Barks's translations capture the inward exploration and intensity that characterize Rumi's poetry, making this unique voice of mysticism and desire contemporary while remaining true to the original poems. In this volume readers will encounter the essence of Sufism's insights into the experience of divine love, wisdom, and the nature of both humanity and God.While Barks's stamp on this collection is clear, it is Rumi's voice that leaps off these pages with a rapturous power that leaves readers breathless. These poems express our deepest yearning for the transcendent connection with the source of the divine: there are passionate outbursts about the torment of longing for the beloved and the sweet delight that comes from union; stories of sexual adventures and of loss; poems of love and fury, sadness and joy; and quiet truths about the beauty and variety of human emotion. For Rumi, soul and body and emotion are not separate but are rather part of the great mystery of mortal life, a riddle whose solution is love. Above all else, Rumi's poetry exposes us to the delight that comes from being fully alive, urging us always to put aside our fears and take the risk of discovering our core self:No one knows what makes the soul wake up so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil from the face of God. These fresh, original translations magnificently convey Rumi's insights into the human heart and its longings with his signature passion and daring, focusing on the ecstatic experience of the inseparability of human and divine love. The match between Rumi's sublime poetry and Coleman Barks's poetic art are unequaled, and here this artistic union is raised to new heights.

    Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that “to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.”Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile—most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His later poems also reflect the sharp political focus through which this Nobel Laureate never fails to bear witness to the events that stir the world.Digging among the rubble of the past, Milosz forges a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work, wrote Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, is “one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age.” With more than fifty poems from the end of Milosz’s career, this is an essential collection from one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

    Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages. John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work. John Bayley wrote in the New York Review of Books, "Felstiner translates ... brilliantly."

    It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

    These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

    George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as "a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book." Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as references in the poems.

    It brings together a unique combination of Keats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by a generous selection of Keats's letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking.In his tragically short life Keats wrote an astonishing number of superb poems; his stature as one of the foremost poets of the Romantic movement remains unassailable. This volume contains all the poetry published during his lifetime, including Endymion in its entirety, the Odes, Lamia, and both versions of Hyperion. The poetry is presented in chronological order, illustrating the staggering speed with which Keats's work matured. Further insight into his creative process is given by reproducing, in their original form, a number of poems that were published posthumously.Keats's letters are admired almost as much as his poetry and were described by T. S. Eliot as certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet. They provide the best biographical detail available and shed invaluable light on Keats's poems.

    A new translation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, the wonders of nature's beauty, and the illusory character of art. Szymborska's voice emerges as that of a gentle subversive, self-deprecating in its wit, yet graced with a gift for coaxing the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

    Once you can express yourself, she wrote, you can tell the world what you want from it. Now, Caroline Kennedy shares her mothers favorite poems by such renowned authors as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, and Robert Frost. The book also includes a poem written by Jacqueline Kennedy and is illustrated with photographs of the Kennedy clan. This is a wonderful volume for reading aloud or by yourself and a meaningful gift or keepsake for Mothers Day.

    This book combines their most significant poems in print with the authors themselves reading their poetry on audio CD. Poets range from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Parker to Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks. The power of spoken poetry is at the heart of Poetry Speaks. Poetry is a vocal art, an art meant to be read aloud. Listening to a poem read aloud can be a transforming experience. Poetry Speaks not only introduces the finest work from some of the greatest poets who ever lived, it reintroduces the oral tradition of poetry. Poetry Speaks features over 40 poets in chapters each containing: ? The poems that are read by the poet on the audio CD? Additional poems in print form to allow the reader to further explore the poet? A short biography and photo of each poet? Original manuscripts and letters for most of the featured poets? An original essay for each poet written by today's most influential poets, a veritable Who's Who of poetry, including: Seamus Heaney on W.B. Yeats; Richard Wilbur on Robert Frost; Mark Strand on Wallace Stevens; Jorie Graham on Elizabeth Bishop; Glyn Maxwell on Dylan Thomas; and Rita Dove on Melvin B. Tolson. Poetry Speaks-combining the talents of great poets past and living, their words written and spoken-is the most ambitious, comprehensive and innovative poetry project to be published in years, and is sure to be the model for collections to come.

    A unique book 'in two voices' that uses traditional reading teaching techniques (alliteration, rhyme, repetition, short sentences) to invite young children to read along with an adult. Each of the twelve short stories fit on one spread and features childlike themes - family, friendship, pets and seasons. With clear, color-coded typography and amusing illustrations, this collection is sure to entertain.

    T. Stepanek takes us on a Journey Through Heartsongs with more of his moving poems. These poems share the rare wisdom that Mattie has acquired through his struggle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and the death of his three siblings from the same disease. His life view was one of love and generosity and as a poet and a peacemaker, his desire was to bring his message of peace to as many people as possible.

    These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady's range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. Includes poems that inspired the libretto for Eady's music-drama Running Man, a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

    Only at the end of the twentieth century could a writer create this compelling combination of experience and imagination, education and tradition, sex and prayer. This magic and modern coming of age could not have been written at any other time, yet its references bring the reader places that are distinctly not 1990s America.

    In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity.Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.

    The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.

    Pleasure Dome gathers over twenty-five years of work, including early uncollected poems and a rich selection of new poems.Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.

    Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence.

