A full introduction discusses his development as a poet, and how the poems relate to the plays, and detailed notes explain the language and allusions. While accessibly written, the edition takes account of the most recent scholarship and criticism.

    A native of Tehran, Shamlu has been publishing poetry and other writings since the mid-1940s. His poetry, like much great literature, appears simple on the surface but actually have many layers of meaning to appreciate. Shamlu has also written many plays.In addition to acclaim from critics and readers alike, Shamlu has also received honors from organizations such as Human Rights Watch for his emphasis on freedom of expression and social justice.This book is a collection of Shamlu's works, covering Persian years 1323-1378 (1944-1999 Common Era). Originally published as a two-volume set, this edition combines the two volumes into one.The text is written entirely in Persian (Farsi). It makes an excellent introduction to Shamlu's works as well as a comprehensive reference for scholars and fans.

    In Coleman Barks′ delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.′There are lovers content with longing.I′m not one of them.′Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds - erotic, divine, friendship -and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging from the ′wholeness′ one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover′s loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship - these poems cover all ′the magnificent regions of the heart′.

    Here are "Birches," "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Two Tramps at Mudtime," "Choose Something Like a Star," and "The Gift Outright," which Frost read at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy." An essential addition to every home library, Robert Frost's Poems is a celebration of the New England countryside, Frost's appreciation of common folk, and his wonderful understanding of the human condition. These classic verses touch our hearts and leave behind a lasting impression.* Over 100 poems* All Frost's best known verses from throughout his life

    Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory. Staying Alive is already an astonishing best-seller in the United Kingdom, where it has gained a wide-ranging audience. This new edition, specially revised for its American readership, reconnects acionados and newcomers alike to the force of poetry, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

    Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech.This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.

    He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski’s life.  With the overhang of failing health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more.Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative – published posthumously, it’s completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski’s lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty.We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.

    During his tragically short life he strove to reconcile his religious and artistic vocations, and this edition demonstrates the range of his interests. It includes all his poetry, from best-known works such as The Wreck of the Deutschland and The Windhover to translations, foreign language poems, plays, and verse fragments, and the recently discovered poem Consule Jones. In addition there are excerpts from Hopkins's journals, letters, and spiritual writings. The poems are printed in chronological order to show Hopkins's changing preoccupations, and all the texts have been established from original manuscripts.

    How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace.

    He is a living legend whose lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world's oldest literary traditions at the same time that he has struggled to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish's entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form. A splendid team of translators has collaborated with the poet on these new translations, which capture Darwish's distinctive voice and spirit.

    And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." Good Poems includes verse about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

    Once again Ladinsky reveals his talent for creating profound and playful renditions of classic poems for a modern audience. Rumi's joyous, ecstatic love poems; St. Francis's loving observations of nature through the eyes of Catholicism; Kabir's wild, freeing humor that synthesizes Hindu, Muslim, and Christian beliefs; St. Teresa's sensual verse; and the mystical, healing words of Sufi poet Hafiz—these along with inspiring works by Rabia, Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, Mira, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Tukaram are all “love poems by God,” from writers considered to be "conduits of the divine." A spiritual treasure to cherish always.

    The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hidden textures are revealed by Collins's poetic eye. With clarity, precision, and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination. Nine Horses is a poetry collection to savor and to share.

    Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq's Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.

    Swimming is like prayer:palms join and part,join and part,almost without end.--from "On Swimming"Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."

    These forty poems-of observing, of searching, of pausing, of astonishment, of giving thanks-embrace in every sense the natural world, its unrepeatable moments and its ceaseless cycles. Mary Oliver evokes unforgettable images-from one hundred white-sided dolphins on a summer day to bees that have memorized every stalk and leaf in a field-even as she reminds us, after Emerson, that "the invisible and imponderable is the sole fact."

    Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning."from "Our Dust"You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,I was the poetof shadow work and towns with quarter-inchphone books, of failedroadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs andsharpening shops,jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybellinefactory on the penitentiary road."Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—Voice Literary Supplement"C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire."—American LettersC.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.

    Stepanek.Mattie J.T. Stepanek has made several appearances on Oprah, and has also been a guest on Good Morning America, Prime Time Live, National Public Radio, and Book TV, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and People.

    Gulzar's songs, Gulzar's dialogues, Gulzar's films, all have one quality-they carry the "rasa" of poetry because basically he remains a poet.

