North American Poetry Titles: Authors E to L

Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614369 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Partly an addendum to George Economou’s versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, published by Shearsman in 2013, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself.

"Invaluable as they are, these retrieved Cavafy poems at moments seem a prologue to Economou's own, so deeply has he assimilated, in the course of decades of translation, both the older poet and the store of Greek classic poetry in which he also was invested. But the very American wit and formal hijinks are Economou's own, as are the grace, for instance, of an epithalamion that Sappho might have sung—this isn't pastiche, but a bringing of past into present, as Cavafy did, and also of present into past. This is the stance of irony, which demands a double vision. As its final gift this eloquent book treats us to a fractured narrative of the poet's education in the irony that is and has been an essential armament of survival for those in both his benighted lands." —Mark Weiss

Published 2012. Paperback, 310pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848612068 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Track is a book-length poem, originally released in the USA by Spuyten Divil in three volumes.

"Norman Finkelstein's Track undertakes a voyage beset by recombinatory duress. An excursis through realms where "the letters / arrive to be destroyed," this wickedly wise poem keeps on arriving long after it's done — a lingering trade or track of mind in mind, trouble in mind. It is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest." —Nathaniel Mackey

Published 2012. Paperback, 339pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $27.50

ISBN 9781848611849 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Araki Yasusada, allegedly a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, had his work published posthumously and in translation in the mid-1990s. The work was widely praised and seemed to fuse traditional Japanese forms and themes with more innovative North American techniques and a sprinkling of French critical theory. However, Yasusada was an invention, and while no one claimed responsibility for the work, most readers agree that Kent Johnson was the creator, although Johnson insists the actual author is Tosa Motokiyu, the pseudonym for an unnamed writer who is now dead.

This book considers all aspects of the Yasusada phenomenon.

Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613218 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Dustbowl is a collection of serial poems that intertwine Arthurian legend and Dust Bowl Americana with fragmented memories of Arizona and California. The book's polyphonic voices conjoin perpetually questing knights and those journeying west into a single body. The Guardian's review of Dear World & Everyone In It complemented the anthology for its inclusion of pieces from this "expertly challenging" sequence.

Published 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610040 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Anne Gorrick's first collection is a remarkable reworking of themes from the ancient Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.

"A densely beautiful book, young poems growing out of old poems, vines round an ancient pine. Imagine language talking to itself, all skin and rain and blossoms, scattering like leaves, seeming to remember some other country some other time—yet always being vividly present like a strange food you've taken into your mouth that's too sweet—but after a moment, just barely sweet enough, as we get to like this world Gorrick has incarnated for us here, safe in our deepest feelings." (Robert Kelly)

Published 2012. Paperback, 150pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612372 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

I-Formation in its entirety is comprised of four separate groups of poems, that when ordered in a particular way, tell a Genesis story. The first book (2010) begins in a garden and ends with an incarnation of Eve meeting her coeval. The break between books expresses a break in the story. Something has happened. Something perhaps as simple as eating an apple. The second book addresses the things we are left with once we are thrown out of the garden: co-identity and depiction, the self and landscape. The first section of the second book is a collection of poems based on anagrams of people’s names, and forms a relationship map of this poet’s life. The final section is comprised of poems based largely on the Hudson Valley landscape, a world exterior to and surrounding the garden.

Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848617407 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



" Horology teeters on the brink; “faience” and “plumbago” float to the surface like literary flotsam but the vessel is never quite sunk. Words are strung like trade beads carrying faint signs of meaning along with their chief task of beauty, a miraculous conjuration of song. As you look at the collected bones and feathers in this Kunstkammer, suddenly it wriggles free, not a shipwreck, not an archive, but a living creature. The clock and the poem are as close as we have come to making parts cohere into a living organism. Imagine Verlaine transcribing lyrics for an opera drawn from a Burtonian study of seafaring and clocks: “a chanticleer of fo’c’sle songs” indeed." —Martin Corless-Smith

Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611856 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"My father hovers in the aperture of a glistening window, suicide botched by his mother's ghost. Numbers from his slide rule pause on the sill, fallen by chance into a brilliant formula."

This interlinked collection of lyric essays documents Carol Guess's relationship to her father, a brilliant scientist whose intensity and eccentricity shaped family life in humorous and often lonely ways. In musical prose, writing as a poet, teacher, and queer activist, Guess describes a life lived in service to language. At once accessible and enigmatic, funny and somber, My Father In Water is a haunting examination of the impact of family history on one artist's journey.

Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700707 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In Forget Reading , Anthony Hawley's second collection for Shearsman Books, poems speak up despite themselves, and in doing so they affirm poetry's slight, subterranean power inside a culture of overwhelming and decadent ugliness. Due to the very odds stacked against them, these beautifully moving poems enact a radical little protest, unheeded by the majority rule.

Published 2006. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 92pp. £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9780907562849 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Born in 1977, Anthony Hawley grew up in New England and was educated at Columbia University. He is the author of the chapbooks Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Vocative (Phylum Press), and his poems have appeared in various publications including Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, 26, and Volt . He currently lives in Nebraska with his wife and daughter and is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Concerto Form is his first full-length collection.

Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610873 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles's shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.

2nd, Expanded Edition. Published 2012. Paperback, 175pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.

ISBN 9781848612082 [Download a sample PDF from this bookhere.]



This expanded edition of Speaking the Estranged brings together Michael Heller's writings on the work of George Oppen (1908–1984), one of America's most remarkable and distinguished poets. Heller's essays, written over the last twenty years since his ground-breaking book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction's Net of Branches , cover all of Oppen's poetry and how other poets and critics have read him. They touch on all phases of his career, from his early roots in the Objectivist tradition to his abandonment of poetry for political and social activism in the 1930s and his coming back to poetry in the 1950s. Oppen's work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and is considered by many to be one of the most extraordinary and original bodies of poetry in the twentieth century.

2nd Edition. Published 2012. Paperback, 256pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.

ISBN 9781848612181 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarmé and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.

Published 2009. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610354 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

If you write out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin — the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. (Janet Holmes)

Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700813 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



A first collection for Chicago-based poet and small-press publisher, Brandi Homan.

"Like the stream of cut-paper hearts in her Valentine Factory, Brandi Homan's poems are connected 'at the blade's edge,' are all 'hard reds'—an intelligent and imaginative woman coming to terms with desire. This collection is an exciting 'kick-start' for her electric voice." — David Trinidad

Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610859 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the "Fuck yeaaaah!"s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman ......" —Jennifer L. Knox

Published 2008. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700820 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Heloise and Abelard—since the 12th century writers, artists, and musicians have been inspired by the details of their story—famous philosopher and his pupil, forbidden love affair, abandoned son, castration, monastic life, and heresy trials.

     In this remarkable collection Judith Infante gives us a series of poems that form a verse novel about the medieval lovers. The poems make clear how bound was their relationship to its period, yet capture the intensity of their timeless and conflicting emotions.

     Heloise and Abelard became different people as their story moved from romance to life apart and finally to their individual deaths and the mysterious change that implies. By interweaving Ovid’s myth of Atalanta with the story of Heloise and Abelard, Love: A Suspect Form calls attention to the many and often disorienting aspects we present to each other.

Published 2024. Paperback, 276pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £15 / $23

ISBN 9781848618657 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

David Jaffin's first collection for 2024. The world's busiest poet strikes yet again.....

Published 2023. Paperback, 184pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848618794



David Jaffin's second collection for 2023. The world's busiest poet strikes yet again.....

Published 2023. Paperback, 298pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848618565 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

David Jaffin's first collection for 2023. The world's busiest poet strikes again.....

Published 2008. Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700950 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Homage contains a wide variety of poems and prose, representing all strands of Johnson's work: versions from the Greek, traduced to an extraordinary degree; anti-war poems, overflowing with rage; stink-bombs tossed in the direction of some famous poets, mostly meant in an ironic, joshing way. But not all. And then there are memoir poems of persons met and places visited, that may well be documentary in nature, or may also be artfully disguised. Memory is, after all, an awkward thing, and not to be trusted, just as politicians and their henchmen are not and there is no irony in their treatment in this book. No, sir, none at all.

Published 2020. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616998 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Johnson’s poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard – somebody is going to get bit." — Ron Silliman

The provocative position of Kent Johnson in American poetry over the past two decades—as both its foremost gadfly and its anti-institutional conscience—is unequalled. Admired and abhorred in like measures, he is the author, translator, or editor of more than thirty titles of poetry, criticism, nonfiction, and metafiction. This collection represents a follow-up to his widely reviewed 2008 classic from Shearsman, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde . He has recently retired, after many years of teaching English and Spanish. In 2004, he was named State Teacher of the Year by the Illinois Community College Board of Trustees. From 2016 to 2020, with Michael Boughn, he oversaw the highly controversial Dispatches from the Poetry Wars .