    He wrote his poetry in Urdu and Farsi (1873-1938), and that bridged and encompassed the past many centuries of man's endeavours in the realms of thought and intuition. He emblazoned the high standards set by Mirza Asadullah Khan 'Ghalib', and glorified the literature in his own way. He was a scholarly personality, and wrote on various subjects, from philosophy to politics, from romance to emotions and so on. He wrote world famous poem 'sare jahan se acha Hindustan hamara' and many other such 'nazams' which are even today considered as great poetical creations. He was honoured with the title 'sir' by the British Government for his contributions to the literature.The present collection is a representative of Iqbal's Urdu poetry, which has been transliterated into English verses, with translation into Devanagari (Hindi) and Roman script. The English translation has been done by Khwaja Tariq Mahmood, who earlier translated the poems of Mirza Ghalib and Sahir Ludhianvi, and is now working on many other collections.

    Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have “authority, daring, [and] a language of color and sure movement,” says series judge W.S. Merwin.From Seven ChimerasThe way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons;  each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, colored beads falling away.

    Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored. Author Biography: Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. After a period of peripatetic traveling, she married poet Ted Berrigan. She has published more than twenty books and has been an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School of poetry.

    H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

    His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.From the Hardcover edition.

    New work by the best-selling author of XECLOGUE and DEBBIE: AN EPIC. "Consider that we need to drink deeply from convention under faithfully lighthearted circumstances in order to integrate the weather, boredom utopic, with waking life. By 'integrate' we mean: to arc into a space without surface as if it were an inhabitable, flickering event. And by 'convention' we refer to our improprietous infiltration of the long citations of grooming, intimacy, and prognastication. Like flags or vanes, we signify an incommensurability. No elegance is self-sufficient. No-one is old enough to die or to love. The weather is a stretchy, elaborate, delicate trapeze, an abstract and intact conveyance to the genuine future which is also now. Mount its silky rope in ancient makeup and polished muscle to know the idea of tempo as real" - from the Introduction by Lisa Robertson.

    Veil contains poems from five of Armantrout's previous books as well as a generous selection of new poems. Her work relies tenaciously on the intelligibility of language, her careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored lines always questioning how linguistic subjects are formed. Armantrout is interested in questions of origin, and the psychology of perception; she is interested in who is speaking and how we know what we know. Fans will welcome the chance to become reacquainted with her witty and lyric meditations on erotic and family issues, and new readers will be captivated by her poems' immediate availability and freshness.

    This full-length collection includes individual lyric poems as well as a previously published chapbook Sea Lyrics and a new collaborative piece "Dumb Duke Death" with illustrations by Jennifer Jarnot.

    LGBT Studies. One of SPD's bestselling authors, Kevin Killian's stories have had wide circulation among the avant-garde for many years. The poems in ARGENTO SERIES are loosely organized around the films of the great Italian/Brazilian filmmaker Dario Argento, whose take on the horror/thriller genre have made him arguably the most censored filmmaker in modern film history. But AIDS, and more specifically death, are as commonly the real subject of these poems, and Killian's ability to blend a light, transgressive, O'Hara-like wit with his sense of loss allows these poems to achieve something that is not mere sentimentality. For those who wonder how AIDS can be written about without indulging in cliches, Killian's book will come as a revelation and a gift.

    Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

    Cummings's affirmation of life resolved into serenity as he described himself as someone "whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow." This collection of Cummings reading his own poetry embodies this in an unforgettable way.While perhaps best remembered for his use of such visual devices as typography and punctuation, the sheer sound of Cummings's work imparts a greater, deeper understanding of how its cadences reveal its profound meaning. This rich sampling of his poems and lectures is rendered in what the great Robert Graves called Cummings "own beautifully modulated voice."

    His work has up until now only been available in anthologies and short selections. This volume contains all his major poetic work including the prose poetry and some prose pieces. Trakl's models were Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. His admirers include Rilke, Kafka, Karl Kraus, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was one of his patrons. This is a bilingual edition with German/English on facing pages.

    The cry of the soul in love with God has never been more eloquently expressed than by the great Persian Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). Readers have thrilled to his ecstatic songs of divine union for more than eight hundred years. Now, here is the collection of the best of Rumi's poetry reissued as part of a new series with Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, H.H. the Dalai Lama, and more. The Shambhala Pocket Library is a collection of short, portable teachings from notable figures across religious traditions and classic texts. The covers in this series are rendered by Colorado artist Robert Spellman. The books in this collection distill the wisdom and heart of the work Shambhala Publications has published over 50 years into a compact format that is collectible, reader-friendly, and applicable to everyday life.

    The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts. In a rushing, rolling style, poems sweep to the edge of falling apart, take great delight in defying that dissolution, and come upon a thing redemptive and clarifying: the fact of love. In a world that "doesn't really care / whether we live or die," Steve Scafidi writes, "tell it you do and why." From the unthinkable to the quietly heroic, somehow we have emerged. Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer celebrates that fact most of all.

    In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

    In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.

    As television, video games, and the Internet threaten to distract young people from the solitary pleasures of reading, Bloom presents a volume that will amuse, challenge, and beguile readers with its myriad voices and subjects. Here are old favorites by beloved writers of children's literature, as well as exciting rediscoveries and wonderful works penned by writers better known for their adult classics, such as Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and Walt Whitman. Encompassing the natural world and the supernatural; childhood, romance, and death; pets, wild animals, and goblins; mystery, adventure, and humor; the selections reflect the passion and erudition of our most revered literary critic. Arranged by season, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages is a must-have anthology, sure to delight readers young and old for years to come.

