America's Kim Addonizio has been called 'one of the nation's most provocative and edgy poets'. Her poetry is renowned both for its gritty, street-wise narrators and for a wicked sense of wit. With passion, precision and irreverent honesty, her poems explore life's dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, joy and suffering, exposing raw emotions often only visible when truly confronting ourselves - jealousy, self-pity, fear, lust.

From lilting lines about a love that "dizzies up the brain's back room" to haunting fragments betokening death and decline in a suffering world, Kim Addonizio articulates the ways that our connections to the world, to self, and to others endure and help make us whole."

Entering its fourth 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's being practiced today.

Distributed for the Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well.

In this fortuitous collaboration, two spirited poets, themselves teachers of poetry, offer guidance to aspiring beginners and those who have already published. Brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing are each followed by distinctive writing exercises. ("Compare an actual family photograph with one that was never taken, but might have been.") The ups and downs of the writing life—including the inevitable visitations of self-doubt and writer's block—are here, along with tips about getting published. A special section contains twenty-minute writing exercises, and valuable appendixes cover further reading and marketing advice. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

Numerous examples of contemporary poetry, chosen for relevance and freshness, illustrate salient points and stimulate the imagination. By calling on their own experience and focusing on living American writers for their models, the authors introduce you to poetry as it is right now.

Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called "Over the Bright and Darkened Lands," canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. "Except Thou Ravish Me," reimagines John Donne's famous "Batter my heart, Three-person'd God" as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears "a swarm of objects that call without being answered": hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth. From "Scrapbook": We believe in the one-ton rose and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues assume you understand not much, and try to be alive, just as we do, and that it may be helpful to hold the hand of someone as lost as you.

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life's dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected joy. Whether looking outward to events on the world stage-the war in Iraq, the 2004 Asian tsunami-or inward at struggles with the self, these poems aim at the heart and against the feeling that Lucifer may have already won the day. from "Lucifer at the Starlite" Here's my bright idea for life on earth: better management. The CEO has lost touch with the details. I'm worth as much, but I care; I come down here, I show my face, I'm a real regular. A toast: To our boys and girls in the war, grinding through sand, to everybody here, our host who's mostly mist, like methane rising

Kim Addonizio's sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We're Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikannit-drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet's characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more. Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf. Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar. A poet whose "voice lifts from the page, alive and biting" (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, "if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming."

In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem. In Beautiful Lady of the Snow, young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in Night Owls, a young college student s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in Cancer Poems, a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in Intuition, a young girl s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend s father; and in the collection s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner s wife. The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts." Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making."

Rita Jackson is a young woman on the skids, spending her time in shelters and on the dot-com-drunk streets of late 1990s San Francisco. She's a young woman haunted by the murder of her mother when she was thirteen, and a young bride haunted by the disappearance of her husband, Jimmy, who split after a nasty argument more than a year earlier. Together Jimmy and Rita were slipping into drugs and hard times. Rita is filled with feelings of guilt and failure, and the hope that she will one day and Jimmy. She doesn't know that he is still in the city, still in love with her, waiting tables in an expensive restaurant while trying to get a foothold in the straight life.

When Rita witnesses the aftermath of a murder, her own life is endangered. She becomes involved with Gary Shepard, a married criminal investigator drawn to the dark side of this young woman. What unfolds is a story of three flawed people struggling with themselves as much as with their circumstances, as each of them is pulled more deeply and dangerously into the consequences of their decisions. When a drunken night leads Jimmy to jeopardize his second and last chance, it seems unlikely that these sweet, damaged people will ever come to anything, let alone find and -- miracle of miracles -- save one another.

But fate, in Addonizio's hands, works in strange and beautiful geometries. And redemption, she tells us, is never impossible.

The lives of three characters -- an obsessive-compulsive, a pregnant teenager, and the teen's unborn child -- come together in National Book Award finalist and Pushcart Prize winner Kim Addonizio's unsparingly funny and transcendent debut novel.

Diana McBride, a thirty-four-year-old former child pageant contender, now works in a baby store in Long Beach. Between dealing with a catastrophic haircut, the failure of her marriage, and phone calls from her alcoholic mother, Diana has gone off her OCD medication and is trying to cope via washing and cleaning rituals. When pregnant teenager Jamie Ramirez enters the store, Diana's already chaotic world is sent spinning.

Jamie can't stand being pregnant. She can't wait to get on with her normal life and give the baby up for adoption. But her yet-to-be-born daughter, Stella, has a fierce will and a destiny to fulfill. And as the magical plot of "Little Beauties" unfolds, these three characters' lives become linked in ever more surprising ways.

