FIELD POETRY SERIES

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RANDOM SYMMETRIES:
The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews

This posthumous volume brings together the poems of Tom Andrews, whose untimely death in 2001 cut off a career marked by early achievement and remarkable innovation. It comprises two previously published books (The Brother's Country and The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle), two unpublished manuscripts (25 Short Films About Poetry and The Temptation of Saint Augustine), and closes with two late uncollected poems. The willingness to experiment, to explore the borders between poetry and other art forms, including film, novel, and memoir, is everywhere in this dazzling text.

Marianne Boruch
MOSS BURNING

A remarkable collection, astonishing in its brave intelligence, its deadpan humor, its highly charged, vital music. Through her investigations of a remembered Catholic childhood, of the delights and challenges of domestic life, of the varieties of midwestern landscape, Marianne Boruch weaves a brilliant meditation on the intersections of the visible and the invisible worlds.

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

There simply isn't anything, anywhere, that is quite like the crazy, painful, wildly funny and oddly inexorable work of Russell Edson, the most extraordinary American prose poet of the twentieth century. This volume gathers his best work from seven collections over thirty years.

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
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

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

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

Timothy Kelly grew up in Cleveland and contemplated careers in medicine and rock music before settling on his double vocation as poet and physical therapist, based in Olympia, Washington. He writes about his work, his family, his memories of growing up, and the natural area in which he lives and often hikes. The human body, in all its manifestations and meanings, forms the natural center of his poetic vision.

Jon Loomis
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

Jon Loomis's new 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

Things happen in Vanitas Motel: a funeral, a fistfight, an outburst at a poetry reading. Its poems are surreal parables, at once funny and dark, sensual and deeply serious. Their revealed subjects are loss, art, illness and desire. Vanitas Motel is the first collection by Jon Loomis, and the winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize.

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 her third collection, Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically superb. The book includes three long sequences based on art and artifact in various stages of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center, the site-specific art installation that gives the book its title and impetus. Attracting charged material as a lightning field attracts lightning, the poems reference narrative but move beneath and beyond it through a restless and rewarding insistence on making and remaking, on seeing by degrees and seeing whole.

Dennis Schmitz
ABOUT NIGHT: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS

Since his first book Dennis Schmitz has provoked praise, delight, and amazement among his readers. His complex, energetic poems, diving fearlessly into the physical world in pursuit of spiritual meanings, have proved rich and rewarding to those who have encountered them.

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.

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 has selected from the best of his previous collections, in some cases making substantial revisions, and has 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.