    Cummings's affirmation of life resolved into serenity as he described himself as someone "whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow." This collection of Cummings reading his own poetry embodies this in an unforgettable way.While perhaps best remembered for his use of such visual devices as typography and punctuation, the sheer sound of Cummings's work imparts a greater, deeper understanding of how its cadences reveal its profound meaning. This rich sampling of his poems and lectures is rendered in what the great Robert Graves called Cummings "own beautifully modulated voice."

    Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), one of the most original American poets of the last century, wrote poems that were striking for both their minute observation as well as for their formal invention. Guy Davenport describes Johnson's work as being "poetry with a passion for exact, even scientific scrutiny." This volume, edited by Peter O'Leary, is a collection of Johnson's final poems, condensed and cosmic mediations on death and the natural world--"the halftones of reality/of veritable life/a various weave of stuff."

    First Songs, poems inspired by the Andalusian countryside are comparable in style and theme to those in his masterpiece Poem of the Deep Song. This charming little book was given by Lorca to his friend Manuel Altolaguirre and his wife as a gift to their first child. Ode to Walt Whitman, a passionate meditation on homosexuality in a society that proscribes it, is perhaps the best-known book to have come out of the poet's New York Cycle of poems, a damning vision of urban life under capitalism. Perhaps Lorca's finest poem, A Flood of Tears for Ignacio Sanchez Mojis, is a moving elegy to his friend, a renowned bullfighter who was also a writer and a hero to a generation of poets. With Six Galician Poems, written in the Galician language, Lorca returns to themes of the simple life and folklore of the Spanish people. Published only a few months before the Spanish Civil War broke out, this book – a classic of Galician literature – never won the prominence it deserved."His real impact, however, surely comes from the stark vividness of his imagery, his ability to conjure up primal subjective realms of love and death: The guitar makes dreams weep. The sobbing of lost souls escapes through its round mouth. And like the tarantula it spins a large star to trap the sighs floating in its black, wooden water tank." —David H. Rosenthal". . . García Lorca's poem dedicated to the New York poet is nothing short of beautiful. The translation does not detract from the emotion and respect that García Lorca has for Walt Whitman." —A.J. Ortega, Front Porch JournalFederico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a poet, playwright, and theater director. He was well-known as a member of the Generation of '27 who introduced symbolism, futurism, and surrealism to Spanish literature. City Lights Publishers also published another book of poetry by Federico García Lorca titled Poem of the Deep Song.Carlos Bauer is the translator of García Lorca's Poem of the Deep Song (City Lights Books), Cries from a Wounded Madrid (Swallow Press), and The Public and Play without a Title: Posthumous Plays (New Directions). He has also translated the work of contemporary writers into Spanish.

    Her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination, she wrote. Her research involved dark matter - hidden mass which can be inferred only from its influence on observable objects: As if, from fireflies, one could infer the field. Her poems, too, make inferences and speculate, setting out always from meticulous observation and not deterred by a knowledge of how little we can know of the universe.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    This anthology of pieces from Waldman and Warsh's 1960s literary magazine and press, ANGEL HAIR SLEEPS WITH A BOY IN MY HEAD, displays a generous archive of groundbreaking work by a generation of poets and artists of the New York School, Beat, Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance aesthetics and practices. "This large & generous anthology is not only an archival masterpiece - the best of a time that's now gone though scarce forgotten - but an incitement to keep their work alive for a still newer generation" - Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor of Poems for the Millennium.

    This volume rescues from limbo three of his most beautiful poetry volumes: Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun (1981, 1984, 1988). Making available a great deal of Palmer's most influential, exciting, and stunning work, Codes Appearing is a landmark volume. The significance of his writing is every day more recognized. "It is impossible," as The Boston Review noted, "to overstate Palmer's importance." "Michael Palmer,'" as Joshua Clover declared in The Village Voice, "is the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.... And his books, including the essential '80s triptych of Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun, are organized not by story but by a dreamland of calculus and sway....[Palmer's] genius is for making the world strange again."

    Through poems of passionate and obsessive erotic love, Orr has dramatized the anguished intersection of infinite longings and finite lives and, in the process, explores the very sources of poetry.When Eurydice saw himhuddled in a thick cloak,she should have knownhe was alive,the way he shiveredbeneath its useless folds.But what she sawwas the usual: a strangerconfused in a new world.And when she touched himon the shoulder,it was nothingpersonal, a kindnesshe misunderstood.To guide someonethrough the halls of hellis not the same as love."A reader unfamiliar with Orr’s work may be surprised, at first, by the richness of both action and visual detail that his succinct, spare poems convey. Lyricism can erupt in the midst of desolation."—Boston GlobeWhen Gregory Orr’s Burning the Empty Nest appear, Publisher’s Weekly praised it as an "auspicious debut for a gifted newcomer…he already demonstrates a superior control of his medium." Kirkus Review celebrated it as "an almost unbearably powerful first book of poetry" and enthusiastically reviewed his second book Gathering the Bones Together, noting that "Orr’s power is the eloquence of understatement." Most recently, his City of Salt was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Gregory Orr teaches at the University of Virginia.

    In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

    Translated from the German by James Mitchell. Readers of these carefully crafted translations by James Mitchell will profit not only by their economy and clarity of expression, but also by the fact that the same translating technique allows Hölderlin's imagery and remarkable spiritual imagination to shine forth in English. Friedrich Hölderlin was born in Germany in 1770 and studied in Tubingen from 1788 to 1793, where he became friends with fellow-students Hegel and Schelling. Thereafter he wrote some of the most fascinating lyric poetry in the history of German literature. Translator James Mitchell has lived and worked for many years in Germany and San Francisco as a writer, book publisher and college teacher.

    Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the same power of her live performances.

    Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and livid apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kakapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology, are “a rough draft of human being,” that “the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft.” The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration’s putative angel itself."Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust - 'heat's/mean' and the rush of language to bear it." —Robin Blaser"Mackey's raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension." —Publishers WeeklyNathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of School of Udhra and Atet A.D., both also published by City Lights Publishers. He won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2014, and won Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry in 2015. He teaches a poetry workshop at Duke University.

    Fidelito’s mother, Maria Elena, tries to keep her son grounded while struggling with her own moorings. Meanwhile, Domingo, Fidelito's fisherman father, is always at sea, even when among them. From the archipelago of the Philippines to San Francisco, horizontal and vertical movements shape moments of displacement and belonging for this marginalized family. Fidelito approaches life with a sense of wonder, finding magic in the mundane and becoming increasingly uncertain whether he is in the sky or whether his feet are planted firmly on the ground.

    Refreshingly candid, laugh-out-loud funny, and, at the same time, intimate, the pieces trace Larry Levis's early years growing up on his father's farm, his decision at sixteen to become a poet, and his undergraduate experience in the days of the Vietnam War. In addition to memoir, there are critical reviews, including his seminal essay on the poet Philip Levine, and reviews of poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass and Zbigniew Herbert.David St. John's foreword speaks eloquently of Levis's enduring legacy: "Of the poets of his generation, Larry Levis spoke most powerfully of what it means to be a poet at this historical moment. With the same majesty he brought to his poetry, Larry Levis engaged his readers with the most subtle and disturbing questions of the self to be found in the prose--essays, reviews or interviews--of any contemporary American poet. Broadly international in his scope and deeply personal in his reflections, Levis addressed poetic concerns that are both immediate and timeless. For many of us who struggle with these issues, Larry Levis's prose on poetry stands as some of the most capacious to be found since Randell Jarrell's."The late Larry Levis was the author of six volumes of poetry. He was Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Utah; Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University; and also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

    These are the voices poetry has classically ignored, finally speaking to us through Millar's expertly detailed lines. Here is the poetry of work, its dignity, pain, pathos and oppression rendered in poems so tight they tick like clocks, or bombs.

    Showing songlines to Spicer's profanity and to Zukofsky's purest register, they move through musics entirely their own. There, MISS AMERICA finds a world wide-open but unharmed. There, Wagner proves the wisdom of divided hearts. She is a mage and a marvel. I believe she is our best."--Donald Russell

    It is a form that both challenges and liberates the poet.For this anthology, poet and scholar Phillis Levin has gathered more than 600 sonnets to tell the full story of the sonnet tradition in the English language. She begins with its Italian origins; takes the reader through its multifaceted development from the Elizabethan era to the Romantic and Victorian; demonstrates its popularity as a vehicle of protest among writers of the Harlem Renaissance and poets who served in the First World War; and explores its revival among modern and contemporary poets. In her vibrant introduction, Levin traces this history, discussing characteristic structures and shifting themes and providing illuminating readings of individual sonnets. She includes an appendix on structure, biographical notes, and valuable explanatory notes and indexes. And, through her narrative and wide-ranging selection of sonnets and sonnet sequences, she portrays not only the evolution of the form over half a millennium but also its dynamic possibilities.

    According to author David Wojahn, a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, this collection of poetry “is the best collection yet by a poet who has become one of the most individual and necessary voices of his generation. An almost prophetic rage seems to inhabit these poems, which present us with a speaker who is tender and brutally rueful by turns. Bob Hicok asks to be a voice of conscience in a conscience-less world. And, like all true prophets, his rage and consternation in the end transform themselves into a form of prayer, what one of his poems calls a ‘mad . . . devotion.’ Hicok is able to instruct and console us, and that is a very rare thing indeed.”

    Readers are embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions against a relief of interior truth: "Today you strike me as needing something./ So take my ten-thousand-pound typewriter ...For here is an older,/other world, taking almost forty sheep to make one sock."

    Blaga the poet is inextricably bound up with Blaga the philosopher. He pursued similar goals in poetry and philosophy: to uncover the meaning of existence and to account for man's place in the universe.

    Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

    With formal invention and a wild personae, ZIRCONIA compels one to follow gem-strewn trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolically fruitful conclusions.