    When you find yourself without bearings, as Dante Alighieri voiced so well centuries ago, where will you look for guidance?Throughout the ages, teaches David Whyte, the language of poetry has held the power to lend us courage, to give us the vision of those who endured, and to hazard ourselves boldly at the fierce edges of our lives. On Clear Mind, Wild Heart you will join this acclaimed poet and teacher to engage with the poetic imagination as your companion and guide for the difficult terrain we are all traversing.Poetry, teaches Whyte, offers immediate and powerful tools unique from any other tradition. It can help us to see beyond the fragile surfaces of our lives, open us to the universal cycles and patterns that shape our lives, and awaken our conversation with what has been called the Untouchable, the Numinous, or the Eternal.Clear Mind, Wild Heart guides you into the wellspring of this living poetic tradition through six hours of exploration and poetry with David Whyte, including the verses of such inspired voices as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Antonio Machado, and others. Through their words, you will discover how to apprentice yourself to beauty and find a place of belonging where you can hold loss and grief, the challenges of change, and the wonder of new discovery and adventure.The language of poetry takes us outside of our small selves and calls us to look at ourselves and the world with open eyes, teaches David Whyte. Whether you are a lifelong poetry lover or new to its insights and pleasures, Clear Mind, Wild Heart is an inspiring guide to answering that call.Learn More About: Finding the courage to hazard yourself in the world- Emily Dickinson on the alive-ness of words- Conversing with the unknowable - The harvest of your attention- How the language of poetry teaches us a relationship with silence- Goethe's Holy Longing - Apprenticing yourself to beauty- Blake's reflections on innocence and experience- Creating a house of belonging through speech and imagination- Work, the pilgrimage into identity - Who are you? How presence shrives you of your old identity- Encountering the visitations of loss, grief, and defeat - The poetic spirit in marriage, parenting, and friendship- Six hours of exploration, as taught in David Whyte's acclaimed seminars and retreats

    From Heartsongs, to Vietnam War Memorial, to Prayer for a Journey, Mattie has written movingly and courageously about life and death, love and loss, faith and hope, innocence and joy. His struggle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy has given him wisdom and insight, and his life, work, and message have been recognized by Oprah, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, ABC TV's Good Morning America, People, NBC TV's the Today show, and C- PAN's BookTV.

    When her poems first emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial literary figure. One of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered.From the sublime "Ego Tripping" to the tender "My House," Nikki Giovanni's mind-speaking, truth-telling poems compassionately evoke our nation's past, present, and future.Read by Nikki Giovanni.

    Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously, you won't know whether to laugh or cry, but you'll definitely keep reading.

    The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child’s birth, a kiss,/ or even me—in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on—thinking of you."Marketing Plans: • National advertising • National media campaign • Advance reader copies • Course adoption mailingAuthor Tour: • Berkeley • Boston • Minneapolis • San Francisco • Santa CruzEllen Bass is co-author (with Laura Davis) of the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 1994), which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Double Take, and Field. In 1980, Ms. Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati. Last year, she won Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, judged by Thomas Lux. She was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, where she has taught creative writing for 25 years. She has also taught writing workshops at many conferences nationally and in Mallorca, Spain.

    Inspired by the experiences of yoga and meditation, the natural world, and the challenges of life itself, these poems capture both the struggle and the delight of the author's attempt to live consciously. They speak in a voice that is both encouraging and uplifting, yet they are simple and accessible.

    He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences.As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

    His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

    H. Fairchild's memory systems are the collective vision of America's despairing dreamers—failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.

    Stepanek is an award-winning poet whose struggle with a rare form of muscular dystrophy has touched the lives of people nationwide. Celebrate Through Heartsongs, his fourth inspiring collection of poetry, features works written between the ages of three and eleven, and continues to spread Mattie's message of universal hope, peace, courage, and love. Fully illustrated by the poet, the collection will appeal to people of all ages, religions, and beliefs.

    "Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"-Martin Espada. "With deceptively quiet, unflinching compassion, Eula Biss records the perceptual wedges that cleave the self from its origins. The family history refracted here is mutable, notable, more gravid than grave. THE BALLOONISTS holds a fresh line on confession, biography, and the formal uses of information in poetry"-Rebecca Wolff.

