Pinko
Jen Benka

Jen Benka’s elegant and superbly crafted poems reinvigorate our notion of the lyric. Welding language from diverse spheres—military, political, legal, literary, pop—she enlists the reader to help in this renewal process, urging: “trespassers take up your tools.”

Praise for Pinko:

These poems are imperatives, invitations, if not prayers, at least expressions of faith that change is possible.— Elaine Equi

I’m a huge fan of Benka’s Pinko. It’s an anti war book, a sweet book, a powerful witnessing one. I’m all for its exact experience.— Eileen Myles

When do consequences trump protest, when does action checkmate the power of words? Jen Benka takes her cue from Audre Lorde’s famous dictum that ‘my silence will not protect me.’ Into the combine of Pinko, Benka places some of her loveliest writing, to create a fresh, optimistic and instructional book.— Kevin Killian

 

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The Whalen Poem
William Corbett

I spent the summer of 2007 reading the galleys of Philip Whalen’s Collected Poems. I was in Vermont and had the leisure to read slowly, ten or so pages a day. About halfway through the master’s poems I began to write The Whalen Poem. I kept at it until just after Halloween. No book I have written, poetry or prose, has given me the deep pleasure I felt in writing The Whalen Poem. —William Corbett

William Corbett is a poet and memoirist who lives in Boston's South End and teaches writing at MIT. He edited Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, directs the small press Pressed Wafer, and is on the advisory board of Manhattan’s CUE Art Foundation. In 2008 Hanging Loose published his book of poems Opening Day. His most recent book is an essay on the painter Albert York.

Night of Pure Breathing
Gerald Fleming

GERALD FLEMING’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely over the past thirty years. He has won numerous awards and fellowships, and between 1995 and 2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, whose archives can be found at U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. His book of poems Swimmer Climbing onto Shore appeared from Sixteen Rivers Press in 2005. He taught in the San Francisco public schools for thirty-seven years, and has published three books for teachers, the most recent of which is Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). He lives in Lagunitas, California.

Praise for Night of Pure Breathing:

“I’ve just picked myself up off the floor after reading what I don’t think I can really call ‘prose poems.’ That’s too ordinary, too usual, too expected. There is nothing here that is ordinary. And it’s not just ‘pure breathing’ either. It’s a cry, a scream, a prayer. This is an amazing collection.”—Shirley Kaufman

“Gerald Fleming has found a tone of voice in Night of Pure Breathing that allows him to write with humor about the long history of our frailties or with passion about the politics of the moment. He has mastered an American language that finds joy in the words we use and fear in the artifacts of our popular culture. His prose poems sing and tell stories, often at the very same time; they are crystal clear, pure, and deeply refreshing.”—Keith Taylor

“These dark fables, written in a language ‘born of rage,’ furiously peel back the veneer of the world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap, where a smile can get a job, and where identities are fluid and interchangeable. Many poems are set in exotic locations—Corfu, Bali, Mexico, Ukraine—but they all merge to create a discrete, elemental landscape, a poetic geography where this remarkable collection plays out. In one poem, ‘a boy and girl court each other by telling ghost stories.’ Gerald Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing is a collection that seduces the reader in just that way. Hold onto your socks; you’re in for a ride.”—Gary Young

 

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The Man Who Wrote on Water
Pablo Medina

Pablo Medina’s poetry has been called “exuberant,” “provocative,” and “nothing short of linguistic mastery.” In this, his sixth collection, he wrestles with love, God, the city, and the ever-present island of his birth. Born in Big Banana Havana, Medina grew up in Big Apple New York. Fruit, he loves fruit. He longs for Big Papaya, pink and juicy, of which he can’t get enough. He is also a novelist, translator, and essayist. He lives in Boston, in an exile surrounded by icicles, and is on faculty at Emerson College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Advanced praise for The Man Who Wrote on Water:

“The boat leaves behind a wake,/the Chinese ideogram for man.” Pablo Medina is a brilliant poet. His new book moves, with ease and anguish, from Wittgenstein to Lord Chango. The language is extraordinarily charged. The words themselves undergo desire and take action—”the poem is the lost key/to what was said,//to what was not, the back room/where we made love/before the furniture came.” Medina is the master of a taut contemporary lyricism, but he can channel the sources: the gacela, the qasida. The sacrifice of Isaac edges into “Playa Norte,” climactic poems aim to resurrect and summon the dead. Wild and playful, The Man Who Wrote On Water is lasting work.” —D. Nurkse

“Pablo Medina’s poems belong to the real world even while they move across the borders of dreams and wild imagination. They sustain a tone that’s both sophisti­cated and innocent, delivering fresh news of what it feels like to be alive and human. I love these poems for their music and vivid imagery. I love their clarity, whether evoking city or bull pasture or bedroom, or an interior landscape. I love following the poet’s surprising thought, as he delves deep into the heart and the mind and the world.” —Joan Larkin

“Each of these graceful, deeply felt and fluent poems contains the burst of an impres­sion produced by a world made primarily of people and ideas; each, via music and image, is given a shape and a language richer than words. Their effect: the universal generously crafted from the particular, again and again, as these poems written on water eddy outward to reach us all.” —Chuck Wachtel

 

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Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor
Terence Winch

Terence Winch is the author of four previous poetry collections: Boy Drinkers, The Drift of Things, The Great Indoors, and Irish Musicians/American Friends, which won an American Book Award. He has also written two story collections, Contenders and That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, which draws on his experiences as a founding member of the original Celtic Thunder, the acclaimed Irish band. His work is included in numerous anthologies, among them the Oxford Book of American Poetry and four Best American Poetry collections, and has been featured on “The Writers Almanac” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Winch is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, among other awards.

Praise for Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor:

“Terence Winch’s poems are plugged directly into real experience, and they convey the quiet authority of what is true. He writes with a sure hand and fine sense of the playful slipperiness of language.” — Billy Collins

“The title of Terence Winch’s newest collection says it all:  the wonderfully droll, self-deprecating, hard-hitting and deliciously comic narrator of these poems knows only too well what life exacts from us.  A trivial event like losing one’s watch and replacing it brings on the rueful recognition that “it ran so fast, / I had to live every day / as if it were tomorrow.” It’s a dilemma we all face. No rest for the weary! In a sequence of dazzling and poignant memory poems about love and death, friendship and family trauma, Winch once again displays his uncanny ability to take the most ordinary of incidents and endow them with radiance.  One reads Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor with a steady shock of recognition. Here WE are!” — Marjorie Perloff