David Lampe, born and bred on the U.S. prairies, home dweller in a Rust Belt border town, is a people's poet, readily understood, a tribune of our common humanity, a teller of truth close to the bone. This is a collection of stand-alone poems that enrich one another through proximity between those of societal ruin and those that dream longingly of paradise. Includes 6 black-and-white ink drawings by Gabriela Campos.

This remarkable collection of poems lures you in, at first to stand alone in the dark, but slowly there comes a hint of light from a crack beneath a door, then a riot of sensuous intensity as you open up to the beauty that lies between the folds of words, bursts of poetic energy that casts warm light over all shadows. From the Introduction by A.F. Moritz "What is this poetry like? There are not many precedents for it or bodies of work very similar to it in English...Bien's word hoard is all his own, though, the way he animates it, constantly connecting the outer with the inner, the familiar with the distant, the limited with the vast, the realm of thought with the realm of life, non-sentient things with sentient ones... There is scarcely a stanza in Bien's work that does not contain some instance of these extendings and plunges into each other performed by things and whole modes of existence. More notable still is the mysterious ease with which the poems admit the contradictions present in perceptions, emotions and desires. In a Time of No Song will impress readers with its poetry of pure sentience and godlike laughter... The mysticism of the source is here, but most of all, I think, we will remember the great enactments and themes of this book through its omnipresent, brilliant tributes to life. We'll keep it by us for its indelible celebrations... A dove lands on my shoulder, the unbearable weight of magicwhat shelters each moment in every other, dies and lives, homelessly on,an orchard of lovely berries singing on a dying treeand so all the while, so too, I sing, that which sings me, in a time of no song.

From one of the defining poets of his generation, a new collection that plumbs the depth of beauty, history, responsibility, and love. As Far As You Know, acclaimed poet A. F. Moritz's twentieth collection of poems, begins with two sections entitled "Terrorism" and "Poetry." The book unfolds in six movements, yet it revolves around and agonizes over the struggle between these two catalyzing concepts, in all the forms they might take, eventually arguing they are the unavoidable conditions and quandaries of human life. Written and organized chronologically around before and after the poet's serious illness and heart surgery in 2014, these gorgeously unguarded poems plumb and deepen the reader's understanding of Moritz's primary and ongoing obsessions: beauty, impermanence, history, social conscience and responsibility, and, always and most urgently, love. For all its necessary engagement with worry, sorrow, and fragility, As Far As You Know sings a final insistent chorus to what it loves: "You will live."

To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought. Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a society of appetite flirting with self-destruction. Many voices act as vigilant witness to our urban wastes and wastefulness. Moritz's unmistakable cadences -- magisterial, philosophical, and funny -- mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke as he extends his already prestigious and singular poetic project.