Taking its concept of concentricity from the eponymous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, "Circle," the first collection from Victoria Chang, adopts the shape as a trope for gender, family, and history. These lyrical, narrative, and hybrid poems trace the spiral trajectory of womanhood and growth and plot the progression of self as it ebbs away from and returns to its roots in an Asian American family and context. Locating human desire within the helixes of politics, society, and war, Chang skillfully draws arcs between T'ang Dynasty suicides and Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies, between the Hong Kong Flower Lounge and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch, the Rape of Nanking and civilian casualties in Iraq.

This book celebrates the golden age of silent cinema. In ""Cinema Muto"", Jesse Lee Kercheval examines the enduring themes of time, mortality, and love as revealed through the power of silent film. Following the ten days of the annual Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy, this collection of ekphrastic poems are love letters to the evocative power of silent cinema. Kercheval's poems elegantly capture the allure of these rare films, which compel hundreds of pilgrims from around the world - from scholars and archivists, to artists and connoisseurs - to flock to Italy each autumn. ""Cinema Muto"" celebrates the flickering tales of madness and adventure, drama and love, which are all too often left to decay within forgotten vaults. As reels of Mosjoukine and D. W. Griffith float throughout the collection, a portrait also emerges of the simple beauty of Italy in October and of two lovers who are drawn together by their mutual passion for an extinct art. Together they revel in recapturing 'the black and white gestures of a lost world.' ""Cinema Muto"" is a tender tribute to the brief yet unforgettable reign of silent film. Brimming with stirring images of dreams, desire, and the ghosts of cinema legends gone by, Kercheval's verse is a testament to the mute beauty and timeless lessons that may still be discovered in a fragile roll of celluloid.

This title juxtaposes themes of popular culture and apocalypse. ""The Last Predicta"" is Chad Davidson's searing collection of poetry dedicated to endings of all varieties. From odes to the corporate cornucopia of Target and the aggressive cheer of a Carnival cruise, to emotive examinations of Caravaggio's ""The Calling of St. Matthew"" or flies circling a putrescent bowl of forgotten fruit, Davidson weaves a lyrical web of apocalyptic scenarios and snapshots of pop culture.Throughout the volume appear cataclysms large and small, whether the finality of a minute passed or the deaths of a thousand swans at Seneca Lake in 1912. Images of King Kong, Starburst candies, and the Brady Bunch swim with mythological figures, Roman heroes, and dead animals as Davidson deftly explores the relationship between the mundane and the profound. At the center of the collection sits the Predicta television itself, 'the lives blooming there in Technicolor,' at once futuristic and nostalgic in its space age prophecy.Moving in their very simplicity, these poems resonate with discoveries that belie their seemingly ordinary wellsprings. Chad Davidson's stunning collection repeatedly explores the moment of revelation and all its accompanying aftermaths. ""The Last Predicta"" leads readers to ponder all manner of predictions, endings, and everything that follows.

If No Moon by award-winning author Moira Linehan documents the effects of profound loss and the dark withdrawal into grief. Wherever the author turns - the landscape of her backyard in Massachusetts, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, the museums of Florence, or the cliffs of Inishmor in Ireland - she sees only the geography of emptiness. Crossovers between craft and art, form and voice, knitting and memory, recur throughout the poems. Lying within the traditions of narrative poetry, elegy, and the lyric, the collection reveals the mysterious journey of return. Coming full circle to find again the lyrical and the transcendent within the everyday, beauty eventually wins out. ""If No Moon"", accessible to all who have or will experience loss, is the voice of one who has come to understand that there is no other work but starting over.

In her third book of poems, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, ""The Gospel of Barbecue"" and ""Outlandish Blues"", use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in ""Red Clay Suite"", Jeffers approaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia - a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four ""bars"" of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.

"Roam" explores the loss of a parent to cancer and the resulting uprootedness that loss can create. In searching for a sense of home and belonging, this collection of free verse looks both inward and outward, to landscapes rural and urban, and speaks in haunting and musical lyrics. Unexpected voices emerge from history and myth--those of Joan of Arc, Ophelia, Circe, Daedalus and Icarus, and Achilles' mother, Thetis--and mingle with the author's own voice. From the naming of the first woman, Eve, to the naming of the first European child born in the Americas, Virginia Dare, these characters seek full houses and, instead, discover empty ones. In a voice that is southern, feminist, and unflinching in its assessments of the self, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett treats personal loss without ceremony or nostalgia. The poems of "Roam "look homeward while acknowledging that one can never return to such elusive comforts. Her lyrics reveal the dangers and delights of an ever-changing, ever-traveling sense of self.