More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

Dry, offbeat, and mostly profane, this debut collection of humorous nonfiction glorifies all things inappropriate and TMI. A compendia of probing essays, lists, profiles, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, and overly revealing memoir, How to Be Inappropriate adds up to the portrait of an artist who bumbles through life obsessed with one thing: extreme impropriety. In How to Be Inappropriate, Daniel Nester determines the boundary of acceptable behavior by completely disregarding it. As a twenty-something hipster, he looks for love with a Williamsburg abstract painter who has had her feet licked for money. As a teacher, he tries out curse words with Chinese students in ESL classes. Along the way, Nester provides a short cultural history on mooning and attempts to cast a spell on a neighbor who fails to curb his dog. He befriends exiled video game king Todd Rogers, re-imagines a conversation with NPR’s Terry Gross, and invents a robot version of Kiss bassist Gene Simmons. No matter which misadventure catches their eye in this eclectic series of essays, How to Be Inappropriate makes readers appreciate that someone else has experienced these embarrassing sides of life, so that they won’t have to.

The first of its kind--a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku. With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago. Many well-known poets in the past have tried their hands at the villanelle, and the form is enjoying a revival among poets writing today. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song." Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Sherman Alexie, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and many others whose poems demonstrate the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single, strict form.

Nester will rock readers with this collection of lyrical, loopy riffs celebrating the rock band Queen, by a poet and die-hard fan.

During a deadly Chicago heat wave that's claiming hundreds of lives, Robert, who's stuck in his apartment alone, fears he's going to be the next victim. In the apartment above him lives a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who talks obsessively about the corpses of his war experience while alternately listening to Die Meistersinger and Madama Butterfly. One day, Robert ventures forth into the searing heat to gas up his car. Immediately he encounters enigmatic Lucy who is trying to escape her brutal fiancé, Matthew Gliss. On a whim, Lucy invites Robert to her apartment where she shows him her mysterious tattoo and tells him of her dangerous life with Matthew Gliss. She warns Robert that if Matthew ever catches them together he should run, not walk, because Matthew won't think twice of killing him. So begins the risky, short-lived relationship that leads to a chilling climax. Each of Robert's increasingly hallucinatory recollections of what happened during the heat wave leads him to profoundly question his own culpability.

The debut collection of poems by Anne Marie Rooney.

Winner of the 2005 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize "The image evoked by Intaglio, this first collection by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, rests on a paradox, one perhaps central to the poetic impulse itself: that design can be shaped by what is cut away, by the loss that surrounds it, so that what is missing creates the negative space which raises the figure in relief, presents it to sight, and touch. Relief: a word whose two meanings--one artistic and material, the other emotional and intangible, together suggest how art engraves meaning."--Eleanor Wilner, Judge "Intaglio is a remarkable new book by a haunting new voice. Freighted with music and beauty, even the simplest lines are memorable: 'There is this heron in a hush of lift / and my eyes are filled with it.' In the lift, there is also a lyric pressure, an inner intensity which evokes the best kind of madness: 'Let Nothing be that / which bitch-slaps the heart, / for the heart, like a hospital, / is a many-winged thing.' Kartsonis has offered up a vision both playful and painful, all of it lit with the eerie glow of her brilliance. What a lovely and terrifying offering. What an extraordinary introduction to this new poet."--Laura Kasischke "With Intaglio, Kartsonis carefully incises the sensuality of history onto the fleet attentions of the day. And onto loss, onto bereavement, she incises the incredible, now credible, luxuries of everlastingness. This is a formidable debut, lavish in its mind and loves." --Donald Revell