    These free-verse poems, which first appeared in Marquis's New York newspaper columns, revolve around the escapades of Archy, the philosophical cockroach who was once a poet, and Mehitabel, a streetwise alley cat who was once Cleopatra. Reincarnated as the lowest creatures on the social scale, they prowl the rowdy streets of New York City in between the world wars. The antics of these two immortal characters are now made available for the first time in their original order of publication in this unique, comprehensive collection, which features many poems never before reprinted.First time in Penguin ClassicsArchy and Mehitabel is considered the inspiration for E.B. White's Charlotte's WebFeatures many new poems never reprinted since they were first published early in the twentieth centuryIntroduction places Marquis in the context of American humor and the history of satire

    China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The "rivers-and-mountains" tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.

    Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

    In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations. Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.

    Poetry. Essays. Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text, THE BODY: AN ESSAY is a meditation on absence, loss and disappearance that offers a guarded "narrative" of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise on the relation of life to book. Christian Bok describes Boully's groundbreaking text as one that "may simply annotate a fantastic biography from another reality, referring only to itself as a kind of dream within a dream...The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void-filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination." First published in 2002 and excerpted in such anthologies as The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002, THE BODY: AN ESSAY continues to challenge conventional notions of plot and narrative, genre and form, theory and practice, unremittingly questioning the presumptive boundaries between reflection, imagination, and experience.

    Ever commanding, luminous, and controversial, Nikki Giovanni speaks truth to power on issues of social justice, racism, gender, violence, and justice.Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American culture and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni’s poetry has touched millions of readers worldwide, focusing a sharp eye on politics, racial inequality, violence, gender, social justice and African-American life. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.“One of her best collections to date.” —Essence

    

    From one of our most esteemed contemporary poets, a collection of essays about reading and poetics, written over many decades, and touching on many centuries. We expect poets to give a first-hand account of what poetry is. But some poets, when they write criticism, produce a kind of prose that is itself on the verge of being poetry. Valery, Stevens and Marianne Moore belong to this visionary company. And so does Barbara Guest, whose writings on poetry, collected here, are among the most inspiring works of their kind. It is a deep pleasure to know that such writing can still exist --John Ashbery.

    Also included are five other selected poems read by Dylan Thomas, including his well-known Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.Whether sharing his wistful memory of a holiday spent with people long past, or addressing the perennial problem of our mortality, Thomas gives us great pleasure in our personal and common memories while affirming life with a resounding "Yes!"Contents: A Child's Christmas in Wales and five poems: Fern Hill; Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night; In The White Giant's Thigh; Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait; Ceremony After a Fire Raid.

    The son of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan has been surrounded by poetry and poetics his entire life, a fact that was much noted after the publication of his first book, INTEGRITY & DRAMATIC LIFE (also available from SPD). But ZERO STAR HOTEL, while it will impress most of those early readers, may also suprise them. Taking family relationships, including the death of his step-father Douglas Oliver, as his subject matter, Berrigan's new work evinces a startling range and depth: acute anger, confusion, frustration, and stark awareness of the complexity of his poetic inheiritance. While these poems manage to practice the surreal playfulness Berrigan mastered at an early age, the context is darker, the clever phrases ever more ominous. "some say oblivion/ it is where you lose/ the stains on your ivory/ semi-see through/ untucked dress shirt/ but the stains/ they reappear/ on the other side/ and you will pay/ to have them removed" (from "Zero Star Hotel") Kevin Killian

    (You may even hear it yawning if the morning's just begun, watch its petals slowly open to embrace the rising sun.So put on your pith helmet and prepare to explore a wilderness of puns and rhymes where birds, beasts, vegetables, and flowers have been mysteriously scrambled together to create creatures you've never seen before –– and are unlikely to meet again! Your guides –– Jack Prelutsky, poet laureate of the elementary school set, and two–time Caldecott Honor artist Peter Sis – invite you to join them on an adventure you will never forget!Ages 4+

    These journeys were part of his religious training as a Buddhist monk as well as literary inspiration for his memorable and often painfully moving poems. The works he wrote during this time comprise a record of his quest for spiritual enlightenment.Although Santoka was master of conventional-style haiku, which he wrote in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently recorded the circumstances that had led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. In "For All My Walking, " master translator Burton Watson makes Santoka's life story and literary journeys available to English-speaking readers and students of haiku and Zen Buddhism. He allows us to meet Santoka directly, not by withholding his own opinions but by leaving room for us to form our own. Watson's translations bring across not only the poetry but also the emotional force at the core of the poems.This volume includes 245 of Santoka's poems and of excerpts from his prose diary, along with a chronology of his life and a compelling introduction that provides historical and biographical context to Taneda Santoka's work.

