Terrapin Books: 23 books

In the earnest and beautiful Travel Notes from the River Styx, Susanna Lang peers into the tiny mirrors of a river’s current, the mirror her father cannot see himself in, the rearview mirror in which she spies sandhill cranes on an afternoon drive as she interrogates the natural and, at times, unnatural...

Like “sunlight stroking the birds’ throats so it comes out as song,” Ann Fisher-Wirth’s graceful and sturdy lines unsettle the seemingly familiar. A writer of moral gravity, her distilled attentiveness presses against our all-too-common ambivalence and detachment from the ordinary world. Whether...

How do we move forward after enormous loss? Perhaps like the lightning-struck tree, “half of it shorn of leaves the other half full, standing, / swaying….”  In these beautiful, intimate poems spoken from the heart of grief, the speaker urges herself not to flinch, “letting the knife settle...

If you want to learn how to live on this planet, read How to Wear This Body, a lyric and riveting book uniquely suited to help us survive the hard facts of our existence and to do so with wit and courage, intelligence and grace. Yes, everything is coming to an end. / The way it does each hour of the...

Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood—love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother’s bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the “bluewords” that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in...

Departing from the more whimsical tone of A Glossary of Chickens, Whitehead's last book, this new collection explores, among other subjects, childlessness in middle age, the vicissitudes of divorce, the pain of parental aging, and the mystery of mortality. Laden with regret and misgiving, but illuminated by...

Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab...

In these sparkling poems, Diane Lockward takes life as it comes and finds nourishment in it all: succulence of the peach, redolence of the pear, the "green grape of sorrow." I love these poems for their craft, sensuality and energy. Like high-wire acts of language and imagination, they almost...

"Cognizant of loss but always celebratory, Lockward's poems are irreverent, ravenous for the world, and unabashedly female. When. 'In Losing the Blues,' she writes, 'I could burn / the hands off a man,' you have no doubt that she is singing a true song." --- Kim Addonizio