FIELD POETRY SERIES

(Click on covers for further information)

RANDOM SYMMETRIES:
The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews

"The leaves just burst from his fingers. He had that odd stance to the world and its language that made whatever he wrote seem new and undiscovered, like treasure hauled up into the sealight from the ocean floor."
--Charles Wright

Marianne Boruch
POEMS: NEW & SELECTED

Marianne Boruch, one of the most thoughtful and searching of contemporary poets, here draws from her four previous collections and adds a group of 25 new poems to make a volume that is truly impressive in its range and authority.

Short-listed for the 2005 Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Marianne Boruch
A STICK THAT BREAKS AND BREAKS

In this remarkable book, her fourth collection of poems, Marianne Boruch continues to explore the world around her with curiosity, wry humor, searching skepticism, and thoughtful tenderness. Her poems range widely, letting themselves be triggered, often, by quite ordinary events and people, in order to launch themselves into unpredictable questions and considerations.

Ralph Burns
GHOST NOTES
Winner of the 2000 FIELD Poetry Prize

In his deeply innovative and beautifully human Ghost Notes, Ralph Burns explores the vivid relation between American jazz and American poetry. His book embodies the movement of jazz. In the long title poem he plays wide open, without a mute, as Red Allen advises. The result is inclusive and exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening and opening.

Killarney Clary
BY COMMON SALT

Killarney Clary's spare and lucid prose poems reduce the contemporary landscape to its essences and essentials, revealing the ways in which it is broken, unchartable, mysterious, and violent. Her language is unerring, her vision unique.

Mary Cornish
RED STUDIO
Winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Because Mary Cornish owns a keen, loving eye and a susceptible heart, her poems can braid together sight and feeling so as to produce a delicacy rarely found in contemporary poetry. She takes us by the hand and leads us into rooms of wonder."
--Billy Collins

Russell Edson
THE TUNNEL

"The Tunnel is a magnificent book. The microscopic precision and intuitive leaps evident throughout the book confirm that Edson is not merely an offbeat original but a profound contemporary poet deserving of wider recognition."
--Rain Taxi

Angie Estes
CHEZ NOUS

"With glamour's grammar and a vision rich in historical insight, Angie Estes has written a brilliant, evocative book. Picture a green glass vial tucked between the pillows of a diva's breasts 'to keep the cognac warm.' Chez Nous is at once crystal and cognac--flacon and spirit--and the singular, pure-pitched notes crossing so assuredly between them."
--Linda Bierds

Angie Estes
ENCHANTEE
Winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Award

"This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh surprise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read."
--Langdon Hammer

Angie Estes
PAROLE

"Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet."
—Stephanie Burt

Angie Estes
TRYST
Finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

"Her timing and her ever-inhibited instinct for poetic shape are the triumphs of a first-rate musical intelligence. Angie Estes is Fred Astaire and Ginger too: backwards in high heels, forward on rollerskates, never have classy and sexy been better matched."
--Linda Gregerson

Angie Estes
VOICE-OVER
Winner of the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Angie Estes' stunning new collection of poems is a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page of this rich, compelling, and essential new book of poetry."
--David St. John

Jean Gallagher
START

"Jean Gallagher plunges us into the mystery-shrouded chthonic rites of Demeter and Persephone in a stunning postmodern Homeric hymn, stepping into the company of other reinventors of the ancient myths like H.D., Anne Carson, and Louise Gluck. We're ungrounded by these poems, cast among the mysteries and ecstacies."
—Bruce Beasley

Jean Gallagher
STUBBORN
Winner of the 2005 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Gallagher looks past the aesthetic dimensions of Medieval and Renaissance paintings--the subjects of the poems here--to the Biblical events they depict, and past those as well to their human meanings. She shows us how it feels for the human and the holy to interact."
--Mark Jarman

Beckian Fritz Goldberg
EGYPT FROM SPACE

"Beckian Fritz Goldberg energizes and advances the prose poem with her charged and often heartbreaking tales of death and the vulnerability of the body. She moves freely from surrealism to fabulism to meditations, from the waking to dreaming life, from detachment to engagement, with compassion and humor and grace. Her poems contain panoramic sweeps and minutia the rest of us miss. This is a truly amazing book."
—Denise Duhamel

Beckian Fritz Goldberg
LIE AWAKE LAKE
Winner of the 2004 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Lie Awake Lake is made out of a brilliance of thought, of heart, and of language that we find only in the truest poetry. This fierce homage to the body and to the spirit reminds me of Ettie Hillesum's letters from the transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands in 1942-43; it is as relentless and unmediated as if it was letters or diaries, but it is song--come to give us human animals pleasure and to help us endure."
--Jean Valentine

