Pleiades Press Books

Country House by Sarah Barber

The Poem's Country: Place and Poetic Practice. Edited by Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider.

30 Questions People Don't Ask: The Selected Poems of Inga Gaile

Bridled: Poems by Amy Meng

The Darkness Call: Essays by Gary Fincke

A Lesser Love by E. J. Koh

In Between: Poetry Comics by Mita Mahato

Among Other Things: Essays by Robert Long Foreman

Book of No Ledge by Nance Van Winckel

“Adrian C. Louis is profane, angry, and deep in love with this sad-ass world. He is the reason why I started to write poems. And he is one of the poets that I constantly re-read. He is one of my personal prophets.” — Sherman Alexie

“Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility. In her work we are propelled along by abrupt changes in perspective and dimension. I have long awaited a manuscript by her that combines her visual talents with her poetry.” – John Ashbery

"The inner lives of demons, the demonic forces of opera and ballet, a soupcon here and there of fairytale, of Moulin Rouge and Belle Epoque: Sylph offers up a vivid melange of sonic and imagistic riches, where 'silver spoons / in drawers arrange to rattle,' where everything might 'turn the air, its clotted hush, to cream.' I love the imagination at play in these poems, so gothic, so baroque: one that invites 'a hiss of white to slice a dream open,' where 'the baby / builds its own hot cave.'"

Katie Bickham’s poems, set on a Louisiana plantation from 1811 through 2005, speak through the imagined voices of slaves, masters, mistresses, servants, and children. Focused on events that take place in a single room within the plantation home, Belle Mar, she offers an unflinching portrayal of the atrocities that form an undeniable part of Louisiana’s history.

Didden’s poems take their measure from personal and geologic time, from knowledge gained through science and that attendant to the heart. With precision and craft reminiscent of Bishop, these are field notes for an earth alive and on the move: torrents, glaciers, volcanoes. Didden has a mathematician’s and a poet’s mind, gauging her life against the larger processes, imagining how, in the days before electricity, “you could mark your place in the universe / by how you fit / among the stars."

There's a deep and complicated life in this land's interior. Underneath beat a thousand fragile hearts, their sensitive, furtive gestures. Bruce Snider's version of paradise accounts for those souls, makes a haven for them amidst the roadkill and the rapeseed, among the monster trucks and holy scriptures. Nothing in Snider's America is ever lost: not love, not beauty, not the first furtive kisses of adolescent boys. In this paradise, no one form of pleasure takes dominion over the others.

Selected by Alan Michael Parker Beneath the wit of these poems—and wit there is in dizzying plenty—there are sobering concerns, skeptical and philosophical quandaries that, almost as if by mistake, make themselves felt.. Source is, no doubt, the stake—'source' ... this adhesive thing that is Flaherty's, given to us in unsparing generosity, in serious play—not source exactly, but resource inexactly, in poems that are 'brilliant / without all the fuss of brilliance.

Moving seamlessly between the sixties-to-mid-seventies and the present, between a sensuously lived life and a deep sense of mortality, Kevin Cark's poems perform the magic his passion dictates and his intelligence won't quite allow: an "open / closure, the kind that improvs its own end- / lessness." Lush with detail, rich with wisdom, filled with unforgettable people and held together with masterful syntax, these poems raise narrative poetry to a breathtaking new level of pleasure.

Pacific Shooter is a book of transformations as insubordinate and subversive as Ovid’s Metamorphoses—and with all the taste and twang of a new language. The bourgeois reader will hate it: there’s too much magic, too much genius, too much linguistic bliss.

Lynch’s book is a vision. You find yourself immediately in a vivid, chill season near the end of the world, maybe in the dark wood where the hardest of the fairy tales took place. Everywhere are signs, the ruins of something momentous you somehow missed, and line after line there is a sight or phrase you would linger over…except that there, just ahead, is another just as fascinating. It was a terrible cloud at twilight is just about the strangest book I know that still makes perfect sense.

Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees hums with attention to the act of creation. These poems are like watches that show their inner workings. . . . We see Poetry and Fiction (cast as sisters) presenting their different versions of events; an author’s elegy for an orphan poem; poetry as mother and poetry as lover. When Baggott writes, 'Everything is talking, / even the rooted irises tonguing air,'’ we want to be able to hear it too.

Brian Swann’s poems have been whittled from the tree of life and the acuity of his imagination into shapes and stories lovely and wise. They are full of 'blades of light,' affirming the visible beauty and the invisible mysteries of our world. He is, as he says himself, 'dazed by the everyday.' I have not read a book of poems so reverent and so delicious for a long time.

