HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

o on, live a little—it's National Poetry Month. Poet laureate Robert Pinsky showers us with Jersey Rain (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), new lyrical poems infused with the spirit of the god Hermes. The poems in Michael Collier's The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin) tread nimbly between moments of everyday transcendence and spiritual pining, and pop culture and traditional poetic form meld in David Trinidad's sensational Plasticville (Turtle Point). On the Hollywood front: The curtain goes up on cinephile Martin Scorsese's favorite film books, which are being reissued by the Modern Library, including Agee on Film and Memo from David O. Selznick. Screenwriter William Goldman talks shop in Winch Lie Did I Tell? (Pantheon). Saguaros finally get their close-up in John A. Murray's Cinema Southwest (Northland), a guide to handsome and rugged southwestern film locations. One hundred and one captivating and immortal cinema images come together in George Perry, Bob Adelman, and Michael Rand's Magic Movie Moments (Viking), from Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain to a flu-racked Gene Kelly cavorting in the rain. Also this month: Locked and loaded, Frances FitzGerald focuses on the myth of Ronald Reagan through the lens of the "Star Wars" missile-defense program in Way Out There in the Blue (Simon & Schuster). A young widower hits the road with his kids in Daniel Jones's affecting and wise debut novel, After Lucy (Morrow). The short story's dark master, Leonard Michaels, exposes our psychosexual impulses in A Girl with a Monkey (Mercury). In The Devil and Sonny Liston (Little, Brown), V.F. contributor Nick Tosches takes the gloves off the enigmatic and brooding "anti-Ali," who rose from street kid to world heavyweight champion, only to get K.O.'d by organized crime, and The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo) collects 30 years of hard-hitting essays and tough-guy ephemera. Don't look for Francine Prose's Blue Angel (HarperCollins) on your local college's reading list; her trenchant satire of sexual harassment gives political correctness a much-deserved poke in the eye. Jim DeRogatis's Let It Blurt (Broadway) is the long-awaited bio of Lester Bangs, America's craziest and most astute rock critic of all time, a full-throttle rebel who wrote as hard as he lived. Prints by Alexander Rodchenko, Walker Evans, and a pack of the top photo dogs from the 20s and 30s are compiled in Fotografia Publica (Actar), edited by Horacio Fernandez. In Strange Fruit (Running Press), V.F. contributor David Margolick dips into the dark story behind the haunting civil-rights ballad Billie Holiday made famous. Icons of Design (Prestel) is a glossy salute to ordinary objects of the 20th century, such as Legos and the VW Bug. War-zone habitue William Shawcross's Deliver Us from Evil (Simon & Schuster) exposes a world of endless conflict. Food Chain (Aperture) displays photographer Catherine Chalmers's images of such lovely predatory encounters as a female praying mantis shagging, then devouring, her mate. From the harbors and skylines to the street scenes and festivals, the Museum of the City of New York shares two centuries of cityscapes in Painting the Town (Yale). Ah, poetry in motion!