In-depth interviews with poets have been a popular feature of "Verse" magazine--and this volume collects many favorites, along with new interviews commissioned for this collection. The poets represent a wide range of aesthetics, ethnicities and politics. Although a particular focus of the book is emerging and innovative American poets, the collection also features interviews with Australian, Scottish, Irish, Czech, Slovenian and Kashmiri poets, as well as established American poets such as Hayden Carruth and Charles Wright. A vital record of contemporary poetry and an engaging read.

Brian Henry's poetry collections include "Graft," "American Incident" and "Astronaut," and he is the editor of "On James Tate."

Andrew Zawacki is the author of "Anabranch" and "By Reason of Breakings," co-translator of Ales Debeljak's "Arrow's Shadow" and an editor of "Verse" since 1995.

Soft Apocalypse pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism, its lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer improvisational measures for going and going on. Chrome angels, strange beloveds, and cool-eyed speakers cut speculative lines through precarious spaces of the present-deserts and nightscapes, neon-lit strips, corner stores, foreclosures, pharmacy queues, and "crumpled back alleys"-making imaginative economies, queer kinships, and alternative ways of being in the world. Nothing here is done with ease, but irreducible gifts do slip surreptitiously from palm to palm: after all, "we all need a little help sometimes / baby." Anybody in these poems may use ordinary, embodied matters-"raw materials" and "dream residuals"-to shimmy out of dire, official measures and into "an unmarked rest," an excess, or any "o vacancy!" where unofficial exchanges may be made. Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these minor events and intimate apprehensions against the official orders, projections, violations, and isolations of our time. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic ending, this book bets on its softer wrecks, a futurity in an intimately rewired collective.

"By Reason of Breakings," Andrew Zawacki's first book of poetry, overwhelms and silences by virtue of its extremely austere beauty. In highly wrought lyrics, prose poems, fragments of apocrypha, and splintered efforts at song, this volume is forceful and haunted by doubt. Each intimate and restrained line is a glimpse at a wisdom that defies paraphrase, each image carefully chosen and constructed. Zawacki's language summons and invites and is almost menacing in its delicate intensity: "Weight is the syntax of filling empty spaces: scalpels and expired tissue fall, but fire rises to fever and sere." While pursuing an explanation for the disappearance of God and for the denouement of a love affair, and exploring the failure of language to compensate or console, these poems maintain their sublime power and elegance.