    However astonishing her subjects—from sideshow freaks to sadomasochistic fantasy—they ultimately emerge in this startling collection as moving images of the deepest levels of our shared humanity.

    In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.

    In this volume—the first major selection of Smith's poetry in more than thirty years—editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have presented an extensive array of poetic work that fully reveals Smith's exotic language, imaginative range, and metrical precision. Including work from as early as the precocious Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and as late as the posthumously published The Hill of Dionysus (1962), The Last Oblivion features such celebrated works as "Nero," "Ode to the Abyss," and Smith's exquisite elegies to his mentor George Sterling and to his colleague in fantasy, H. P. Lovecraft. Poems on Zothique, Averoigne, and Atlantis, realms in which many of his prose tales are set, are also featured. More than two dozen unpublished or uncollected poems, never previously included in any of Smith's books, make The Last Oblivion a must for Smith devotees. Two full-color illustrations by Clark Ashton Smith and an exhaustive glossary of unusual words and names used in Smith's poetry enhance the volume.

    Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.

    African American Studies. Charged, visionary poems from Nikky Finney, published by InnerLight Publishing out of Atlanta, Georgia. "A poem, when it works, is a rolling realization of ideas and emotion that takes you somewhere you've never been. Nikky Finney does that for me. Every now and then, I find myself in a room with a stage and there she is, reading poems, pulling me out pf myself and bringing me home. THE WORLD IS ROUND opens all of my doors and windows and airs me out with a cold and truthful wind"--Walter Mosley. "It is 1963 and I am a Black girl / in the South. One thing is for certain: / I do not trust white men"-from "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

    In this beautifully illustrated book, the artist combines photographs, paintings, and poems that span his artistic output from 1978 to 2002.

    Each poem explores important themes in Hughess life his lonely childhood, his love of language and travel, and his dream of writing poetry. Color illustrations throughout and extensive notes at the back of the book expand upon the poems, giving a broader picture of Hughess life and the time in which he lived.

    Encompassing a wide range of subject matter, while addressing concerns that emphasize the emotional, the political, and the philosophic, these poems all demonstrate a lyric integrity that is as responsive to the gravity of experience as it is to the pleasure one can find through the means of representing it.

    Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on: "In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was--as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark."Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose--"the change-of-life baby"--after the death of her mother: "The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with flour sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it." Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the place: "I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm." Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves.Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realize "I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep."

    Eliot Prize, this unique collection centres on a daughter's fraught relationship with her dying father, a man whose legacy to her was violence and abandonment. Rich in the imagery of the Amazonian jungle (fire ants, shaman masks, hummingbirds, shrunken heads, jaguars) these poems at once ward off and redeem the father through myriad transformations. In contrast, 'The Vineyard' series is inspired by the author's mother and by "...the last piece of wild land, / left to me by accident, by dream" - a family vineyard in France. These intense, vibrant and fiercely felt poems are sure to evoke strong responses in readers. Refusing oblique irony, quotidian props, cant or any pretensions to urban hipness, Pascale Petit takes considerable risks. With fierce courage, she not only survives the brutal facts of her past, but transmutes them, through vivid imagination, into art. The Zoo Father is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

    It comprises two previously published books, The Brother’s Country and The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, and two unpublished manuscript, closing with two late uncollected poems.

    T. Stepanek takes us on a journey with more the full collection of his moving poems.These poems share the rare wisdom that Mattie 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.

    After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and reading only to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks with a small press, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a winter solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's poems and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction -- a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. "Like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters." -- Thomas Pynchon "A rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism." -- The New York Times Book Review "Diverse, savvy, passionate.... Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that." -- Gary Snyder

    Haiku are clearly shown to be a means of discovering and recording the miracles of the world, from the humorous to the tragic. This is one of the major themes underlying Writing and Enjoying Haiku-that haiku can provide a way to a better life.After looking at why the reading and writing of haiku is important from a spiritual point of view, the book shows, as has never been done before, the techniques of writing-the when and the where, punctuation and capitalization, choice of words, figures of speech, sharing haiku, and much, much more.Having come this far, having learned to read and write haiku with a discerning mind, the reader will never again look upon the world in quite the same way.