    Known for his profound mystical wisdom combined with a sublime sensuousness, Hafiz was the supreme master of a poetic form known as the ghazal (pronounced "guzzle"), an ode or song consisting of rhymed couplets celebrating divine love. In this selection of his poems, wine and the intoxication it brings are the image that expresses this love in all its joyful abandon, painful longing, bewilderment, and surrender. Through ninety-five free-verse renditions, we gain entry into the mystical world of Hafiz's Winehouse, with its happy minstrels, its bewitching Winebringer, and its companions in drunken longing whose hearts cry out, "More wine!" Thomas Rain Crowe brings a new dimension to our growing appreciation of Hafiz and his wise drunkard's advice to the seekers of God: In this world of illusion, take nothing other than this cup of wine; In this playhouse, don't play any games but love.

    Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over.Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses.Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

    As one of Canada's leading poets, McKay has long been known for his passionate engagement with his natural surroundings. This book collects three essays on this relationship, together with new and previously published poems that further demonstrate these ideas. Using bushtits, baler twine, Heidegger and Levinas, McKay sets out to explore some of the almost unspeakable concepts driving the use of language particular to poets, and the arguably skewed relationship human beings have with their natural surroundings. In a book the Globe & Mail calls "stylishly constructed" and "impeccably casual," one of Canada's best-loved writers offers his own sense of poetics.

    He is regarded as one of the world's great short story writers as well as a great lyric poet, and is credited with inventing the detective story and the modern gothic horror tale. He has been an important influence on many major American and European writers including William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Butler Yeats, among many others.Poe's poetry, which is collected in this volume, is more personal than his prose. The themes of love, death, and despair which recur throughout reflect the anguish he suffered in his own troubled life. "Annabel Lee" is a haunting lament to his young wife, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis. "The Bells" is an eerie and melancholy meditation which recreates with brilliant musical language the hypnotic, funereal aura of ringing bells. "The Raven" is a comic tour de force in which the protagonist turns his strange visitor into a symbol of his own sorrow and loss. Poe's best poems remain some of the most popular and technically accomplished in the English language.This book features a deluxe cover, ribbon marker, top stain, and decorative endpaper with a name plate.

    Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces us to a man and woman before they are acquainted and re-creates their first meeting, falling in love, their decision to make a family, the eventual realization of each other's irreconcilable faults, the resulting conflicts, the breakup and hostility, and, finally, their transcendence of the bitterness and resentment. Throughout the relationship we are privy to the couple's astonishing range of emotions: the anguish of loneliness, the heady rush of new love, the irritations and joys of raising children, the difficulties in truly knowing someone, the doldrums of breakup, and so on. It is impossible not to identify with these characters and to recognize one's own experience in theirs.As he weaves this story, Baca explores many of his traditional themes: the beauty and cruelty of the desert lands where he has spent much of his life, the grace and wisdom of animals, the quiet dignity of life on small Chicano farms. This is an extraordinary work from one of our finest poets.

    She grew up in the suburbs of Washington, Dc and studied poetry at New College of California in San Francisco, California. She now lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, the poet Dale Smith, and their son, Keaton Thomas. In 2002, subpress published Your Ancient See Through, a full-length collection of her poems with drawings by Philip Trussell. "Interlocking profiles how the mouth protrudes through the other's face faces joined like vases smiling lips nostril x or a vest with two buttons has become of union double secret grin up-turning chin."

     Portrayed by actor Benjamin Bratt in the 2001 feature film Pinero, the poet's works are as rough and gritty as the New York City underworld he wrote about and loved. "So here I am, look at me / I stand proud as you can see / pleased to be from the Lower East / a street fighting man / a problem of this land / I am the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind / a dweller of prison time / a cancer of Rockefeller's ghettocide / this concrete tomb is my home." His depictions of pimp bars, drug addiction, petty crime, prison culture and outlaw life all drawn from first-hand experience astound the faint-hearted, as Pinero poetizes an outlaw vernacular meant to shock proper, bourgeois culture. This long-awaited collection includes previously published and never-before-published poems; ten plays, including Short Eyes, which was later made into a film and won the 1973-1974 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play, The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, and Eulogy for a Small Time Thief. A co-founder of the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, Pinero died at the age of 41, leaving behind a compelling legacy of poetry and plays that reveal the harsh, impoverished lives of his urban Puerto Rican community.

    In Of Sun, Of History, Of Seeing, the oracular power of language fuels the journey between constellations shimmering above and the mind shimmering in response below, between phenomenology and phenomena.The author of five chapbooks, Eleni Sikelianos has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Chicago Review, and Sulfur. She lives in New York. Blue Guide Contents[It is not enough that], 15 Matter has been Blown off the Surface, 16 The Stone I was Bothering, 17 [Dear Flaubert], 19 The Most Beautiful Theorems, 20 Everyone in the Country's got a Clubfoot, 22 [As a child], 23 Chapters: of I Define the Darkness Correct, 24 [Again, several years passed], 36 Book of Tributes: Cosmorama, 37 Lights, 38 [Fresh from the latitudes], 39 The Typical Hand, 40 [This, (my) brain-truck], 42 [Most of my life], 43 Thus, Speak the Chromograph, 44 [Polar citadel], 47 City between cycles of light, 48 [Now the bells have begun], 50 [I always took shadow for shelter], 51 [The devil was known for], 52 Worn like a corsage, 53 O quanta qualia suntilla sabbatta, 55 [Here is a story], 56 [You can be King of the Corners], 57 The brambles of cavalry (Quamash), 58 The Secret Life of J.K. Huysmans / parataxis, 62 [I will soon make my animal tears], 63 Chapters: Touching the Original Matter, 64 Campo santo, , 73 [Someone is sewing next to me], 74 The decameron, 75 Of the True Human Fold, 77 [They are chasing me home again], 78 "The birds are at their highest thoughts of leaving", 79 [Here we are on the place St. Sulpice], 80 The well-tempered clavicle, 81 [When the things was a?re], 82 The river's which river's why, 83 [As a result, some astronomers], 85 Under

    Roger McGough made the final selection and wrote the introduction.

