"Big-hearted, individualistic in scope and voice, Idra Novey's The Next Country surveys a terrain that's truly multifaceted and calibrated down to every word, every nuance. Each poem's imagistic certainty enlarges meaning. Line by line, a playful innuendo moves us, and we find ourselves in that rugged country of the human spirit where enlightenment and surprise are twin rulers."--Yusef Komunyakaa In these powerful lyric poems, Idra Novey's exploration of "country" extends beyond national boundaries into the countries of marriage and family, history and the unspoken, leading to a bold and imaginative reckoning of the self with the larger world. From "Into the Atacama": When I said I wished this trip, I meant the rush of songas we left the city. I meant the bus. I meant the woman whoplayed her flip-fl ops like drum sticks against the window.For singing with strangers in a desert is like getting closerto the moon. And the glow of a moment is like a moon, caught behind clouds and then visible and then hidden again.And when I said here, I meant elsewhere--I meant moving. Idra Novey has received awards from the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, the Paris Review, AGNI, and Ploughshares, and a book of her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, was published in 2007. She teaches at Columbia University and in the Bard College Prison Initiative.