A bilingual collection of poems that offers a surreal perspective of urban experience. This bilingual edition of Nicole Brossard's lyrical poetry is a sequence of lush, taut cityscapes. Known for her elliptical and materially grounded poetics, Brossard creates an intimate series of poems drawn loosely from urban experience. The poems comprise an evocative distillation of postmodern urban life with a sharp sense of cultural and gendered histories of violence and beauty and struggles for survival and intimacy. The poems capture the emotional and ecological surroundings of each city and its people. The cities in Brossard's poems feel surreal and in them dwell survivors of "misfortunes," living in urban landscapes with their "gleaming debris" and "bridges, ghats, / rivers in a time of peace and torture." These poems gesture toward a transmuted social context and toward a quest "to meet the horizon the day after the horizon."

An electrifying feminist poetics combining language and visual collage to explore gender, landscape, taxidermy, and the idea of a "natural body" An innovative book-length poem that delves into the intricacies of natural history dioramas, taxidermy, landscape, and women naturalists, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners is an experience of looking for "Woman's Work" in American natural history museums. Why, for instance, have the contributions of taxidermist and naturalist Martha Maxwell, the first person to create a "habitat group" display in the United States, and Delia Akeley, the wife of the "father of modern taxidermy," been largely erased? Sarah Mangold mines language from natural history texts and taxidermy manuals from the 1800s to explore the perception and the reception of women in male-dominated scientific pursuits, as well as the doctrine of nature as pure, unpopulated, and outside historical and political time. A stunning work of visual and textual collage, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners creates a vibrant textual ecology that utilizes language as landscape while reshaping notions of nature and the natural.

Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love.

In her stunning ninth collection of poetry, In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue tells a deeply personal lyric of love and loss through a mythic story. This book-length serial poem follows Elle, a dying woman, as she travels a trans-historical, trans-geographical terrain on a quest to investigate the labyrinth not only as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” At the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage—inspired by Hogue’s own composited experience with loss, in particular the death of her mother. Rooted in the idea of the labyrinth as a symbol for life, as in the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe that Hogue would visit the summer of her mother’s death, these poems above all distill, fracture, recompose, and tell only partially—literally in parts but also in loving detail—the story of a life.

Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.

Poetry. Fusing lyric meditation and narrative perceptions, the poems in Cynthia Hogue's new collection FLUX track the natural world and the self in it--from the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest to the far north of Iceland. In the tradition of the distilled and lyrically abstract poetry of Dickinson and H.D., FLUX opens into visionary language and the search for transcendence. "Emerson described life as 'a flux of moods' and in her fine new book of poems, her best yet, Cynthia Hogue takes that impermanence, that emotional volatility, as her first subject, reading the natural world for signs, pushing the far edges of things, invoking her key female precursors as inspirational presences (Emily Dickinson, H.D.), and letting her imagination flow and even soar against the brute realities of death" --Edward Hirsch.