    Triggered by a series of deaths in the poet's intimate circle, anchored in the deserts of the Spring Mountains of Nevada, this book is nonetheless replete with lush, still moments. Many of the poems begin as meditations on loss and then transform themselves, thanks to the poet's awareness of the spaciousness and openness of the void following grief. The attention to rhythm and the exploration of seen and unseen worlds lead the poet to find solace in the earthly rhythms of seasons' passage and seasonal rituals. Revell's sparse, experimental lines are soundings within which the music of language harnesses us to the present and its infinite resonance. Like Ives's notion of music heard through and against other music, Revell's words and images well up against each other and a profound language of images, meter and rhythm emerges.

    "Here's the room. We're here./ We're late for the wedding.../There's nobody here now but the bride." This book demonstrates Alice Notley's early-on success playing with longer poetry/prose structures, and marks the book-length debut for Notley's engrossing experiments with voices, inside and outside, the real wedding guests. The reissue of this long out-of-print book of dialogues invites perusal by new generations of readers lured by the sound of her highly original new forms.

    Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process.CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

    She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.

    The scope and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. Aridjis's sources range from Nahuatl chants and Huichol initiation songs to San Juan de la Cruz and the 16th-century Spanish poet Luis de Gongora y Argote. He is, in the words of translator George McWhirter, "a troubadour of love for lost environments, a voice in the wilderness of Mexico City and Mexico." Included in this selection are poems by Aridjis evoking his own life, present and past, his memories always sticking close to his birthplace Contepec, where, on Altamirano Hill, the Monarch butterflies arrive each year. This long awaited Selected Poems enables the reader to witness, from his 1960 collection The Eyes ora Double Vision to new unpublished poems -- in a bilingual edition -- the poetic and personal evolution of this "visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces" (Kenneth Rexroth).

    An ambivalent figure who stayed in Germany under the Nazis but was himself repressed by them, Benn came to be considered a great national writer after the war. While Supervert considers Benn mostly overrated, his early Expressionist verse — particularly the Morgue cycle — is matchless for its economy, precision, and irony. Walter Kaufmann, the famous translator of Nietzsche, wrote that its "shocking power," which was "far greater than that of most beatnik poetry," was due to the "brutal honesty of an unprecedented perception."

    "In poems that both honor and transcend his blue-collar roots, BJ Ward blends poignancy and humor with downright good storytelling, and takes his place among the bright up-and-coming voices of his generation."â��Stephen Dunn, Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

    The poems vary in tone from the fairly serious to the reflective and meditative, to the wryly comic. Perhaps it is fair to say that this range of tones exists within many of the individual poems, and is their defining characteristic. Poems like "What I Want," and "The Good Kiss" are good examples of these quirky, rather unexpected tonal shifts and blendings.

    The overall theme is loss, both the social loss from the disappearance of communities due to the external effects of technology, and the personal loss from the death of a family member. The book is divided into five sections with the first and last dealing with the social impacts of the flooding of the Jocassee Valley on the border of North and South Carolina. As in his other books, Rash is very precise in his use of language, with the prosody being informed by Welsh forms. Many of the poems use a style of syllabic verse featuring seven- syllable lines with internal echos, but most readers will not notice the craftsmanship of these poems because they flow so naturally. There is great narrative intensity in these poems with short poems of short lines telling detailed and vivid stories.

    "Cecelia Woloch reinvents herself as a gypsy fire of language, a 'single word' set flaming as a daring, dancing lyric conflagration in the reader's hand"— Carol Muske-Dukes.

    During his teenage years in Brixton, Johnson witnessed serial episodes of racial abuse and joined the Black Panthers movement in protest. There, he learned his history and culture, but found his own outlet.”—Caroline Frost, BBC FourLinton Kwesi Johnson is the most influential black poet in Britain. The author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things.Contains a full-length CD of Johnson reading.

    We at Zoo are eminently pleased to have such a fine book of verse for our inaugural Kenyon Review Prize volume. Fennelly's poems are well poised in their witty and sometime sassy ruminations, often "maximalist" in their scope (see "From L' HUtel Terminus Notebooks") and the pleasure one takes within them is of the rarest breed: it is the pleasure of unexpected revelation. Open House comes introduced by series judge and Kenyon Review poetry editor, David Baker.