    Collom rejects the notion that a distinction exists between the quotidian and the poetic. His poems assert that poetry is everywhere. But to find poetry everywhere means that one incessantly engages the world at the poetic level. The result is a dance between fierce notion and ceilingless song. For writers of at least three generations, Collom's poetry and poetices have set the standard for the appreciation of earthly experience in elemental, quick-tempo'd language. Contains poems chosen by: Reed Bye, Clark Coolidge, Larry Fagin, Merrill Gilfillan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jack Collom. Collom has authored 17 small press poetry books, including COLORS BORN OF SHADOW and THE TASK.

    "Often humorous but always serious, Goldbarth combines erudite research, pop-culture fanaticism, and personal anecdote in ways that make his writings among the most stylistically recognizable in the literary world". This new volume, Saving Lives, both consolidates and extends his passions and their presentations.The poems range from a few tight, resonant lines to works of long storytelling drive, from sequences that encompass the most flexible of free verse to an homage to the sestina. Some center on familiar cultural icons (Rembrandt, Houdini, Barnum, the Hardy Boys), others on little-known fringe players in subculture's oddest unlit corners, and yet others on family histories. But always they examine an essential subject: the ways in which we try to "save lives" -- whether through a transplanted lung, the archeological remnant, the conserved book.As ever, Goldbarth dazzles, displaying an energetic mind eager to share his arcane learning, oddball musings, and observations of intimate moments, joys, and despairs. A zany wit and a generous sense of humanity reign equally. Saving Lives only enhances this writer's grand signature tradition.

    Three dedicated translators contribute to this book. Robert Bly's translations celebrate the radiance with which Jacobsen praised the complex beauty of the Earth; Robert Hedin focuses on the countryside, creature, and star poems; and Roger Greenwald draws difficult emotions from Jacobsen's charged last poems, composed while his wife struggled with fatal illness—as when he remembers their bitter-cold wedding day during World War II: Road to the church was blocked with barbed wire. I remember we clambered over the rail fence of the parsonage. —Hey, your dress is caught —no, not there—over there. We tramped the furrows of an ice-crusted potato field, up to the minister who was in his surplice and had the Scriptures ready. —Love is a path you must walk, he says. Yes, we said. But my lord what muddy feet we had! When we got in bed that night we cried a dab—both of us. God knows why. And then the long life began. Rolf Jacobsen was born in 1907 and lived his adult life north of Oslo. He worked as a journalist and newspaper editor and played a critical role in introducing modernism to Norwegian poetry. His poetry has been translated into nearly thirty languages. A member of the Norwegian Academy of Language and Literature, he was honored with many prizes and awards, including the Norwegian Critics' Prize and the Grand Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Jacobsen died in 1994.

    Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.from "Signs Taken for Wonders" ... Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin....

    This complete collection of verse shows the bush balladeer at his very best with favorites such as "A Bush Christening," "The Man from Ironbark," "Clancy of the Overflow," and the immortal "The Man from Snowy River."A.B. Banjo Paterson was born in Australia in 1864 and wrote poetry and fiction from 1900 until his death in 1941.

    And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire. From André Breton's battle cry of "Mad Love" to the quiet lyricism of Robert Desnos, Surrealist writers and artists obsessively expressed the permutations of that fundamental human state, love, and they did so with the vocabulary of natural and unnatural worlds, the explicit language of sex, and a great deal of humor.Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems by Surrealists who charged their work with all forms of eroticism. Expertly and energetically edited by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world.""Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the sixty works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. 'I want to sleep with you side by side. . . . Stretched out on your shadow / Hammered by your tongue / To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth / Happy' writes Joyce Mansour. . . . Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like André Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dalí, and Frida Kahlo, side by side with fourteen lushly printed and alluring black-and-white photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun."—Publishers Weekly

    Almost everything I know how to do with the line, I learned from absorbing Auden.ES: You never met him?MK: No. I probably attended a dozen readings he gave, in and around Boston, in his carpet slippers. I worshipped him from afar. Today, it must seem a strange influence, and Anglo-American male. You'd expect I would say--I don't know--but some woman role model. There really was no one at the time.ES: Marianne Moore?MK: Hardly. She was inimitable, in the firest sense of that word. And Elizabeth Bishop was just too distant and too classical. But when I was sixteen, I adored Edna St. Vincent Millay; I could say lots of her sonnets by heart, and that was all to the good. Auden exerted an intellectual and visceral influence on me, though, metrically, in terms of rhyme and scansion, and his ability to compress those gifts into images, to make a metaphor of a thought: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."

