As a psychologist, Lisa C. Krueger is familiar with digging into what makes us human. The joys and celebrations or the pain of what cuts the skin—and what cuts deeper. In animals the size of dreams, Krueger looks into the dark corners and, instead of just shining a light, strips them down to their foundations, until all that’s left is life.

In this first critical study of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s major work, Daniel P. Watkins reveals the singular purpose of Barbauld’s visionary poems: to recreate the world based on the values of liberty and justice. Watkins examines in close detail both the form and content of Barbauld’s Poems, originally published in 1773 and revised and reissued in 1792. Along with providing careful readings of the poems, readings that situate the works in their broader political, historical, and philosophical contexts, Watkins explores the relevance of the introductory epigraphs and the importance of the poems’ placement throughout the volume. At the center of Watkins’s study is Barbauld’s effort to develop a visionary poetic stance. He argues that the deliberate arrangement of the poems creates a coherent portrayal of Barbauld’s poetic, political, and social vision, a vision born of her deep belief that the principles of love, sympathy, liberty, and pacifism are necessary for a secure and meaningful human reality. In tracing the contours of this effort, Watkins examines, in particular, the tension in Barbauld’s poetry between her desire to engage directly with the political realities of the world and her equally strong longing for a pastoral world of peace and prosperity. Scholars of British literature and women writers will welcome this important study of one of the eighteenth century’s foremost writers.

"Winner of the 2010 Colorado Prize, this sophomore collection from Savich (Full Catastrophe Living) features poems that communicate what is fragmentary at the expense of the concrete. At once meticulous and vertiginous, these poems are grounded by "The Mountains Overhead," a long poem of 113 fragments, in which we find "Dawn stripping you like a cat/ clawing a band of wallpaper" and horses that "hold themselves like torches so they/ won't burn like themselves." The result is a collection that is thrilling and inchoate. "A Children's Story" is Savich at his best, blending enjambment and narrative to create a poem in which the speaker's distance from the memory of a former love ("the white/ in her teeth and eyes moved him like childhood/ loss") is realized with melancholy. In keeping with the trope of annulments, the poems often end suddenly, leaving much to be desired in their genesis and construction. One senses that Savich could go on building his fragmentary mountain forever, not unlike a certain well-known biblical tower whose result was the fragmentation of language itself, all the while longing for a "heart which exists/ in which to continue is not/ to confine." (Nov.) " —Danniel Schoonebeek , Publishers Weekly

"It is the poet who, undistracted by the imbecile telegraphy of this moment, dares to sustain a sustaining sound I most esteem and most warmly embrace. Zach Savich has written a book both intimate and vast, both tender and acidly candid. And with his long poem, 'The Mountains Overhead,' he has entered that visionary company of poets who, by overturning Babel, lay the heavens at our feet."—Donald Revell

"Sparse, spare, these lines nonetheless overflow with a sheer and brilliant imagination- 'The crows: hearing our voices through wires'; 'the horses hold themselves like torches'; 'the sun a dial tone . . .' The tension between minimalism of form and maximalism of concept and feeling gives this work a vivid, oddly crystalline, momentum. The central long poem unfolds one small leaf at a time, yet resists accumulation; instead it presents us again and again with the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the slightly uncanny: what would it be to sing instead of to say? This book gives us an intimation."—Cole Swensen

In Another Creature Pamela Gemin reconciles her generation’s impulse toward personal freedom with its costs as she moves her cast of innocents and outlaws through Midwestern landscapes embroidered with green lawns, blue lakes and raspberry patches eerily wired for sound. Hers are hungry poems, in and of the world, expounding the “flavors and hues, the fragrance and skin / of the merchandise of Earth.”

A feminist classic, The Answer/La Respuesta is the letter by 17th century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to a priest who hoped to silence her and all women. Known as the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana was a brilliant scholar and poet and an outspoken defender of women's rights. Her works shows a keen awareness of gender. This volume also reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and humor she used in defense of her cause.

Anxiety In Mosaic is a sum up of a manís fears and hopes into a volume of poetry; anxieties that span a cross section of the human phenomena of greed (in ramifications) and the resultant socio-political, economic and environmental consequences; the repercussions of worsted governance, feminist, ecological, emigrational and imperialist concerns, presented from the perspective of a philosophical questioning. The charm of these thoroughly vocal, finely-crafted poems not only lie in the quasi-compendious multiplicity of subject matter but also in their creative and innovative re-chartings.

Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand up against a dominating and repressive society. Her poetry, novels, memoirs, and children's books reflect her Appalachian upbringing and feature her struggles with racially integrated schools and unwelcome authority figures. One of Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life," hooks has won wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. In Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks continues her work as an imagist of life's harsh realities in a collection of poems inspired by her childhood in the isolated hills and hidden hollows of Kentucky. At once meditative, confessional, and political, this poignant volume draws the reader deep into the experience of living in Appalachia. Touching on such topics as the marginalization of its people and the environmental degradation it has suffered over the years, hooks's poetry quietly elegizes the slow loss of an identity while also celebrating that which is constant, firmly rooted in a place that is no longer whole.

Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"--a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.