    Boogers. Stinky boys. These are the things of childhood, and they're all here in this outrageous collection of poems that look at the world through a child's eyes. Featuring everything from the Giant Children of the title-who flip pages with amazing speed-to a turtle named Jaws, the poetry included here is rambunctious, irreverent, funny, and sometimes even gross. Tedd Arnold, creator of the beloved Parts and More Parts, and Brod Bagert are good friends who have happily teamed up-with hilarious results.

    Art. Includes drawings by the writer. Cecilia Vicuña's INSTAN is composed in handwritten lines that move across the page with the instantaneous feeling of marks in a private journal, the bookt ransmits the energy of her performative works, where thread and poetic lines play at being one. The word/drawings are certain and fragile. In their power to preserve and transform, they offer hope in art and daily speech for radical change. "Cecilia Vicuña, born and raised in Santiago de Chile, has been an exile since the early 1970s. Vicuna has never accepted the boundaries between cultural disciplines, creating a terrain of her own ..." Lucy Lippard, "The Precarious" The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña."

    The book opens with a group of new poems, including “What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?”—a question that has kept Ponsot’s work vital for more than five decades. Throughout the selections from her four earlier books and a trove of previously unpublished work covering the years 1946 to 1971, she offers us a “lost haven in a springing world.” Sometimes sharp in her self-perception, but always listing toward pleasure and elegance, unafraid of grief and the passage of time, Ponsot continually refreshes her language and the spirited self from which it emerges.From the Hardcover edition.

    Titles are: Heartsongs, Journey Through Heartsongs, and Hope Through Heartsongs.

    Asian American Studies. Truong Tran's work seems to me to be part of a literary undertaking that has both sociological and aesthetic implications. Along with writers like Pamela Lu and Renee Gladman, Tran is advancing the interrelated questions of narration, historiography, and identity and establishing something new in American culture as well as in American literature, DUST AND CONSCIENCE speaks of a cultural position that simultaneously and from the start resists both marginalization and assimilation. The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work--it explains why the writing is, and must be, simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric. Something extremely important is going on, something wonderful.--Lyn Hejinian

    Includes biographical notes, a key to Roman transcription, a list of titles or first lines, and a glossary of Urdu words in Roman script.

    Informed throughout by Milton's Paradise Lost, Johnson's poems burst with the flora and fauna of a magnificently imagined landscape, and gain their power from the incomparable language she uses to describe it. This language is itself an organism in her writing, grown from its own seed, its "vowels blooming like necessary globes/with sharp, consonantal edges." Her voice is wholly new and unique; Leviathan with a Hook heralds the arrival of one of the new standard-bearers of American verse.

    The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto—love, faith, hope, truth—might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices—exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence—gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.

    The late Nizar Kabbani's selected poems appear here in English for the first time. So popular is he that one of his poems is the greatest love song in the Arab world, recorded by the legendary Egyptian singer Um Khaslsoum and played on virtually every taxi's radio across the Middle East.

    Born in 1918 in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, in a zamindar family, Azmi wrote his first poem at the age of eleven. He joined the Communist Party when he was nineteen, and wrote for the Party paper, Quami Jung. Subsequently, he moved to Bombay, and wrote his first lyric for the film Buzdil, directed by Shahid Latif, in 1948. A member of the Progressive Writersý movement, Azmi has been an active spokesperson for several workersý unions and works passionately to rectify social injustices even today. The richness of experience and maturity of perspective is captured in his poems, which reflect the many aspects of Azmiýman, lover, activist and poet. Some of his best verses are about the plight of the exploited, like the famous ýMakaaný which highlights a system where the poor, homeless footpath dwellers build palaces for the rich. At the other end of the spectrum are his love poems, including memorable lyrics for films that haunt the reader with their tenderness and contained passion. Azmiýs preoccupation with such disparate themes are indicative as much of his zest for life as his sincerity and honesty of experience. Brilliantly translated by Pavan K. Varma, this bilingual selection brings to a wider audience the wisdom and lyricism of Azmiýs poetry.

    Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from "Gathering the Bones Together"A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."—The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr:Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 • CUSA

    Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in."Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Milosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: "Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth."

    "Taking her cues from folktale, legend, and fable, Elizabeth Robinson has reinvented the 'uses of enchantment.’ She shows, with a minimalist's precision and a logician's attention to linguistic morphology, how the often bleak agenda of the real capitulates to the moral restitution of the true; how our need to tell stories enjambs faith and enlightenment."--Ann Lauterbach.

