From the acclaimed, award-winning poet, this new collection is a gripping search for life and truth. From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes "Tokyo Butter," perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science. Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogative--but in "Tokyo Butter" there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

"This eighth outing from MacArthur 'genius' grant winner Moss (Slave Moth, 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons — Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song — these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: 'any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor.' Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: 'Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out.' The long central poem 'Deirdre: A Search Engine' includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: 'we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery'; 'without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it.' This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes