Alice James Books imprint: 52 books

In the aftermath of best-selling Here, Bullet, Brian Turner deftly illuminates existence as both easily extinguishable and ultimately enduring. These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

“…the kind of union of passion and wit that we have been looking for ever since the metaphysicals turned to John Dryden… The best lines are white-hot and there is a priceless honesty.”—John Updike“…a beautiful book in all ways—the conduct of it, and the salty, learned voice…”—Barry Spacks“Sometimes she lets the wild take over—and win.”—Great Speckled Bird

Ruth Whitman has recreated the journal that Tamsen Donner lost on her nightmarish journey to California in 1846. With a grant from the National Endowment, Whitman traveled along the route of the Donner party, keeping her own diary and watching the American landscape unfold as it did to the eyes of a...

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers....

"All the poems are about survival. Patricia Cumming speaks with unblinking carefulness." -New: American and Canadian Poetry

"Donald Revell writes with a drunken equipoise among the weedy flowers and bees of roadside museums and vacant churches. . . .[Here] are poems that border the hereafter and revive the child's play of prophecy. What miraculous assistance they provide!"—Dean YoungDonald Revell pushes boundaries...

Gloryland re-examines motherhood, death, birth, and rebirth, drawing on religious and secular creation myths to enact a feminist religion. Bold, rich lyrics reveal the grand in the domestic, claiming the physical as an essential part of the -female experience, declaring that to live fully in the body is the truest, bravest, and most glorious form of worship.

"In Cecily Parks' beautiful poems, the natural world teeters between being and seeming—the seeming a simulacrum projected onto the world by a mind's yearning, taxonomy and dread. Deeply metaphysical, and deeply attentive to our spiritual as well as physical uses and abuses of nature, O'Nights implicates...

"Juxtaposing our wars, our disturbed cities, our flawed policies with the erotic and domestic, Michael Broek creates, in Refuge/es, a stunning love song for our troubled nation and world. Consisting primarily of three sequences, this audaciously original first book is actually one complex collage...

Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker’s unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion, and personal responsibility.

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

"Lee's poems are like places. I enter them and he talks to me there. I hear his voice. The rare quality is how full these places seem of things and feelings but without crowding me. Rather they make me believe I'm really there. I like Lees poems a lot." -Dick Lourie

These political poems employ humor to challenge the cultural norms of American society, focusing primarily on racism, social injustices and inequality. Simultaneously, the poems take on a deeper, personal level as it carefully deconstructs identity and the human experience, piecing them together with...

"Hawley's spare, emblematic poetry is like the stones she so often writes about: monumental, enduring, clean and insistently its own shape. Stripped to the bone her poems catalogue the minutiae of moments that, except in poetry, have no form." —Jane Barnes, Dark Horse