"Determined to extract pleasure and meaning from every experience, Hiestand looks for magic properties in familiar objects. Staring out the window of her apartment, she advises herself: 'but be alert / as though you were seeing all new, / as Balboa awakened by the Pacific.' Particularly in the impressive book's first section, the poems share the mechanisms of fairy tales: 'The last summer we lived in a picture book,' Hiestand says, and asks in all seriousness, 'Is our cat in heaven?'; just as naturally, she refers to Dante or the philosophy of Spinoza. By the middle of the volume, princes depart from their storybook models and desert their maidens. In one of the final poems, 'Birthday Party,' enchanting imagery suddenly produces a forceful political statement, all the more potent given the innocence of the poet's vision. Hiestand manipulates words with uncommon playfulness and precision, and her enjoyment is highly infectious. Jorie Graham selected this first collection for the National Poetry Series." —Publishers Weekly

A childhood shaped by her zestful aunt Nan Dean of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; a girlhood spent in Oak Ridge ("Atom City"), Tennessee; a journey north to a seedy seaside town where a stripper named Angela the Upside-Down Girl is her first neighbor—these are only some of the geographical and spiritual journeys in this dazzling, seriously funny guide to the art of being human.

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude.

Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

From an award-winning poet, a new collection in which the political and the personal converge in innovative and beautiful ways. In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

A stirring portrait exploring the intersections of three generations of an Othodox Jewish family. David Birnbaum is a middle-aged man at the crossroads—of youth and old age, of Othodox Judaism and assimilation, of the well-worn past and an uncertain future. He is also at the dramatic center of this sensitive, often funny chronicle of three generations of a family straining to hold together in the face of changing cultures and shifting fortunes. Throughout this extraordinary book, David struggles with the mixed loyalties he has felt since childhood and that continue to haunt his present and future. Capturing the hopes and conflicts of a Jewish family, from its most assimilated to its most Orthodox members, Like Never Before exudes on every page a poignancy and truthfulness that will print themselves indelibly on readers' minds.

At the start of Bearing the Body, Nathan Mirsky learns that his older brother has died in San Francisco, apparently murdered after years of aimlessness. On the spur of the moment, Nathan leaves his job as a medical resident and heads west from Boston to learn what he can about Daniel's death. His father, Sol—a quiet, embittered Holocaust survivor—insists on coming along. Piecing together Daniel's last days, Nathan and Sol are forced to confront secrets that have long isolated them from each other and to being a long process of forgiveness.

In his critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough. Narrated by her neighbour, Edith's tragedies unfold: a tough childhood, a mother's death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children, forever enraged. She is a woman who sacrifices everything in the name of family—until she is forced to reclaim her freedom in one dramatic and unexpected gesture. Breathtaking and truthful, The Tie That Binds is a powerful tribute to the demands of rural life, and to the tenacity of the human spirit.

A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition. Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.

Strange Relation, Daniel Hall's second book of poems, opens with a childhood memory of a fogbound fireworks display in Provincetown, and closes with the poet traveling in Asia, overtaken by a love letter "half in Chinese, half in hard-won/English." "Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation," said Wallace Stevens, and this defiant celebration, elegiac and erotic, meditative and wild, is grounded by a conjunction of losses, "a hard dearth, and another one gathering."