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Kay Ryan

“A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning former US Poet Laureate (Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief).

Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan’s poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan’s fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books.

Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of internationally acclaimed poet and writer Dana Gioia, “take the shape of an idea clarifying itself. ”

“The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness. ” —San Francisco Chronicle

“The short lines and quick images—almost snapshots—are elemental. Ryan puts them together, then pulls them apart, and twists them in playful fashion, as though she were an alchemist with a modern experimental attitude … Truly short-line, one-stanza (for the most part) wonders: full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world. ” —Kirkus Reviews

“Witty, charming, serious and delightful … her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt. Those poets, though, wrote many kinds of poems: Ryan, in this volume, writes just one kind. It is, however, a kind worth looking out for—well crafted, understated, funny and smart. ” —Publishers Weekly

Grove Press

Grove Press Poetry Series

Say Uncle

Sarah Lindsay

“The closest thing to a sincerely new brand of poetry to come along in quite some time” from the National Book Award finalist (Pedestal Magazine).

The poems in Sarah Lindsay’s debut, Primate Behavior, have been hailed as “dark-edged . . . with a buoying sense of respect—for the different, the unexpected and the challenging” (Publishers Weekly). Her new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history’s curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay’s poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience.

“[A] vision that beckons the reader after it into unexpected recognitions.”—W. S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet

“Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for . . . Her poems open doors to other worlds and other ways of seeing.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Erudite and whimsical.”—Greensboro News & Record

Mount Clutter

Jacqueline Osherow

A witty and formally versatile collection of poetry exploring life, faith, and history by the Witter Bynner Prize-winning poet.

With Dead Men’s Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection of poetry to date. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante’s terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, all delivered in a casually conversational voice. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure lyric inspiration of biblical verse, these poems range in theme from Italian hill towns to contemporary art installations in Los Angeles to the vanished Jewish world of the Ukraine. Her effortless humor and sharp insights take us from imaginings of the future to recovery of the past, and her distinctive voice becomes a fusion of the sublime and the down-to-earth.

“Like Elizabeth Bishop, who wove her voice into a sestina so effortlessly you forget the form is there, Osherow makes villanelles, sonnets, and even Dante’s terza rima feel genuinely conversational. ” —David Yaffe, The Village Voice

Dead Men's Praise

Timothy Donnelly

“A strutting, dazzling, exhilarating” collection of poems by the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award–winning author of The Cloud Corporation (The Village Voice).

In his critically acclaimed debut collection, Timothy Donnelly pairs an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance with a stunning formal mastery. The title poem conjures an imaginary play, populated by objects, that forms an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. In “Accidental Species, ” he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica by way of a heartbreaking lover’s complaint. For its thoughtfulness, range, and sheer energy, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable work from one of our most original young poets.

“Filled with dreams both romantic and funny … [Donnelly’s] self-deprecating surrealism is vivid and often touching. ” —Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun

Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

“A collection that is down-to-earth and sparkling in its self-deprecating wit . . . Osherow’s poems cast a magical light on whatever she beholds.” —Library Journal

In With a Moon in Transit, Jacqueline Osherow has given us her most accomplished poetry to date. Integrating the strengths of her earlier work—humor, honesty, artifice, testimony—into compelling poems of great vigor and charm, she combines the often antithetical impulses of lyric and narrative verse. The result is an aesthetic largely her own, one that permits Osherow to treat emotionally charged events and elaborate ideas with remarkable control.

Osherow’s observations are by turns gossipy, grand, sober, and hilarious. She sustains a disarming tone and manages to assimilate elements of both high and popular culture without apparent strain. While firmly rooted in the Hebrew Bible, her verse is also informed by authors as various as Dante and Dickinson. Yet for all that these poems are alive to the literary past, they remain sensitive to the rhythms of conversation and the tones of everyday speech. Osherow’s poems are composed with great clarity and rigor, but they never cease to sound casually spoken.

“Marked by an inimitable anecdotal expansiveness and uncompromising control, Jacqueline Osherow’s poems are among the most ambitious being written.” —Mark Strand, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

“Abundant in whimsy, philosophical speculation, and earthly affections, Jacqueline Osherow’s poems inhabit their forms with insouciance and wit . . . Whether in mourning or celebration, hers is a voice of dazzling confidence, and humane and generous wisdom.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems

With a Moon in Transit

Tony Sanders

The prize-winning poet and author of Partial Eclipse continues his investigation of urban metaphysical pathos in this collection.

Transit Authority is made up of three sequences that mark the early and late junctures of the twentieth century: the first, a series of poems that investigate the early part of the century; the second, meditations based on the 1930s photographs by Berenice Abbott; and the third, “Reckoning,” in which, with spare lyricism, Sanders meditates on where this century has brought us.

Sanders looks with rueful intrigue at a landscape inundated with near misses and has-beens. While it is tempting to turn away from the common predicament, his poems quietly urge us to keep looking. As the poet concludes, though “things aren’t what they should be according to the map . . . we have to press on in search of our bearings.”