James Haug
RIVERAIN
Winner of the 2017 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Haug is a master at making the mundane magical and the mystical common. His plainspoken encounters with the denizens of the river valley never succumb to the burden of expectations, for they, like the river, are joyfully unpredictable and alive."
—William Waltz

Dennis Hinrichsen
KUROSAWA'S DOG
Winner of the 2008 FIELD Poetry Prize

"The poems in this collection--born out of father and Iowa and desert, born out of the burning and visionary places--possess a gravitational pull so powerful I can feel the great bards of the language (Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop) craning over my shoulder to read."
--John Rybicki

Timothy Kelly
THE EXTREMITIES

"The Extremities rescues from the drab columns of textbooks the clinical language of tendons and bones, unlocking an enormous, previously unguessed range of metaphor and reference. The poems are unique. Their brilliant engagement with the concrete and objective brings the inner life to light with a crystalline concision for which I had not known I hungered. This is a wonderful book, something truly new."
--Christopher Howell

Timothy Kelly
STRONGER
Winner of the 1999 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Stronger is one of the strongest things I've read in ages. Timothy Kelly writes poems rich with music, intelligence and compassion. They make great moves, which should be no surprise, since they often rise from the deep terrain of the physical form, the body, into all the layerings and elevations of thought and existence."
--Naomi Shihab Nye

Jon Loomis
THE MANSION OF HAPPINESS

"In conversation with past selves and the incessant pull of time, these direct and honest poems take place in the small moments of gratitude as well as those biting moments of sarcasm and denial. Jon Loomis is a poet unafraid to praise life while still leaning in and saying that dark thing that circles the chest. Smart, buoyant, and refreshingly self-aware, these poems are real and necessary."
—Ada Limón

Jon Loomis
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

Jon Loomis's second collection of poems visits big subjects by way of the commonplace. While The Pleasure Principle is full of surprises, both narrative and metaphoric, it is more than anything a humane and thoughtful exploration of the human condition: passion, mortality, cross-dressing, time, tourism, art, the shifty nature of reality, and, always considered in Loomis's work, the unknowable absolute.

Jon Loomis
VANITAS MOTEL
Winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Jon Loomis's grave, intelligent, mysterious poetry takes you under your own skin, into your own soul, 'only visible in / silhouette dark / planet circling its small / red sun.'"
--Jean Valentine

J. W. Marshall
MEANING A CLOUD
Winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Watchful, ruefully comic, alight with playful lyric precision and a plainspoken rhetorical elegance, Meaning a Cloud is not only a record of one body's recovery from injury but a rendering of the mind's companion journey: pained, stubbornly amused, at last arriving at a state of visionary completion. It is a sorrowing, hopeful book, all of a crucial, embracing piece."
--Susan Hutton

Carol Moldaw
THE LIGHTNING FIELD
Winner of the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize

"In Carol Moldaw's precise, objective poems, a Parnassian art is reborn. These poems keep a remarkable balance between inner and outer worlds, between dream-life and stern logic. They are works of art."
--Rosanna Warren

Bern Mulvey
DEEP SNOW COUNTRY
Winner of the 2013 FIELD Poetry Prize

"At times elegiac, at times bitterly funny, these poems are held together by Mulvey's rigorous technique, his moral vision, and a belief that art might help us assimilate loss and transform even the most dreadful experience into something valuable and lasting."
— Steve Gehrke

Mark Neely
BEASTS OF THE HILL
Winner of the 2011 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Mark Neely works in small spaces where the slightest moves have seismic consequences. The acoustics are sensational, and the modest and laconic gestures of the poems are also vehicles for the flights and fugues of a 'glorious attack.' Neely has the chops and the voice to sing the blues."
--Bruce Smith

Mark Neely
DIRTY BOMB

"How to explain the rush of joy and consolation these brilliant, savvy poems afford? To be sure, sheer mindfulness—and there's mindfulness in abundance here—is a comfort in an age of oblivion and denial. And the music is terrific: Mark Neely has a very fine ear. But something larger is at stake as well, something about the noticing that makes it matter: I can find no better name for it than heart. Open these pages. Take heart."
—Linda Gregerson

Timothy O'Keefe
THE GOODBYE TOWN
Winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize

