The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts-of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Entering its fifteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York s Staten Island, moving through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts. Cate Marvin s haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence. From A Thousand Degrees It s called a thousand degrees. Think about love. Seemed what the clutch of pot-bellied women in striped shirts were muttering drunk among one another as I skulked past them on a 2 a.m. street s sidewalk buckling with the heave of July s late heat, skitterish and still drunk from cheap wine I d sucked down in the City."