    This stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, and essays reveals a life possessed by the muse. You've seen the "safe" versions, now comes this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive volume.Anne Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York for over a decade. She is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches and directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing and Poetics.Contents>/B>Author's Note, 13 Prelude: "My Long & Only Afterlife", 15 Feminafesto, 19 My Life a List, 23 Oppositional Poetics, 48 That Light Is Sandino, 49 Managua Sketches, 51 Seeing What Happens (Interview with Joyce Jenkins) , 54 Kali Yuga Poetics: A Manifesto, 60 "Take Me to Your Poets!", 74 Loom Down the Thorough Narrow, 81 Hermeneutical (Light to Read By), 91 Vow to Poetry (Conversation with Randy Roark), 96 Sikelianos's Delphic Idea: Site & Poetic Legacy, 123 Hags, Nuns, & Magpie Scholars, 135 The Outrider Legacy (Interview with Mark DuCharme), 142 Poetry as Siddhi, 155 Noösphere & the Six Realms, 167 I Is Another: Dissipative Structures, 173 The Talisman Interview (Interview with Edward Foster), 192 Warring God Charnel Ground, 205 Deviant Identities, 213 Minstrel Bard, 228 Last Days, Hours, 230 Burroughs: Hurry Up. It's Time, 235 Go-Between Between, 238 Grasping the Broom More Tightly Now (Interview with Eric Lorberer), 247 Creative Writing Life [Reading/Writing/Performance] Experiments, 247 Alphabetic Tesserae, 262 Epic & Performance, 266 "Surprise Each Other": The Art of Collaboration (Interview with Lisa Birman), 272 Spare Us Your Epiphanies, 280 Marriage Marriage: A Sentence Sentence, 283 Muse, 286 My Life a Book, 289Acknowledgements, 292 Selected Bibliography, 295Oppositional Poetics"wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?"-Hölderlin from "Bread & Wine"How do we

    A concise collection of 15 of Leonard Cohen's best, including: Bird on a Wire * Chelsea Hotel #2 * Dress Rehearsal Rag * Everybody Knows * Famous Blue Raincoat * First We Take Manhattan * I'm Your Man * Joan of Arc * So Long Marianne * Suzanne * Take This Waltz * Tower of Song * Who by Fire * and more.

    Correspondence. Beginning in the fall of 1998, the poet Nada Gordon, then living in Tokyo, and poet/cartoonist Gary Sullivan, who'd moved to New York the previous year, began a daily correspondence that culminated in April of 1999 with Gordon's return to the U.S. after 11 years in Japan. Culled from more than 5,000 pages of e-mail, postcards and letters, SWOON is documentary, love story, poetry, collaborative essay and auto- (or duo-) biography all rolled into one. Written almost inadvertently, it documents the tenacity of love, and shows how it survives - with language as its host - even in inhospitable conditions.

    It includes major international writers like Alberto Blanco, Pura Lopez Colome, and David Huerta, as well as exciting younger poets, and poets whose work, while well-known in the Spanish-speaking world has not yet seen publication in English. The twenty-five poets represented are as diverse as their American counterparts: They are urban, educated, younger, well travelled, aware of their literary heritage, and include Buddhists, feminists, Jewish poets, experimental poets, darkly brooding poets, and playfully entertaining poets.Until the Poem Remainsby Francisco HernandezStrip away all the fleshuntil the poem remainswith the sonorous darkness of bone.And smooth the bone, polish it, sharpen ituntil it becomes such a fine needle,that it pierces the tongue without painthough blood chokes the throat.Reversible Monuments includes a healthy bilingual selection by each poet, features an introduction by Elliott Weinberger, and gathers the work of esteemed translators alongside that of younger translators. It also includes biographies of the poets, notes on the poetry, and an extensive bibliography of contemporary Mexican poetry.

    The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person.In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers.Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes, which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s, and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.

    This renowned but little-known Sufi mystic of the 10th century preceded Rumi by over two hundred years on the same path of annihilation into God. He referred to himself as -- Nobody Son of Nobody his expression of the reality that his life was subsumed in the Divine, and that the individual self had disappeared in the heart of God: Under this cloak is nothing but God. Introduce me as Nobody, Son of Nobody. These are 195 short selections translated from the original Farsi. These poems deal with the longing for union with God, the desire to know the Real from the False, the inexpressible beauty of Creation when seen through the eyes of Love, and the many attitudes of heart, mind and feeling that are necessary to those who would find the Beloved -- The Friend -- in this life.

    Of Beckman’s follow-up collection to his APR-Honickman award winning first book, Tomaz Salamun writes: "There are no similarities with Apollinaire or Ginsberg, except with what they were doing to Time while they were young." The contemplative poems of this collection unfurl in startling and beautiful new ways.

    Her subject matter is at once broad -- defining divinity, achieving serenity -- and specific, as she sees with a keen eye "the neon needle of a damsel fly hovering and vanishing".