With a poet's ear for fresh, evocative language and a deft humor that exposes her characters' foibles, Addonizio perfectly captures the messiness and unexpected beauty of life.

"One of the wonderful things about "Jimmy & Rita" is that Kim Addonizio never imposes herself in any way, so the poems sing themselves into us. We experience the victories and defeats of Jimmy and Rita as they struggle through the boundless claustrophobia of their world. I think of them and there is a sense of sadness within me. Yet I think of what Addonizio has accomplished and I feel joy."--Hubert Selby, Jr " Kim Addonizio's work is distinguished by two of the rarest qualities in American poetry: a sense of dramatic life on the page and a sense of class consciousness. Both are evident in "Jimmy & Rita," a book that streams with the fragmented unity, pace and visceral immediacy of a film: --Stuart Dybeck

Somewhere between Jo Ann Beard sThe Boys of My Youthand Amy Schumer s stand-up exists Kim Addonizio s style of storytelling . . . at once biting and vulnerable, nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality. Refinery29 Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham. Booklist A dazzling, edgy, laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing, drinking, dating, and more Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as Charles Bukowski in a sundress. ( Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu? she muses.) Now, in this utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age. Addonizio vividly captures moments of inspiration at the writing desk (or bed) and adventures on the road from a champagne-and-vodka-fueled one-night stand at a writing conference to sparsely attended readings at remote Midwestern colleges. Her crackling, unfiltered wit brings colorful life to pieces like What Writers Do All Day, How to Fall for a Younger Man, and Necrophilia (that is, sexual attraction to men who are dead inside). And she turns a tender yet still comic eye to her family: her father, who sparked her love of poetry; her mother, a former tennis champion who struggled through Parkinson s at the end of her life; and her daughter, who at a young age chanced upon some erotica she had written forPenthouse. At once intimate and outrageous, Addonizio s memoir radiates all the wit and heartbreak and ever-sexy grittiness that her fans have come to love and that new readers will not soon forget."

• Rick Moody • Flannery O'Connor • Sylvia Plath • Mark Doty • William T. Vollmann...and others

INK ON INK
Once the province of sailors and bikers, tattoos have emerged from backdoor parlors to suburban shopping malls. Today they adorn starlets' ankles, housewives' shoulders, and bankers' biceps. Fashionable? Most definitely. Respectable? Not always. Evocative, transformative, still dangerous? Just ask many of our most gifted writers across several colorful decades, who have found the images of the tattoo needle a vivid subject for the language of the pen. Brought to you by two editors who are themselves widely praised (and proudly tattooed) authors, these stories, poems, and memoirs span the range of human experience, from the awesome to the absurd. From Flannery O'Connor's likeness of God to Sylvia Plath's fifteen-dollar eagle, from Herman Melville's power of the primitive to Mark Doty's embrace of the ineradicable to Franz Kafka's lasting mark of the penal colony, this bold exploration of the illuminated body is guaranteed to get under your skin.

DOROTHY PARKER'S ELBOW

THE BODY ADORNED...IN FACT AND FICTION

• ELIZABETH McCRACKEN tells a tale of romance, loss, and a walking, breathing love letter...
• On a literary canvas WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN paints a portrait of a skinhead girl who wears her rage on her thigh...
• KAROL GRIFFITH recalls how she animates her art, from fruit to flesh...
• From a historical palette, MADAME CHINCHILLA tracks the sinuous, true trail of the illustrated woman...
• RICK MOODY describes how he paid homage to his literary achievement in a place where no prize committee can find it...
• In a story of deliverance, ALEJANDRO MURGIA follows a motorist who picks up a temptress with the mark of danger on the highway to hell...
• DEENA METZGER reflects on her own liberation through illumination of an intimate bodily scar...DOROTHY PARKER'S ELBOW

"My Black Angel, Blues Poems and Portraits" pairs the blues poems of Kim Addonizio with woodcut effigies based on images of a number of significiant blues musicians with the intent of creating "duets" of image and text, each spread becoming a visual composition and each element amplifying the other.
Created by Charles D. Jones, the woodcuts are in direct response to the poetry. The limited edition book features 24 poems and 26 images printed directly from wooden blocks on Hahnemuhle's Biblio paper, with additional images for the delux edition printed onto Sekishu, a fine Japanese paper. Jones uses the Optima font, printing from photopolymer plates.