Published 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611443 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



A is for Accessible. Give Some Word is a somewhat irreverent book of poems. Cralan Kelder believes that people who read poetry should be delighted, not confused. Poems are not riddles. The poetry in Give Some Word is no exception; equal parts distilled language, contrary, and pushing everyday language out of conformity. Humor lurks just below the surface in many these shorter, condensed poems.

Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700066 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In her first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the Left Hand , the poet Nancy Kuhl explores the lyric possibilities found within the sometimes narrow space of the domestic interior, caught between the quotidian and the uncanny. In language that is by turns sensual and spare, elegant and oneiric, the images and music of this collection reveal and recast the daily ambiguities of living with others, "the fragile arrangement all blue / at the seams," and the uncertain line between the hidden and the apparent, like a "house / with its unswerving spine exposed."

Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611221 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The work in Mary Leader's third collection, Beyond the Fire, does not conform to any one habitation, nor aesthetic persuasion, nor name. On the contrary, just about every poem invents its own territory and its own terms. Some poems are straightforward narratives, while others repeat spells and castings. Many are figural; some are classical; some even aspire to anonymity. The book is designed to range the globe and fathom the centuries, albeit, in the end, the poet's settlement is but a momentary locality.

Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615847 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



“Leader has more ideas than she knows what to do with. And each of her poems offers something new: together they adumbrate an enticing and insistently personal way of looking—both at the sights the world offers, and at the people with whom she hopes to share them.” —Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

“Leader owes some of her intimacy with the American sublime to Dr. Williams but much more of it to her own quite remarkable sensibility, which is one of the most self-possessed in contemporary poetry.” — The New Yorker

Published 2024. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619258

"Mary Leader’s The Wood That Will Be Used is a tour de force exemplifying what results from a lifetime of labor in the word, a lifetime of one’s poring over rich literary texts, and of one’s developing the habit of one’s offering answering texts; it also manifests a capacious mind shaped by wit, by candor, and by a keen eye. Receiving the matter prepared for her, she has shaped a beautiful structure that will serve her and us for the journey beyond. If Philip Larkin and H.D. were to have been blessed with a literary child, that child would be Mary Leader."—Scott Cairns

Published 2017. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615168 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



As the title suggests, Aperture opens gaps through which to see and hear the lives of imagined and actual women. This collection becomes a stage on which these women perform, and the poems play with notions of staging, with how we present ourselves and how we are perceived and represented by others. The stories and voices in Aperture “bend and come back again,” telling the truth slant.

Published 2010. Paperback, 210pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848611313 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Karin Lessing — born in Germany, raised in the USA, and resident for decades in France — is one of those poets who exist outside the tides of literary fashion, and indeed beyond the ken of most readers, although she has a devoted band of supporters, among whom your editor at Shearsman Books must be counted. Her last two collections were published here, and this survey of her entire writing career, which brings together all of her books, together with a number of uncollected poems, is vital to reaching an understanding of her work.

Published 2001. A5 Paperback, 62pp. OUT OF PRINT

ISBN 9780907562313.

In the Aviary of Voices was Karen Lessing's third full-length collection, and her first for ten years. INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTED POEMS above.



Published 1991. A5 Paperback, 40pp. £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9780907562801



The second full-length collection by this woefully under-recognised expatriate American poet, following on from her early Montemora collection, The Fountain (1982). INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTED POEMS above.

Published June 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618909 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The earliest poem in this book (‘The Sleeper’s Blue Shirt’) is from 1972. The most recent poems are from 2022. Ken Bolton edited this selection, drawing from five books and one chapbook.

“John Levy has a magical deftness that makes world upon world appear out of nowhere. He marvels at the most ordinary circumstances and things (waiting for a bus, wrong numbers, accordion straps, a hammer, the letter K) and when he does so, there is nothing else in the universe. The work is meticulous, precise yet always unlabored. The poems come from Paris, Kyoto, Greece, Tucson, Edinburgh (among other places), and the poet has worked as a public defender. Reading Levy’s wondrous poems, I say to myself again and again, “so this is how it’s done!” His book is like no other.”—John Martone

Published 2013. Paperback, 96pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848612389 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



" murmur in the inventory haunts and sweeps the reader up to move its half told lessons along. Erica Lewis's lines are deftly derailed and as quickly reattached. Each word can be taken as a single beat or allowed to fuse into pure separate lines of music (allowing for escape). "We live in a place of corridors/ it is true and not real and you turn the corner." I feel this inventory as a petrified forest of high tension, rapture and incision, a trifecta that activates all physical endings. The line is cut sometimes mid-way in order to answer back immediately, truly a poetics of the exposed nerve. A gorgeous and arresting book." —Cedar Sigo