It's always exciting to contemplate the naming of a new poet to the office of U.S. Poet Laureate.  Philip Levine, the 83-year-old Detroit native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Simple Truth, has been named by the Librarian of Congress as the Poet Laureate for 2011-12. 

In his review of Mr. Levine's last collection, News of the World, our reviewer, Christopher Phelps, wrote: "Levine's is a world where men and women 'buy and sell each other.' It is also "an immense, endless opera punctuated by the high notes of sirens & the basso profundo of trucks & jackhammers & ferries & tugboats."  You can read the full review here.

Simone Muench is a Chicago poet by way of Louisiana. Her third book of poems, Orange Crush, sets its tone early with her opening lines: "Trouble came and trouble / brought greasy, ungenerous things." The tempting call in this poem, "Hex," evokes a depravity which sets the stage for Muench's central characters: London's seventeenth-century "orange girls," who sat outside theaters selling china oranges for six-pence each--or, more accurately, selling themselves to the audience, to the men, to the trouble to come.