This remarkable book-length meditation is part memoir, part spiritual diary, but first and foremost, pure poem. Set in and submitted to the rigors of convent life, these lyrics shine with winter light. Jesme writes: 'my flexible voice / my ecstasy / I learn that prayer / is either silence / or song.' Few writers are as adept as she is at listening to both.

Nils Michals has a marvelous knack for putting unexpected words in unexpected places—and for composing whole poems of such surprises. In these dense, rich lyric poems, he touches a wide range from the mythical to the quotidian with the same gleamingly precise sensibility. This is a striking collection that's not afraid of beauty or emotion—nor of the difficulties they have always presented to poetry.

While art is never a wholly adequate antidote to sorrow, its consolations can be enormous, as they are in Blair's beautifully nuanced and perceptive poems. Even as he leads us back through our own disenchantment, his "minor ecstasies of will" remind us of all there is in the world to love. Luminous in its language, this collection rewards the reader with "whispers soaked / with the rooted strumming of trees, as light / and as muted as bare green bodies breathing in."

Colloquial, cerebral, and deeply felt, the poems in A Sacrificial Zinc are an absolutely compelling mix of formal adventurousness, dazzling diction, and good story . . . Matthew Cooperman is a very funny poet who is chronically interested and interesting. When he risks straightforward sweetness, he can also break your heart.

This book dares to forego the heavy-handed irony and satiric wink that are so often the chief characteristics of newer poetry . . . Al Maginnes can be dark indeed, but his gaze is finally steady and straight ahead. He is aware, awake, amazed, and alive—all the things we want from a poet—and in language that ultimately blesses with the old lyric joy.

In poems remarkable for their unflinching wisdom, for a maturity of vision too rarely seen in a first book, Kevin Prufer reminds us of that space beyond lullaby, of the fragility of life in a world where 'everything's / the chance for flying / failing somehow,' and of loss as inevitable, the hardest truth of all--how 'the body blooms, unfolding, / then is gone.

This is the link to purchase one Pleiades Press book at the AWP price of $15. 

In the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez and Maxine Hong Kingston, and deeply rooted in the intricacies of the author’s Japanese-Hawaiian heritage, Calabash Stories is a lucid, unforgettable collection. Jeffrey J. Higa’s stories arise from different points in the same fertile landscape: At times, the recurrence of certain details (a beige Volkswagen bug, a famous entertainer) makes them glow with deeper meaning; at others, the reemergence of potent archetypes (a sick child, an old man living a

Winner of the 2017 Lena-Miles Todd Wever Prize for Poetry

Poems translated from the Spanish

Lyric Essays

In Geographic Tongue, an important addition to the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, Rodney Gomez weaves together themes of loss, identity, ethnicity, heritage, and the mechanics of contemporary life to create a collection as lyrically arresting as it is aesthetically stunning. These visual poems, crafted with both restraint and vitality, are visceral in their depiction of cruelty and grief at the US–Mexico border. And yet, this charged landscape also gives rise to moments of tenderness, stil

How To Tell If You Are Human by Jessy Randall Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series

Angela Voras­-Hills’s Louder Birds, her debut collection of poetry, is a beautiful study of the natural world, motherhood, and the inherent desire for meaning. This collection of complex lyric poems holds a haunting absence at its center, an absence that is “impossible to navigate.”

Penelope Cray’s Miracles Come on Mondays begins with a voice—stark, chilling, totally captivating—that searches a barren landscape for a single receptive ear. With echoes of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Lydia Davis, it is Kafka these dark and sometimes darkly funny scenes resemble most.

Paige Quiñones’s incisive debut poetry collection, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, investigates the trauma of desire. Quiñones’s lyric world is populated with stark dualities: procreation and childlessness, predator and prey, mania and depression. A hunter pursues an ill-fated fox through the woods; heaven is paved with girls who would rather drown than be born; a couple returns from their honeymoon to find a stagnant pond in their marriage bed. Through navigating these duplexities,

Leanna Petronella’s The Imaginary Age, winner of the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, is an unwaveringly confident debut collection and an exciting contribution to contemporary poetry.

In this stunning addition to the Pleiades Press Translation Series, rendered in Marilyn Hacker’s innovative translation from the original French, Samira Negrouche confronts a war-torn Algeria, amidst the Arab Spring, cataloguing, in her luminary genre-bending poetry, grief, exile, and revolution.