The contemporary poetry series

"In civilian histories, her fourth book of poetry, Lee Upton portrays contemporary culture as the many-eyed, monstrous Argus and explores the common gestures among people and among cultures that constitute "foreign relations." Formally ambitious, ranging from short, allusive lyrics to long, intricately patterned sequences, Upton's poems reflect on complicity in and vulnerability to violence. Her poems also explore moments of hard-won triumph for the vivid, provocative people who inhabit them."--BOOK JACKET.

Viridian is Paul Hoover's sixth collection of poetry and the first since his book-length work The Novel: A Poem was published in 1990. While The Novel: A Poem dealt with the dilemma of postmodern authorship, the poems in Viridian are conceptual pieces varied in style and subject matter. The poems in the first of three sections comment on the world through language and simultaneously explore how subject matter, from baseball to death to highway signs, is transformed by language. The middle section consists of longer poems in which meaning emerges through a filter of language. In the final and most lyrical section, several poems are based on Hoover's screenplay for Joseph Ramirez's 1994 independent film, Viridian. Many of these poems were used as voice-overs for the film's main character, a single mother searching for permanence. Their language is incantatory, as if poetry could fix a place for her in the world.

If God is not available, then what is? In this collection of "coming of age" poems, Claudia Keelan attempts to answer that question by testing the limits of influence on one writer's notions of self and God. Those influences, or teachers, are as varied as literature, family, and organized religion. Through many voices, The Secularist shapes new poetic forms through which God may be glimpsed.

Taking its title from Samuel Beckett's "Ohio Impromptu", this collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world. They offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things and places - inside and outside the human psyche.

In these quizzically probing and provocative poems, atoms and torture, tattoos and laundromats, mug shots, the theory of light, and such personalities as Joe Louis and Bruce Lee join in shaping a simultaneously personal and historical narrative of love, family, and desire. The tension between the public and the private saturates these poems with a breathless energy that carries the reader through Rekdal’s self-aware depiction of American culture and romance, complete with Harlequin romance novels and an account of her parents’ courtship. Though Rekdal delights in turning traditional images of love upside down, what she finally offers is a grateful and graceful view of humanity, which convinces us that, as she says in “Convocation”: “Nothing is a single moment . . . / No private event lacks history.”

In her most ambitious collection of poems to date, Lee Upton extends and deepens her experiments with perception and language. Drawn into the orbit of her poems are multiple figurations - a Dante-inspired guide and a Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, Hamlet's Gertrude, and Lewis Carroll's Alice - and Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, Louise Bogan, and Sylvia Plath. While investigating elements of women's biological, emotional, and spiritual experiences that prove particularly recalcitrant to language, she draws her attention to the "relentless experiment" of pregnancy and childbirth. Upton examines fleeting moments when objects are seen at the periphery of vision and draws upon the language we use in contemplating the psychic aftereffects of contemporary violence, dispossession, and exclusion.