The Late Parade Poems

A debut collection that welcomes a new modernist aesthetic for the twenty-first century. Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power. "The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide. Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."

Straightforward and precise, these poems, almost exclusively in narrative form, beckon the reader with their immediacy. Gracefully confirming the inextricable links between self and family, Hirsch, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Wild Gratitude , is, at his best, captivating, transforming tremendous respect for and fascination with his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing into enlightened, richly detailed verse that artfully side-steps sentimentality.

A groundbreaking collection from one of our most acclaimed young poets about personal loss and consumer anxiety in the American suburbs. In the wake of the critical success of The Late Parade (“poetry as lush as any of Keats’s odes,” New York Times Book Review), Adam Fitzgerald’s George Washington follows in the documentary poetics tradition of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. These frenetic poems channel the proper names and product placement in the suburban New Jersey memescape of the 1990s. Fitzgerald’s catalogs—a world of video games and love songs, entertainment franchises and widespread anomie—seek out the proxies by which millions now live their most intimate experiences, examining everything from sexuality and faith to the spectacles of shopping and mass shootings. The poet’s memory may prove as fungible as the once-ubiquitous VHS cassette, but these queer poems form a hypertext archive of life as it’s packaged and purveyed. Fitzgerald’s “primal vision” (Harold Bloom), so wildly alive in The Late Parade, metamorphoses into an exhilarating exploration of Americana’s dark origins.

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief and love. Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry. Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I’m 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love—even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise. The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl’s gently racist question. Whether celebrating the visionaries—the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets—or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father’s Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

The second collection from Canadian poet and filmmaker Shane Book. At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book’s Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism. Harnessing techniques of the cinematic and audio arts, Book’s poems splice, sample, collage, and jump-cut language from an array of sources, including slave narratives, Western philosophy, hip hop lyrics, and the diaries of plantation owners. The book’s anchoring series contains an apocryphal narrative grounded in the journey of the Middle Passage and an older mythic history from the West African epic of Sundiata. Here is a world poet of the Sonic Global South sheathed in a Northern Hemispheric glow suit, high “on Coltrane, on Zeus” but also on the old and new schools of Descartes, M.I.A., Cecil Taylor, Gilbert Ryle, Freud, and Jay-Z, among others — or as one poem puts it, the "aural truths."

Originally published in 1898, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is a poem written by Oscar Wilde. Composed after his release from the titular prison whilst he was in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, the poem deals with the hanging at Reading Goal of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a 30-year-old man who was imprisoned for cutting his wife's throat. Within the poem, Wilde narrates the execution in full and explores the brutal nature of the punishment that all inmates must endure. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of the most popular in London during the 1880s and 1890s. Well-known for his sharp wit and extravagant attire, Wilde was a proponent of aestheticism and wrote in a variety of forms including poetry, fiction, and drama. He was famously imprisoned for homosexual acts from 1895 to 1897 and died at the age of 46, just three years after his release. Other notable works by this author include: “Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890), “Salome” (1891), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). Ragged Hand is proudly republishing this classic poem now complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.