Brenda Coultas's prose poems take us on a well-documented tour from the Bowery, pre-1900 and post-9/11, to southern Indiana, pre-automobile and post-genetic engineering. Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.

Chosen by the Poetry Foundation as one of the best poetry books of 2009. Jennifer Moxley's CLAMPDOWN captures a time of political despair and self-doubt. Our "so-called common ground" erodes where liberal thought, implicated in the systems it critiques, finds no traction and becomes the site of new divisions.

A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert.

John Godfrey was born in New York in 1945. He has worked and written in New York's east village for more than three decades. Godfrey's recent books include Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2003) and Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001). A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University's School of Nursing, Godfrey works as a nurse clinician to AIDS patients in New York City. CITY OF CORNERS is his ninth collection.

In NIGHT SCENES, the fourth book from best-selling poet Lisa Jarnot, we are returned to the "first melody" through mock archaisms, neologisms, rollicking rhymes, and childlike delight. Her circling lyrics sing the pleasure of naming itself, with pastoral dreams occasionally giving way to waking life in Brooklyn.