Terrapin Books: 23 books

Open this book at random and find a trove of thrilling images and unexpected metaphors: tiny bells jingling like sins, “a cool lake of indifference,” “an impossible wheel of hunger.” Read this book beginning to end and discover a dark trajectory, the work required to integrate one’s family...

The vast and minute details that lodge within the words “my life” come forth resplendently in these poems. Jessica de Koninck is fluent in the impossible Esperanto of God and cinder blocks, Elvis and glue guns but, also, understandably haunted. Life very much includes death in her poems, the way...

Named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry as one of the best works by a northern California poet published in 2016 I love these poems, love how they sweep me along, sweep me up into the arms of the kind of longing that seems unsayable, untranslatable, impossible to...

The gorgeous poems of Michael T. Young’s The Infinite Doctrine of Water offer the rewards of deep reflection. The poet’s sharp eye and attentive ear capture the delicate light and shadow of urban life and personal memory. New York and Jersey City provide the backdrop for subtle yet incisive meditations,...

In these wise and lovely mortal ruminations Neil Carpathios, long one of my favorite poets, turns fifty, that perilous promontory from which the world starts to flicker like an old neon sign. But age just makes Carpathios pay attention all the more keenly. The joy of this book is that it makes us...

This hilarious, imaginative book packs cigarette butts, Buddhist prayer flags, a spastic colon, Leviathan jaws, and gnats reincarnating as neonatal nurses into just one poem. Others say “Yes, to grunts and drooling”; find a Zen master in a bobcat spotted while driving; and experience an epiphany...

Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham selected fifty-four poems by fifty-one poets, happily including Denise Duhamel, Jack Bedell, Mira Rosenthal, Martha Silano, Julian Stannard, Charles Harper Webb, and others. With all poets singing together, we have a rainbow of words—alive, nourishing, rich—that...

Carolyn Miller is a lyric poet of redeeming grace and intense clarity. Her poems are grounded in a sense of the marvelous, as if viewing life through a jewel, transforming the dark world of memory and desire into a luminous presence. She is a master of distilled moments. The mood of the poems in Route...

The Crafty Poet II is organized into ten sections, beginning with "Revising Your Process." That section is followed by one on "Entryways into Poems" which considers how a poet might get going with a poem and how a poet might pull in a reader with humor and enticing titles. There is...

In Leaves Surface Like Skin, Michelle Menting articulates gorgeous, strange visions of nature inflected by human interference. A forest is interrupted by a graveyard of Bob’s Big Boy statuettes; ruling cockroaches populate a nuclear fall-out film; lichen becomes litter; a horse and farrier practice...

Organized into ten sections with each devoted to a poetic concept, The Practicing Poet begins with "Discovering New Material," "Finding the Best Words," "Making Music," "Working with Sentences and Line Breaks," "Crafting Surprise," and "Achieving...

A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You’ll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic...

Why do dolls compel us so much? What are their meanings? What lessons do they have to teach us? The Doll Collection explores these questions. This wonderful anthology of poems asks us to rethink dolls. Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood. Dolls shape our thinking about the female...

What marvelous poems these are, and how complete a collection. Like a circus aerialist who makes us gasp one moment and laugh the next, the poet takes us from her immigrant father’s Macedonian roots to her own maturity, to the life of a woman who is smart and well-read yet knows her way around a...