Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical."

"Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems—at first—are about sexual passion . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice." —from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York’s Staten Island, moving through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts. Cate Marvin’s haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Natalie and Consuelo are like-minded individuals who live in Lava Landing, CA. When they aren’t working at The Big Cheese Plant, they get all dolled up for the racetrack, or go for a tequila float at The Big Five Four. They urgently need to get Consuelo’s father out of Purgatory: he won’t stop turning up in women’s dreams until they do. But that means a trip to Mexico, and Consuelo still hasn’t gotten over her fear of long car rides . . .

Inspired by La Lotería, a Mexican game of chance not unlike bingo, the novel is a joyous story of mamacitas and mariachis, fiestas and tupperware parties, rodeos and Miss Magma beauty contests. In ¡Caramba! the American experience emerges in a brilliant new language and landscape, both touching and dazzlingly fresh.

"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute." —from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series

"Dionisio D. Martínez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive." —Susan Hussey, Organica

In this exuberant and distinctive collection, Dionisio Martínez addresses topics as diverse as love, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, twentieth-century art and music, and the relevance of language in an age of image. Much of Martínez's private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth, in which large events—from the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow, Ed Sullivan) to the Vietnam War—seemed to move in slow motion. As an adult, the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.

In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

The young men and women who inhabit these mordantly alive stories move around—as do the stories themselves—from city to city, country to country. The characters are in and out of graduate schools, apartments, love affairs, marriages. They go from New York to London to Los Angeles, compulsively studying the facts of their own lives and the facts they can guess at in the lives of those around them, as a way, perhaps out, of their solitude, as if they could map themselves into the world. They long for perspective, permanence—truth—although what they find is often something quite different.

In a comic, disturbing, intense, coming-of age novel that takes readers from the suburbs of Milwaukee to the ruins of the old Prussian capital of Konigsberg—and introduces them to skinheads, drag queens, and international hustlers—Marcus chronicles the exploits of a young American Jew who, in an alarmingly Oblomovian fashion, is becoming physically larger and larger.

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a novel about how far we will go in order to protect our loved ones. The sound of children's speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Claire, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther. But they find it isn't so easy to leave someone you love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a foreign world to try to save his family.

By turns hilarious and heartfelt, dark and illuminative, Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea is a ground breaking collection of stories from one of the single most vital, extraordinary, and unique writers of his generation. In the heartfelt “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.