Series: Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series

A poetic exploration of how we carry the past forward: reshaped but never broken. In Markers and Shrines, Margot Schilpp traces the moments that define us—the losses that strip away our former selves and the resilience that emerges in their wake. These poems illuminate the way the past etches itself onto the future, displaying how experience, no matter how painful,...

An ambitious collection of poems that reckon with life and death through the point of view of famous speakers throughout history and literature, spanning from Penelope to Frankenstein's monster. A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using...

Poems that travel through time and terrain, seeking solace in the raw physicality of the world. To grieve is to search. In Pine, Jonathan Johnson's poems travel across continents: through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Scottish Highlands, the Greek islands, and the mountain wildernesses of the American Northwest, seeking meaning in the spaces left behind. These poems embrace the raw physicality...

A poetic journey through historical and fictional love and loss. Karenmaria Subach's Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in rich lyrical detail through history and the world of fantasy/mythos. Through formal poems, riddle, and sustained lyric contemplative expression, Subach offers her own "blue perfume flask with a gold band," the "trade" of...

A luminous new perspective on aging, science, and the tender strangeness of being alive. What does it mean to exist in a universe that refuses to stay still? In The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fleda Brown weaves together the vastness of cosmic discovery with the intimate textures of daily life. Ranging from quarks to catalytic converters, snapping turtles to...

Poetry that wrestles with language, loss, and resilience in times of crisis. In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of "trying" as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private...

Poems that arise from the currents of felt experience. Shine by Joseph Millar presents lyrical poems that delve into themes of work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This sixth collection marks a departure from Millar's usual narrative style, achieving a more profound, sonic resonance. These poems, described as half songs rendered in hardscrabble lyricism, captivate with their shifting, irregular...

A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic. In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorialises...

An intricate collection of poems that represent the major themes of Pau-Llosa’s career. Fleeing Actium is Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s ninth book of poetry, and it presents an expansive collection that showcases the culmination of major themes in the poet’s work. Now 68 and splitting his time between Miami and Key Largo, Pau-Llosa’s lifelong passion for the visual arts—as a collector, curator,...

A probing collection of new and selected poetry from Jonathan Aaron. A poem uses words to try to get at what can't be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled. As Wislawa Szymborska said,...

Introspective poems that balance past and present beauty and pain. Hoppenthaler’s fourth collection gives voice to a hard-earned weariness that acknowledges but resists resignation. As Grammy Award-winning songwriter Rosanne Cash puts it, “Hoppenthaler’s attention to the specifics of nature—hummingbirds, Japanese maples, snowfall—are like embroidery, stitched through and holding together the sharp memories and images of loss, longing, regret, and hope.”...

Rolly Kent returns to poetry with a book that explores the mysteries and comforts of the known and unknown. Phone Ringing in a Dark House is filled with the mystery of loss, love, and the restorative powers of memory and language. In these forty-eight poems, the product of an intense return to poetry after a twenty-year absence, Rolly Kent writes...

Poems that deftly draw on the sonnet form to follow the speaker’s romantic life. That Other Life is a narrative about how relationships fail and succeed—or rather, about how the narrator fares on the changeable course of love and domestic commerce. Most of the poems in Joyce Sutphen’s twelfth book are sonnets, and each sonnet provides a glimpse of a...

A ruminative collection of poetry that is mystified by life in our built and natural world. Cameo Blue is a spiritual topography, recording the traces of people in their environments, natural and otherwise, and the portents, memories, and signs they use to navigate their path or understand the precipices they face. Lush with colour, weather, and imagery, some poems are...