    In its soundings of a wide range of poets -- Irish and British, American and Eastern European, predecessors and contemporaries -- Finders Keepers is, as its title indicates, "an announcement of both excitement and possession."

    The bulk of her poems appear in numerous, at times vastly different published versions. For Moore, no text was ever stable or finished; each opportunity to publish offered an opportunity to revise. Becoming Marianne Moore gives scholars and readers access to the multiple variant versions of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924. An innovative, deeply contextualized facsimile edition of the poet's published early verse, it brilliantly demonstrates that modernist textuality is not a fixed, static product but an ongoing, fluid process.Becoming Marianne Moore offers readers a full facsimile reprint of the first edition of Observations (1924), the book that garnered Moore the Dial Award for Literature and solidified her reputation as a modernist poet of note. The reprint is followed by a collection of facsimiles that presents each of Moore's poems published between 1907 and 1924 as it first appeared in a modernist little magazine. Each facsimile is accompanied by a variorum table that gives scholars quick access to all of the published changes that Moore made to each poem and a series of brief bibliographical notes that supply information about the immediate publication contexts of all of the presentations of the poem. These notes, in turn, point readers to narrative accounts of Moore's associations with her early publishers that offer a range of historical, contextual, biographical, and bibliographic information about the publication events of Moore's poems and explore her attempts to shape her literary career in concert with some of her most famous modernist peers--Richard Aldington, H.D., Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.A wonderful fusion of historical research and critical sensitivity, Becoming Marianne Moore will change the way people think about Moore's verse and modernist textuality in general. A powerful intervention into Moore studies, it gives readers a broader sense of the poet's complex and brilliant career.

    The charming poems, each one dedicated to a different king or queen, tell the story of the forty-one English monarchs from William I to Elizabeth II in a humorous and charming way that has delighted generations of children and their parents. This CD, read by actors Isla Blair and Julian Glover, includes Kings and Queens in its entirety, as well as a selection from the Farjeons’ Heroes and Heroines, an account of the deeds of heroes and heroines from around the world, including Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Robin Hood, Christopher Columbus, Sir Francis Drake, George Washington, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, and Buffalo Bill, among others.

    It is rare to come across a first book that embraces the world--the way we see it, and the way it can be imagined--with such a wise and graceful mixture of humor, loss, intelligence, wit, self-deprecation and hope. AMERICAN LINDEN is such a first collection. The poems in this book are valuable, even necessary. They are, in the most important sense, love poems: to people, to ideas, to feelings, and to the mind itself, which--by means of language--move with honesty, wit, and distinction among the fleeting things of this world. Matthew Zapruder is a dangerous poet; his poems implicate us in demonstrations of lift-off and escape velocity while also proving the calamity of gravity--Dean Young.

    Accompanied by a discussion with poet Benjamin Hollander, from the warring factions bears out award winning novelist Lynne Tillman's assertion that Ammiel Alcalay is "a unique and important figure in contemporary world literature." And the great Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris has called him a "visionary writer and poet." Author of After Jews and Arabs (Village Voice Top 25; London Independent Top 10, 1993), the cairo notebooks, and Memories of Our Future (Village Voice Top 25, 1999), Edward Said has called Alcalay "that rare thing— a gifted prose writer, poet, and accomplished intellectual."

    Memoir. These parallel reports from two writers long together (and occasionally collaborating) show characteristic differences, both of background and of style. Rosmarie meditates on early years in Germany during World War II and the way her world was changed, first by a bombing raid, then by learning about the Nazi regime, and by emigration to the U.S. Keith wanders from a Midwestern childhood, through a Southern fundamentalist high school and college as a pre-med student, to encounters in Michigan, New England and Europe."What is remarkable are the stories: a unique cultural history of the American avant-garde, a double K�nstlerroman, scattered shots of the post-war milieu.... It is a slight, charming volume that will appeal to those with an interest in people and poetry. It is also easy to read."--Andrew DuBois"The book's candor and vivacity are made new in both autobiographies, and should inspire, both in newcomers and weathered enthusiasts of their work, a great deal of respect."--Max Winter

    These selections represent the finest works of the world's most eminent poets.

