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“Black Aperture addresses, with meticulous balance, a single event from multiple directions. Autobiographical, speculative, imaginal, at times bitterly comic, often lyrically surreal, Matt Rasmussen’s transformative poems look outward—they are built on the observable leaf, field, hand, bird, and act. But this book’s central task is the alchemizing of experience by language: the subject here is the suicide of a brother. What cannot be altered remains; yet by changing saying, seeing is also made wider, more openly porous. The liberations of tongue, word, and conception held in these poems restore the possibility-sense that’s as essential to us as oxygen, when a person stands in the chambers of unacceptable loss.”—Jane Hirshfield

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother’s suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In “Outgoing,” the speaker erases his brother’s answering machine message to save his family from “the shame of dead you / answering calls.” In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, “a flower / of smoldering filaments.” A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, “a tinfoil lake,” “vegetables / dying in the crisper.” Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

Matt Rasmussen’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, H_NGM_N, and at Poets.org. A founding coeditor of Birds LLC, a small, independent poetry press, he is a 2012–2013 McKnight Artist Fellow and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College.

May 13, 2013
72 pages, 5.5 x 8.5
978-0-8071-5086-3
Paper $17.95
LSU Press Paperback Original

“Didden’s is a capacious voice, able at once to deliver both wit and wonder, canny insight and meditative mystery.”—Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

In her first poetry collection The Glacier’s Wake, Katy Didden attends to the large-scale tectonics of the natural world as she considers the sources and aftershocks of mortality, longing, and loss. A number of the poems in the collection are monologues in recurring voices—specifically those of a glacier, a sycamore, and a wasp—offering an inventive, prismatic approach to Didden’s ambitious subject matter. In The Glacier’s Wake, the scientific, the elegiac, and the fantastical intertwine in the service of considering our human place—constructive and destructive, powerful and impermanent—amidst the massive shiftings that are occurring endlessly all around us.

A Washington, D.C. native, Katy Didden holds degrees from Washington University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Missouri. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as Best New Poets 2009, Crazyhorse, Ecotone, The Journal, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, Image, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry. Former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, Didden currently lives in St. Louis, where she is a postdoctoral fellow at St. Louis University.

April 22, 2013
92 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-8071-5200-3
Paper $17.95
Distributed for Winthrop University and Pleiades Press

“Next to Last Words shows Daniel Hoffman to be at the height of his long and distinguished career. He makes us see the world in a new way, compelling for his visual accuracy and consummate technique. . . .”—Grace Schulman

“‘Oh but I was a songster in the days before the flood!’ croaks Daniel Hoffman’s raven, a doughty survivor. Stubborn joy and pulsing, minute attention movingly suffuse these late poems; we can be grateful that Hoffman’s world ‘is filled with importunate distractions.’”—Rachel Hadas

For sixty years Daniel Hoffman (1923-2013) drew on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words—illuminated by the poet’s unique vision and leavened by touches of humor—continue this tradition. Equally skilled in formal and free verse, Hoffman explores our place in the cosmos, our kinship with nature, the violent world in which we must live, and the intense love and grief common to everyone’s life.

Former poet laureate, Daniel Hoffman published fourteen books of poetry, including The Whole Nine Yards, Beyond Silence, and Brotherly Love, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His honors include the Arthur Anse prize for “a distinctive poet” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, from the Sewanee Review, the Aiken-Taylor Award for Contemporary American Poetry. He is the author of many critical studies, including Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, also a National Book Award finalist. He taught at Swarthmore College and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Felix Schelling Professor of English Emeritus.

April 8, 2013
96 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-8071-5022-1
Paper $16.95