moments. Every line is alive with the excitement of what can be known about the world, every poem bursting with an eagerness to share it."

    —Gregory Orr, Judge Second Annual Tupelo Press Poetry Competition

Mulberry by Dan Beachy-Quick More Info...

$16.95 pb
ISBN 13: 978-1-932195-24-8

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Narcissus by Cecilia Woloch More Info...

$9.95 pb
ISBN 13: 978-1-932195-54-5

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