    Never was the phenomenon more clearly marked than in that war we still know as the Great War. Hundreds of what came to be known as the war poets saw their work in print between 1914 and 1918; others - including some of the best - were not published until afterwards. That rather unsatisfactory label includes very different kinds of writers - Owen and Sassoon, with their poems of passionate indignation, are a far cry from Edward Thomas's bleak and oblique rural ruminations. In this collection Stallworthy has gathered some of the most moving and unforgettable poetry born out of the horror of the trenches. He includes brief accounts of the lives and work of 12 of the most powerful of those poets who experienced and wrote about the worst war the world has ever known.

    In C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, he trains his hallmark lyrical intensity on the dark underbelly of addiction and takes us on an unforgettable guided tour of the darkest corners of a brutal, unjust world. C-Train is a heartstopping series of episodes from the life of Dream-boy, a young man who finds himself seduced, and later enslaved, by the siren song of cocaine. Part paean to the delicious power of intoxication, part lament for those helplessly under its power, C-Train is a ride its hero, and the reader, struggle to get off. In Thirteen Mexicans, Baca writes of the Chicano community and the gulf between the American dream and American reality. In searing, elegiac vignettes he portrays the raw beauty of life in the barrio and the surreal, stomach-turning moment when people of color must confront how they are reflected in the distorted mirror of white society. Giving voice to the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, Baca illuminates the most unforgiving landscapes; yet his is a vision tempered by a searching hopefulness that brings these collections inching toward redemption. Baca's latest achievement will confirm his place as one of the nation's leading poets, a poet whose words "heal, inspire, and elicit the earthly response of love" (Garrett Hongo). "[Baca] writes with ... an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events." -- Denise Levertov

    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

    It was the first of many albums Thomas was to record for Caedmon. This recording launched not only Caedmon, but the spoken-word industry as well.Here, at long last, in celebration of 50 years of spoken-word publishing, Caedmon presents "Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection.This collection includes Thomas' poetry: "Fern Hill" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," his prose: "Adventures in the Skin Trade and "Quite Early One Morning, and his final work -- "Under Milk Wood, a play. The recording of "Under Milk Wood included here is the only one in existence with Dylan Thomas in the cast. It owes its remarkable existence to the serendipitous placement of a microphone at center stage minutes before the curtain was raised.

    Reversing the order and outlook of Dante's "Divine Comedy," Seidel's three-book series begins in the heavens (with "The Cosmos Poems") and then descends steeply--through the Purgatory of "Life on Earth," the second volume--to at last arrive at home, in Manhattan, with its famous area code.

    The effects of that experience wind through the poet's work in poems about the survival of the spirit in the face of personal and political tragedy.Looking for Poetry also contains the simple and haunting poems of the Quechua Indians.

    Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present. In Van Clief-Stefanon’s powerful voice, last night’s angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits." She remembers a child’s innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.

    One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape.Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?Sina Queyras's latest collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she now resides.

    A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review. "Hearing poetry spoken by the poet is always a unique illumination. This series opens our ears to some of the most passionate utterances and enthralling performances ever recorded."--Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, Poetry"There has been a great need for a well-edited audio series for poetry, with high literary and technical quality. J. D. McClatchy has filled this need with great style."--Robert Pinsky

    "Dhompa's potent suite of poems elucidates and vocalizes the humanness and adversities of the Tibetan diaspora. The praxes of exile and passage— literal and as in 'rites of...'— are enacted here, soothing complex dynamics of family and 'house.' The moveable hearth is a map of rare ritual and unique, curious attentions. You enter the immigrant girl-child's bifurcated world, coming and going, language to language, culture to culture, from childhood to sexuality, taking Dhompa's ride in her elegantly adopted American-English poet's 'tongue.'"— Anne Waldman.

    Braiding theoretic concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity.WANTING IN ARABIC attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition. "Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change; it's a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous"--Erin Moure. "This is a beautiful and disturbing collection of poems, writing from the uncharted langscape of the third sex"--Mary Di Michele.

    Combining a cool gaze with a precise clarity of expression, the verse is muscular and delicate, spare and musical. From "that net of birds / that moves / unloosened / under bridges at dusk" to "the sea / wrecking itself against the rocks," Robertson is a master of evocative depiction. Filled with an irrepressible zest for life, he traces the arc of loss, the search for grace, and the radiance and shadows of life with a subtlety that is at once exhilarating and sensual.