Alice James Books: 52 books

Nina Nyhart's concern for the saving power of language informs many of the poems in French For Soldiers. The title poem weaves together World War I vocabulary lessons and an eloquent Daudet story to convey the reality of war. Whether in dream sequences, or in persona voices, or in poems grounded in Maine...

"Jean Valentine has written a visionary book. If it is built with the brick and wood of this world, the light that pours through its windows is searing, healing."—Marie Howe

“Bonfire is a passionate, controlled book by an extraordinary poet. First is evident the lucidity of intelligence; then the radiance; and finally the sheer power.”-Josephine Jacobsen"From deep places, these poems allow things to well up: memory, love, fear, and a sense of how our individual natures belong to the same great nature which keeps pushing life forward out of death…

Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, Richard McCann's Ghost Letters chronicles the intersection of grief and desire. These are poems of memory, but they are made of the body--the consoling body; the wounded body; the sexual body, both loved and unloved.

"You will close this book exhilarated by its quirky, passionate poems and grateful for its huge heart fired and fed by a prodigious imagination. This is brilliant, urgent work."—Thomas Lux

Haunting, alarming, transformative, and elusive, these poems bridge together the gaps between development stages: from girl, to woman, and then mother. With the complexities that intertwine them, can you be all three at once? Who shapes our identity, and who is in control here? How do we recognize, acknowledge, and honor the changing of who we are?

“Perception, honesty, delight-it’s all there. She combines an ear for pure language with sharp intelligence about people.” -Betsy Sholl“…a tone, created by her eye, her use of an angle of vision in which ‘things tilt,’ direction changes, and she as much as we her readers are led on… this sense of ideas and images are projecting planes" -- Martha King

This debut highlights fatherhood at its peak as it juggles the uncertainty and deeper meaning of everyday life. The hesitant, yet curious voice of the poems are deeply entrenched in the familial, yet also refreshingly open about the crush one feels when their ideals crash down. How does one build a life, only to be redirected and start anew?

This is the ninth collection of poetry from this highly esteemed poet. Author teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Author is an active reader, lecturer and translator. Author's awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, a Pushcart Prize,...

"These are wonderful, witty, wise poems in love with language and singing the music of the world with all its pleasures and piquancies, its oddities and tragedies. Ellen Doré Watson's vision is agile with quick shifts in direction and vivid juxtapositions. The poems in pray me stay eager contain...