"O’Keefe's poems are not Time, but another thing that flies—grace, soul, fleeting love, the furious imagination of a poet so attendant to his art as to be contemporary without simply resorting to novelty. Here are poems that vary the existing patterns without abandoning them, that engage sensation without being simply sensational, that elegize the province of what is foregone without being elegies."
--D. A. Powell

Carol Potter
SOME SLOW BEES
Winner of the 2014 FIELD Poetry Prize

"In her tsunami-sized drive toward 'the act of knowing,' Potter alternates between bullet-like declaratives, loopy wandering, and mad headlong propulsion; the reader senses anything at all might turn up and be transformed."
—Ellen Doré Watson

Mary Ann Samyn
MY LIFE IN HEAVEN
Winner of the 2012 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Private but not claustral, personal but not narrative, Samyn's achievement is as purposeful and deliberate as the need to survive the end of things. Observation, insight, tenderness, and humor accompany the poet and her readers from heartbreak-unto-death to afterlife-on-earth in this book. I rejoice in its misery, its finery, its charm, and its wisdom."
—Kathy Fagan

Dennis Schmitz
ABOUT NIGHT: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS

"What a rich, complex poetry this is--comic and compassionate, ironic but grimly respectful, participated in."
--Tony Hoagland

"Schmitz takes the ordinary, the tawdry, and transforms them through language into something strange, yet suddenly familiar."
--Linda Pastan

Dennis Schmitz
ANIMISM

"There is a radiant wisdom that has always infused the poetry of Dennis Schmitz, a remarkable light that is able to reflect precisely off even the most corrupted surfaces of our daily world. Since reading his very first collection, the astonishing We Weep for Our Strangeness, I have always thought of Schmitz's poems as the secular prayers of the sanest voice in an often insane world."
— David St. John

Amy Newlove Schroeder
THE SLEEP HOTEL
Winner of the 2009 FIELD Poetry Prize

"These poems rise from the other side of the mirror, from the dream establishment we check into and out of each night. These are passionate, radically beautiful poems, heartbreak hotel in somatic heaven: so inventive and freshly expressive they hand us, as if dropped from the famously extended hand of John Keats, the key to pure wonder."
--Carol Muske-Dukes

Jeffrey Skinner
CHANCE DIVINE
Winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Jeffrey Skinner has a metaphysical thirst so large and fierce and energetic that it can only slake itself in the ocean of language. And that is what it does in these amazing poems, which are amazing both for their complexity and sophistication and their buoyant clarity and immediacy."
—Vijay Seshadri

Marcia Southwick
A SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE FLYING DOG & OTHER POEMS
Winner of the 1998 FIELD Poetry Prize

High-spirited and unpredictable, Marcia Southwick's third collection is, among other things, a remarkable mirror of our place and time. With unrelenting curiosity and brio, she reflects our materialistic, shopping- obsessed, informationally-exploding, and deeply confused culture right back at us, showing us the world we live in with unflinching honesty and compassionate affection.

Kenny Williams
BLOOD HYPHEN
Winner of the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Kenny Williams is a writer of apostate, iconoclastic, and often-absurdist parables, and his poems are rendered with a formal concision that makes their tragicomic sensibility all the more resonant. This is writing that, in Robert Lowell’s words, is 'haunted, not lost.' Blood Hyphen is one of the most distinctive and self-possessed debut collections that I have read in a very long time."
—David Wojahn

Jonah Winter
AMNESIA
Winner of the 2003 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Jonah Winter resides in the Hotel Amnesia, the Hotel of Stars--and though he's a comedian, his room is one along the corridor of the wistful, urbane dreamers: Joseph Cornell, Jean Cocteau. Anais Nin, Charles Simic. At the heart of his method is the list, almost verbless: his marvelous catalogues place unlikely things side by side, creating within the frame of the poem the tantalizing windows of the city of dream."
--Mark Doty

Franz Wright
ILL LIT: SELECTED & NEW POEMS

Franz Wright was recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation even before he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. His voice and sensibility are distinctive, and the places he goes are ones where not many writers are able or willing to venture. The dark world of his poems, which face many of the hardest truths we must learn to live with, is lit by humor, tenderness, compassion, and honesty. For this edition, the poet selected from the best of his previous collections, in some cases making substantial revisions, and added his newest poems. The resulting collection is exciting in its breadth, consistency, depth, and distinction.

The best of new American poetry, in handsomely designed editions

Poetry from around the globe in extraordinary translations by some of our finest poets

Inventive anthologies for discriminating readers. Great for textbook adoption too.

Information about our annual poetry book contest.