    Displaying a range of voices and subjects--from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss--Creech's poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the "kingdom of desire."Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

    The triumph is in words that endure. "Having Lost My Son, I Confront the Wreckage." "The Language Beneath the Language." "They Will Not Be Poets." "Dreams Without Means." "American Sonnets." This is vintage Coleman, the poet of the people.National Book Award in Poetry finalist, Mercurochrome is one of Coleman's most powerful collections. With humor, anger, and sorrow, she captures the deeply personal and societal forces of a Black working woman and mother, always behind in rent, always writing. She captured her world and its truths with beauty, harshness, clarity, and power. Through it all, there is passionate love and sexuality, humor and drama -- her work is full of startling confession and breathtaking power.loveas i live it seems more like mercurochromethan anything elsei can conjure up. it looks so pretty and red, and smells of a balmycoolness when you uncap the little applicator.but swab it on anopen sore and you nearly die under the stabbing burn. recoveryleaves a vague tendernessTerrance Hayes says, "Wanda Coleman was a great poet, a real in-the-flesh, flesh-eating poet who also happened to be a real black woman. Amid a life of single motherhood, multiple marriages, and multiple jobs that included waitress, medical file clerk, and screenwriter, she made poems. She denounced boredom, cowardice, the status quo. Few poets of any stripe write with as much forthrightness about poverty, about literary ambition, about depression, about our violent, fragile passions."A college drop-out, spurned by the literary establishment during her life, it's time for Wanda Coleman's courageous, impassioned, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

    The size and arrangement of words—or even just letters on the page can add or alter meaning, and poems can take the shape of crows and fly off the page. Or become a balloon filled with rhyme drifting away from outstretched hands. Or fourteen exuberant lines can become "Joy Sonnet in a Random Universe." Here in a single extraordinary volume are thirty poems from some of the world’s finest visual poets, including John Hollander, Emmett Williams, Maureen W. Armour, and Douglas Florian—a spirited "poke in the I" brought to you by the very talented Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka.

    ACE, complete! This reprint of one of Raworth's most well-received works includes "Bolivia: Another End of Ace," as well as drawings by Barry Hall only seen in the very limited British edition. In the early 1970s Ted Berrigan wrote of him: "When I read the best of Tom Raworth's poems, I feel proud. They are a human accomplishment, a poet's." Raworth is the author of over 40 books including MEADOW, CLEAN & WELL LIT: SELECTED POEMS 1987-1995, Eternal Sections, and The Relation Ship. Of his selected early poems, TOTTERING STATE, Lyn Hejinian has written "These are among the greatest writings of our times."

    "Wayne Miller's ONLY THE SENSES SLEEP celbrates the transforming power of attentino and distraction, as the perceived dissolves into memory and reverie. 'Moving away from myself//and further into myself' in a poetry both elegant and completely natural, 'the mind keeps trying to arrive/at the other side of here, ' leaving it refreshed and exhilirated by the knowledge that 'retreat//is also a kind of arrival.'"--John Koethe. Wayne Miller was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, studied at Oberlin College, and after working briefly in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, received an MFA from the University of Houston

    Included are such favorites as "My father moved through dooms of love" and "anyone lived in a pretty how town," along with the usual Cummings dazzle of satirical epigrams, love poems, and syntactical anagrams.This edition is published in a uniform format with Is 5, Tulips & Chimneys, ViVa, XAIPE, and No Thanks.

    Her poems demonstrate a mastery of craft and a unique voice buoyed by brilliance. She explains-in her endlessly appealing half-outrageous, half-conspiratorial voice-her purpose: a guidebook for those who come after. WE are the next ancient world, and Hecht makes myths out of our daily lives.

    Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of "feel." This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, and loneliness—as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named. Reticent and passionate, elliptical yet available, Fulton's poems consider flaws and failure, touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter's closeness to the canvas, the human kinship with animals, the fan's nearness to the star. Privacy, the opening and closing of doors, is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude-the meanings and feelings of virginity, the single-mindedness of fetishism, the tragedy of suicide. Rather than accept the world as given, Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge, in which the surprises of enlightenment can be cruel as well as kind. Felt, a deeply imagined work, at once visceral and cerebral, illuminates the possibilities of twenty-first century poetry.

    She shares over twelve years of poetic inspiration, from her days as a writer who ?once wrote poems in a basement with no heat," through the tenderness of motherhood and bitterness of loss, to the strength of love itself, which can ?make the impossible a simple act." Radiant with keen perception, wit, and urgency, sometimes erotic, often funny, this inspiring collection sounds the unmistakable voice of a "woman on fire? / and more worthy than stone."

    He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

    Included here are: "The Freeing of the Dust; Life in the Forest; " and "Candles in Babylon".

    This collection of personal writings provides a window through which to glimpse the enduring love between Ruth Bell Graham and her husband.

    . . [and] draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence."—Harvard Review

    From transparent glass frogs and ravenous rattlesnakes to sticky geckos and stressed-out skinks, this slithery spectacle showcases once again Douglas Florian's incomparable skill for making poetry informative, fun--and irresistible!

    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

    Adapting Apollinaire's ambulatory present-tense notations to the postwar landscapes of London and New York, and projecting them through a delicate and humorous sensibility, Heliczer fashioned some of the greatest poems of the 1960s and 1970s, which are collected here for the first time.

    The colorful legends of the sea–pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis–have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed.This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson’s seductive sea-fairies next to Poe’s beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge’s darkly brooding “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare’s “Full Fathom Five.” And here is Masefield’s “I must go down to the seas again” alongside Cavafy’s “Ithaka” and Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In the wide variety of lyrics collected here–sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers–we feel the encompassing power of our planet’s restless waters as metaphor, mystery, and muse.

    Her cast of elusive outlaws, who encounter the borders and borderlands of experience and identity, appear, reappear, and disappear in landscapes that conjure the Wild West, Colonial New England, and a pop-culture-strewn American present tense.

    Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.