It is impossible to imagine what American poetry in the twentieth century might look like without the magnamity of the late James Laughlin, poet and publisher of New Directions. Among Laughlin's closest friends was poet Hayden Carruth, who served as author, editor, clerk, and typist for New Directions and, at a more personal level, poetry doctor for Laughlin himself. Beside The Shadblow Tree is the meditation of one great old poet upon the death of another, upon two lives intertwined in various ways for half a century.

A promising cinema director in his long-lost youth, Hollywood mogul Gary Rivoli now finds himself at the helm of his 33rd low-budget horror flick, The Broken Man. But number 33 is posing a problem: he seems to have hired a real-life witch to build his new monster—or at least there’s something decidedly creepy about Alice White, about the new creature as it comes into being, and about Gary’s beautiful life as it slides horribly, and terrifyingly, away from him. How long can he survive in a monster movie come to life—and at what cost?

This wise and richly symphonic first novel by the award-winning author of The Coast of Good Intentions is a thoroughly contemporary family drama that hinges on a riveting medical dilemma. Dr. Henry Moss, a dedicated geneticist, happens upon a possible cure for a disease that causes rapid aging and early death in children. His discovery may hold the key to eternal youth, but exploiting it is an ethical minefield. Henry must make a painful choice: he can save the life of a critically ill boy he has grown to love—at the cost of his career—or he can sell his discovery for a fortune to match the wealth of his dot-com-rich Seattle neighbors. For help Henry turns to his close-knit family, and in their intimately detailed lives a story blossoms of unforgettable characters grappling with their own demons. Henry's wryly intelligent wife, Ilse, longs to rediscover some passion as she faces middle age and languishes in a dead-end job. Their daughter, a high school basketball star, suffers setbacks and the pangs of early love, while their sweet, hapless son drifts into adolescence. These utterly real characters inhabit a story that, in Elizabeth Berg"s words, "will move you to tears and make you laugh out loud. It will also probably make you lie in bed at night and think about things that should be thought about: medical ethics, the moral choices of everyday life, the meaning of friendship and love and compassion, the need for connection."

Reading Michael Burkard’s daring new poems is like using a highly sophisticated listening device to eavesdrop on the unconscious. The signal is clear, but what we are hearing is teasingly indeterminent. Burkard has done us the wild favor of removing the usual mediation between waking and dreaming. A melancholy and intensely lyrical voice leads us to the edge of what words can say, and we follow with curiosity and amazement. And then, somehow, the voice goes beyond what can be said.

"Pennsylvania Collection Agency, the ninth book from Michael Burkard, is comprised of poems written in 1986 but withheld from publication until now. This volume utilizes the unifying structure of a single year in the poet's life as an organizing principle. Burkard has been quietly accumulating one of the most fascinating verse biographies we have, and in this book we visit old territories in unexpectedly candid poems about alcoholism, beauty, and the poet's childhood. Burkard further emblazons the arc of theme and language that is beginning to coalesce into one of the most distinguishable formal and emotional landscapes in contemporary poetry."—David Dodd Lee.

Written as a notebook, My Secret Boat is a collage of stories, poems, dreams, and sketches. Among Burkard's subjects are childhood, the sea, family, alcoholism, love. We follow the narrator on a journey as he explores the images, characters, and incidents from his past. Identities merge and even become contrary.

Envelope of Night features an insightful foreword by the author, generous selections from five early books (the out-of-print collections In a White Light, Ruby for Grief, The Fires They Kept, Fictions from the Self and None, River) and "A Thief in the Lamp," a compelling, book-length section of previously unpublished poems that provides crucial insight into the trajectory of the development of Burkard's work. This definitive volume is an essential record of the achievements of a major American writer and a dazzling litmus of the range of the poetic mind.

Joel Brouwer writes prose poems that walk a wire of anxiety through contemporary life where "you realize you're naked under your coat, you don't remember a single line, and you'll have to go on like that, you'll have to go on and sing." And yet the pieces in Centuries are so various and unpredictable and startling, sometimes hyperbolic, often sordid. "The garage smells of turpentine and dirty magazines. The freezer hums with meat. You pour yourself an insecticide martini, scratch idly at your wart, and chit-chat with a cricket." Brouwer's universe, finally, as it springs and bristles with odd, nightmarish details and human voices, is able to circle back to a place of consolation where "A body has soft and hard parts, like a piano. Music comes from where they meet." In the end, Brouwer uses the disparate contingencies of existence like an instrument through which he can control chaos through art and language.

When she was twenty-three years old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. Unlike many aid workers, Brkic was drawn there by her family history, and although fluent in the language, she was advised to avoid letting local workers discover her ethnicity. Her passionate narrative of establishing a morgue in a small town and excavating graves at Srebenica is braided with her family’s remarkable history in what was once Yugoslavia. The Stone Fields, deeply personal and wise, asks what it takes to prevent the violent loss of life, and what we are willing to risk in the process.