The Undressing Poems

Celebrated poet Li-Young Lee returns with a breathtaking new volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love. The Undressing is a tonic for spiritual anemia; it attempts to uncover things hidden since the dawn of the world. Short of achieving that end, these mysterious, unassuming poems investigate the human violence and dispossession increasingly prevalent around the world, as well as the horrors the poet grew up with as a child of refugees. Lee draws from disparate sources, including the Old Testament, the Dao De Jing, and the music of the Wu Tang Clan. While the ostensive subjects of these layered, impassioned poems are wide-ranging, their driving engine is a burning need to understand our collective human mission.

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity. Marketing Plans: o National advertising o National media campaign o National and regional author appearances o Advance reader copies o Course adoption mailing Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.

"Forgive my bluntness, but...Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems. Devastating, comic, inventive, weird, dangerous, smart as hell. I could talk about the diction sometimes glass and sometimes bouquet. Or the syntax jagged here, balletic there. Or the metaphors, good lord. But the bottom line is that when reading the poems in A GUIDE TO UNDRESSING YOUR MONSTERS, one after the next, I kept saying to myself, probably twisting my face a little bit or squirming in my seat, "Goddamn, Sam Sax can write some poems." Ross Gay

In the sensibilities of a discerning few James Broughton has for years occupied a special place comparable of Cocteau or Keaton, Satie or Sitwell. As poet, film-maker, and playwright he has graced the San Francisco scene through its various Renaissances since 1946.

ItÍs not every book of poetry that includes an ñOde to Body Armor.î But then, itÍs not every poet whose experience in academia includes a stint at the police academy. The poems of Sarah Cortez are tough-minded, verbally supple, and often deeply (even explicitly) erotic: You want me to come/ to you each night, drop my gun belt,/ lie along your muscled length . . . And each of these fifty lyric poems (with titles such as ñRosie Working Plain Clothes,î ñLas TÕas,î and ñAttempt to Locateî) displays CortezÍs many facets: the street smarts of a law-enforcement officer (deputy constable in HoustonÍs Harris County); the bilingual vocabulary of a proud Mexican American; the coolly analytic eye of a corporate accountant (as she once was); the linguistic dexterity of a Latin teacher (another former occupation); and the frank sensuality of a strong and spirited woman. Surveying fellow officers, friends, criminals, lovers, strangers, and family members, Sarah Cortez has learned that a bullet-proof vest may, with luck, protect the body, but keeping the heart from harm is a chancier and more mysterious affair. Long after the pages of How to Undress a Cop have been turned, her unique and distinctive voice will stir the blood and haunt the memory.

Contents I. Furious Versionis II. The Interrogation This Hour And What Is Dead Arise, Go Down My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud For A New Citizen Of These United States With Ruins III. This Room And Everything In It The City In Which I Love You IV. The Waiting A Story Goodnight You Must Sing Here I Am A Final Thing V. The Cleaving

Table of Contents I. Epistle The Gift Persimmons The Weight Of Sweetness From Blossoms Dreaming Of Hair Early In The Morning Water Falling: The Code Nocturne My Indigo Irises Eating Alone II. Always A Rose III. Eating Together I Ask My Mother To Sing Ash, Snow, Or Moonlight The Life The Weepers Braiding Rain Diary My Sleeping Loved Ones Mnemonic Between Seasons Visions And Interpretations

By the winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best Book of the Year To his virtuoso collection of new poems, Tim Lilburn brings a philosopher’s mind and the eyes and ears of a marsh hawk. This series of earthy meditations makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Lilburn’s close study of goldenrod, an ice sheet, or night opens into surprising interior and subterranean worlds. Pythagoras lurks within the poplars, Socrates in stones, people fly below the ground. Elsewhere, the human presence of motels and beer parlours is ominous. Kill-site is an exploration of a human’s animal nature. Lilburn invites the reader to: “Go below the small things… then / walk inside them and you have their kindness.” Though a natural progression from Lilburn’s last book, To the River, in Kill-site, the poet moves toward a greater understanding of the human, of sacrifice.