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Destruction Myth
poems by Mathias Svalina

To read a "Creation Myth" on Poetry Daily, click here.

“In the beginning, everyone looked like Larry Bird. In the beginning, there was a rotting pig corpse. Everyone wanted to fight to the death. There was a hole in the basement floor. And a bunny with a broken leg. There were ghosts. Evildoers. A gun. Bacon. Cologne. A pencil. In these inventive, often deeply unnerving poems, Mathias Svalina offers us a string of forty-four creation myths and one longer, unsettling destruction myth. The result is a sonically complex, breathtakingly witty book, a collection of poems that surprises first with its wildly orchestrated clamor of narratives then, on reflection, surprises all over again with its intelligence and insight into the many ways we tell stories, the many means by which we imagine ourselves participating in them. This is an ambitious, brilliant first book.” 
—Kevin Prufer  

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Sum of Every Lost Ship
poems by Allison Titus

Click here to view Former Automotive Plant on Verse Daily.

This debut collection of poems is both fascinated with and distracted by our impending endings and leave-takings, the loneliness of animals, and “how the histories of things eat.” These poems populate empty parking lots and seaside pawnshops and depart from a port at Deadhorse, Alaska. A narwhal gives cryptic advice to those requiring guidance on eulogies, arctic travel, and extracting minerals from ghosts. Allison Titus presents us with quiet meditations on how absence often remains fixed as longing, a red thread knotted at the wrist.

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Horse Dance Underwater
poems by Helena Mesa

To see Rigoberto Gonzalez's review of Horse Dance Underwater in the El Paso Times, click here.
To see a review of Horse Dance Underwater in Midwest Book Review, click here.

“The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air.  By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects.”
 — Michael Collier

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Trust
poems by Liz Waldner
Winner of the 2008 Open Book Competition, selected by the Open Book Editorial Committee

To see Liz Waldner's poem "The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed" in The New Yorker, click here.

Click here to see a book review on Believer Magazine.
Click here to see a book review on Common Line.

“Liz Waldner's Trust is a book I’ve been waiting to read for years. Political in the extreme, deliciously crafted, as menacing as it is hysterical, as intellectually sophisticated as it is laugh-out-loud funny, this book ought to be written in silver pen on bathroom stalls, sent as gold records to outer space,  or  written in gin on a  glass-top table  in  your
favorite karaoke bar. Slip a copy into your shoulder-bag and take it wherever you go.”
— Kazim Ali, author of The Fortieth Day

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Self-Portrait with Crayon
poems by Allison Benis White
Winner of the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Robert Hill Long

Click here to see an interview with Allison Benis White
To see Robin Ekiss's review of Self-Portrait with Crayon on The Rumpus.net, click here.
To see sample poems from Self-Portrait with Crayon on SHARKFORUM, click here.

“An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting.”
— Cole Swensen, author of Ours and The Book of A Hundred Hands

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In A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, Patrick Michael Finn writes of the disappearing Midwest, of Joliet, Illinois, and its factories and assembly lines and rail yards leading out of town. The tension and violence that mark this fierce portrait of urban decay are tempered by Finn's insistence that the people in this world endure. Finn's voice is striking, rich with the poetry of lives measured by time clocks and fistfights, and his novella seethes with dark and fascinating magic.
-- Michael Jaime-Becerra, author of Every Night is Ladies' Night

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"I've never read anything quite like A Momentary Jokebook. It is wonderfully intelligent, terribly funny, thought provoking, often wise and always compelling. Think Milan Kundera meets South Park. What unifies this wide ranging work is Jayson Iwen's fresh approach to form and language, and his ability to surprise us and turn us on our heads."
-- Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance

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Using the South’s lush landscapes—a Carolina lake retreat, a grove of magnolia trees—as their settings, these poems, in a crisp and accessible voice, celebrate family, talk frankly about loss, desire, and healing, mourn for those no longer with us, and find, in the mundane, that which is truly marvelous and transcendent. Linda Lee Harper’s latest book is a vital contribution to the literature of a distinctly 21st-century, easily recognizable South. Why these poems? Writes Harper, “The sun will burn itself out / and the only thing in a hurry / is me, painting it all in // as fast as I can/before the sun blinks / and day vanishes almost / like an image on plasma screens // failing to erase completely, digital / ghost, visual echo, intaglio, light.”

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To See The Earth
poems by Philip Metres

"Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that's Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres's superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another - in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres - they're as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree 'burning into its name.' These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed." -- Maura Stanton

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The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants
poems by Bern Mulvey

“Bern Mulvey’s The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants is a study in intimacy—an intimacy conspiring across cultures, languages, families, and landscapes despite histories of wars, racism, and difference. In our time of global connections, Mulvey has created a poetry of negotiation, of tender but insistent communication. This is a poetry of witness without the distance of the spectator. Complicated because implicated, the voice in these poems speaks with profound precision because where it stands just happens to be where we are standing.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

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Ordering the Storm is an invaluable resource for poets and creative writing classrooms, offering a diversity of suggestions and opinions on the process of assembling a book of poems.

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