“When you open this book, expect serious role-playing and syntactic tap dancing. The City She Was presents a world that brings ‘the horizon line into your lexicon’ and a poet’s muse (‘The Endangered You’) is lent to a friend and returned ‘a little more frayed.’ Giménez Smith muddles and enchants with her many masks, leaving the ground a little less stable under our feet.” —Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine, and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

“The human body has only five senses but The City She Was reroutes the architecture of experience so effectively that the reader is awarded a new unnamed sense, a soft power, one that reprioritizes our outdated reality with the gathering infrastructure of the geography of language. The whole aggressive world is this book’s only enemy, and no one tricks absurdity into form, reality into abstraction, injustice into stylized verdict, and contemporary popular culture into a useful, heroic trap of surreal-her-wholeness like Carmen Giménez Smith.”—Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of Skin, Inc. and The Maverick Room

Marvelously sustained and densely rhythmic, this tightly constructed whole is built of parts that, at each level, all the way down to the phrase, constitute poems in themselves. Baus manages to keep a cast of words in constant replay until many of them take on the presence of character, and some emerge as characters themselves­—Minus and Iris, for instance—­keeping the whole on the verge of a narrative project that remains always just barely out of reach, just barely in another world in which language and animal endlessly interleave. Baus has opened a new literary field: the linguistic bestiary, a new zoo where words pace like fauves behind ever-thinning bars.” —Cole Swensen, contest judge and author of Greensward, Ours, and The Glass Age

““Kryah’s lines are full of figurative grace: The images stun and accumulate. We Are Starved introduces an important poetic vision, a surprising and exciting voice.” —Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Raising

“In haunted days more filled with violence than grace, Joshua Kryah has found the sacred, a way to be amazed at how ‘you can move among the world’s misfortune/and still consider it good.’ We Are Starved’s breathtakingly mature poems are fueled by a man’s internal combustion, the tremendous labor it is to live well—to be a father, a lover, a son—in a fallible world. There’s a gorgeous, seeking darkness swelling the heart of We Are Starved, one that marks Kryah as among contemporary poetry’s finest young voices.” —Alex Lemon, author of Happy: A Memoir and Fancy Beasts

“Joshua Kryah is redefining what it means to write spiritual poetry. This is not another book about longings for the spiritual; this is a book of offerings to the spiritual. These poems answer the plea of Yeats’s spirits (‘We are starved’) and give them what they crave, depicting the particulars of human appetite and the way each ‘peculiar and appalling hunger’ unfolds. The scope of these poems is dizzying; they echo and glitter and sear as they, against all odds, give us a ‘world [that] is/suddener than any idea about the world.’ We Are Starved is unabashed and unflinching, and it is deeply, exquisitely satisfying.” —Mary Szybist, author of Granted