EAMON GRENNAN, Poetry: Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf)
The Retrospective Collection By Eamon Grennan, Whose Poetry “Illuminates, Clarifies, And Directs Our Gaze Toward What It Is We Love But Often Overlook” (The New Yorker). Out of Sight collects poetry from across Eamon Grennan’s decorated career, with generous selections from his seven previous books and more than thirty new poems. This is the definitive book by one of contemporary poetry’s most sensuous and shimmering voices.

TONY HOAGLAND, Poetry: Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty (Graywolf)
In Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland is deep inside a republic that no longer offers reliable signage, in which comfort and suffering are intimately entwined, and whose citizens gasp for oxygen without knowing why. With Hoagland’s trademark humor and social commentary, these poems are exhilarating for their fierce moral curiosity, their desire to name the truth, and their celebration of the resilience of human nature.

MAJOR JACKSON, Poetry: Holding Company (Norton)

ILYA KAMINSKY, Poetry: Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins)
In The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the 20th century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Alongside renowned masters, there will be many new discoveries—internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English. In conjunction with the organization Words Without Borders—an online haven for international literature and an ally to writers all over the world—Ecco presents a paperback anthology that will surely serve as a canonical touchstone in the field of poetics, bringing voices from afar to American readers.

As aptly put in Words Without Borders’ mission statement, this collection also serves as part of “the ultimate aim to introduce exciting international writing to the general and literary public—travelers, teachers, students, publishers, and a new generation of eclectic readers—by presenting international literature not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world.”

TED KOOSER, Children's Book: Bag in the Wind, Illustrated by Barry Root (Candlewick Press)
One cold morning in early spring, a bulldozer pushes a pile of garbage around a landfill and uncovers an empty plastic bag—a perfectly good bag, the color of the skin of a yellow onion, with two holes for handles—that someone has thrown away. Just then, a puff of wind lifts the rolling, flapping bag over a chain-link fence and into the lives of several townsfolk—not that all of them notice. Renowned poet Ted Kooser fashions an understated yet compassionate world full of happenstance and connection, neglect and care, all perfectly expressed in Barry Root's tender illustrations. True to the book's earth-friendly spirit, it is printed on paper containing 100 percent recycled post-consumer waster and includes an author's note on recycling plastic bags.

RICK MOODY, Fiction: The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown and Company)
Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won’t sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he wins a job to write a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror movie, “The Crawling Hand.” He tells therein of the United States’s long-awaited manned mission to Mars. Of the nine intrepid astronauts, only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash landing in the Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or may simply be an infectious killing machine. It crawls through a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally—a dystopia of lowlife and laughable alternative lifestyles. The Four Fingers of Death proves again why Rick Moody has been called, “one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America” (The Wall Street Journal).

PAUL MULDOON, Poetry: Maggot (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) (Faber & Faber UK Cover at right)

BENJAMIN PERCY, Novel: The Wilding (Graywolf Press)
"Not your father's eco-novel. In compelling, image-driven prose, Ben Percy confounds the old polarities about wilderness and development by sending three generations of men into a doomed canyon, and letting so much hell break lose we can't tell the heros from the villians—which feels exactly right. This is a dark, sly, honest, pleasing, slip-under-your-skin-and-stay-there kind of a book." —Pam Houston (Catalog Copy to come)

ROBIN ROBERTSON, Poetry: The Wrecking Light (Picador)
Robin Robertson's fourth collection is, if anything, an even more intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book than "Swithering", winner of the Forward Prize. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary: the poet's gaze - whether on the natural world or the details of his own life - is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry and disarming humour. Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic (and at times horrific) retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems in "The Wrecking Light" pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of the human. Ghosts sift through these poems - certainties become volatile, the simplest situations thicken with strangeness and threat - all of them haunted by the pressure and presence of the primitive world against our own, and the kind of dream-like intensity of description that has become Robertson's trademark. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep which confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today.

TOMAZ SALAMUN, Poetry: Blue Tower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

PHILIP SCHULTZ, Poetry: The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of failure and loss, in his previous book particularly, make him a poet for our times, a poet who can write “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair.” Yet he remains oddly undaunted: “sometimes, late at night / we, my happiness and I, reminisce / lifelong antagonists / enjoying each other’s company.” The God of Loneliness is a volume to cherish, from “one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest” (Tony Hoagland), and it will be an essential addition to the history of American poetry.

CHARLES SIMIC, Poetry: Master of Disguise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam & Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky.

TERESE SVOBODA, Nonfiction: Pirate Talk or Mermalade (Dzanc Books)

NATASHA TRETHEWEY, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation (U of GA Press)

BRIAN TURNER, Poetry: Phantom Noise (Alice James)
“With courage and an uncommon willingness to see the world as it actually is, Brian Turner returns in Phantom Noise with a bullet-borne language in which helicopters hover like spiders over a film of water. His poem Al-A’imma Bridge alone proves his mastery, and joins him to the tradition of Wilfred Owen and David Jones, for he is their descendent, his poetic gifts detonated into a spray of lyric force that will mark what is possible in poetry for years to come, a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de Coeur to the republic of conscience.” ―Carolyn Forché

C.K. WILLIAMS, Poetry: Wait (FSG)
Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by “the conscience-beast, who harries me,” and “riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly.” Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams’s consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style.