THE COLLECTED POETRY OF NIKKI GIOVANNI will include the complete volumes of five adult books of poetry: Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement, My House, The Women and the Men, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds.Nikki self–published her first book Black Feeling, Black Talk/BlackJudgement in 1969, selling 10,000 copies; William Morrow published in 1970. Know for its iconic revolutionary phrases, it is heralded as one of the most important volumes of modern African–American poetry and is considered the seminal volume of Nikki's body of work.My House (Morrow 1972) marks a new dimension in tone and philosphy––This is Giovanni's first foray into the autobiographical.In The Women and the Men (Morrow 1975), Nikki displays her compassion for the people, things and places she has encountered––She reveres the ordinary and is in search of the extraordinary.Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (Morrow 1978) is one of the most poignant and introspective of all Giovanni's collections. These poems chronicle the drastic change that took place during the 1970s––when the dreams of the Civil Rights era seemed to have evaporated.Those Who Ride the Night Winds (Morrow 1983) is devoted to "the day trippers and midnight cowboys," the ones who have devoted their lives to pushing the limits of the human condition and shattered the constraints of the stautus quo.

    She adds two beautifully crafted essays, "Owls," selected for the Best American Essays series, and "Bird," one that will surely take its place among the classics of the genre.

    Everything, he points out, is indeed waiting for us, including our own demise and the demise of those we love. In less eloquent hands, this wisdom might feel burdensome, but in Whyte's language and imagery, these poems convey the beauty inherent in impermanence. Its second chapter, Thresholds, charts the experience of death of a loved one, and Friends, Marriage, Chances and Returns celebrate and explore the relationships, including the relationship with ourself, that accompany us along the journey, for however short or long we're given.

    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

    "Ted's poetry became overwhelmingly vivid," Harrison recalls. "Then we decided to correspond in short poems, because that was the essence of what we wanted to say to each other.""Braided Creek" contains over 300 poems exchanged in this longstanding correspondence. Wise, wry, and penetrating, the poems touch upon numerous subjects, from the natural world to the nature of time. Harrison and Kooser decided to remain silent over who wrote which poem, allowing their voices, ideas, and images to swirl and merge into this remarkable suite of lyrics.Each time I go outside the worldis different. This has happened all my life. * The moon put her handover my mouth and told meto shut up and watch. *A nephew rubs the sore feetof his aunt, and the rope that lifts us all toward gracecreaks on the pulley. *Under the storyteller's hatare many heads, all troubled. Jim Harrison, one of America's best-loved writers, is author of two dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, food criticism, and memoir. He is best known for a collection of novellas, "Legends of the Fall," and the epic novel "Dalva." He lives in western Montana and southern Arizona.Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poetry and a prose memoir. His poetry appears regularly in "The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry," and "The Nation." He lives in Nebraska.

    Their words reach past the outer divisions to the universal currents of love and revelation that move and inspire us all. These poems urge us to wake up and love. They also call on us to relinquish our grip on ideas and opinions that confine us and, instead, to risk moving forward into the life that is truly ours.In his selection, Roger Housden has placed strong emphasis on contemporary voices such as the American poet laureate Billy Collins and the Nobel Prize–winners Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, but the collection also includes some timeless echoes of the past in the form of work by masters such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson.The tens of thousands of readers of Roger Housden’s “Ten Poems” series will welcome this beautiful harvest of poems that both open the mind and heal the heart.

    On Midlife and the Great Unknown, you will engage with poetic imagination as it was meant to be experienced: as your companion and guide for the challenging terrain of midlife. Join this Yorkshire-born poet and bestselling author to explore:Radical simplification—an invitation to sit in silent reflection and observation • Using your poetic imagination to navigate life's cycles of loss and joy• Honoring who you are right now, including your skills and limitations, and moreThe language of poetry can emancipate you into the next phase of your existence, teaches David Whyte. It can help you break through obstacles and give you courage to take necessary risks. Drawing from the wisdom of fellow poets Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Seamus Heaney, Whyte invites you to boldly engage in a conversation with the second half of your life on Midlife and the Great UnknownNote: Excerpted from the full-length audio course Clear Mind, Wild Heart.

    "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon": the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in México welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity. Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember."To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed."—Barbara Kingsolver "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States."—Sandra Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Espada is—his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. "—Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully crafted gems."—Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that makes [Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes."—Booklist"Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada."—San Francisco Chronicle

    The Office constructs propositions and documents for the advancement of a natural history of civic surface. Three books of Robertson's poetry have been published: XEclogue (Tsunami Editions, 1993, reissued by New Star, 1999) Debbie: An Epic (1997, nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry) and The Weather (2001) (both co-published by New Star in Canada and Reality Street in the U.K.). Her prose has appeared in Cabinet, Front, Jacket, Mix, Collapse, Nest magazine, and many art catalogs and monographs.

    Here in All Day Permanent Red is doomed Hector, the lion, "slam-scattering the herd" at the height of his powers. Here is the Greek army rising with a sound like a "sky-wide Venetian blind." Here is an arrow's tunnel, "the width of a lipstick," through a neck. Like Homer himself, Logue is quick to mix the ancient and the new, because his Troy exists outside time, and no translator has a more Homeric interest in the truth of battle, or in the absurdity and sublimity of war.

    In today’s world it is deceptively easy to lose sight of our direction and the things that matter and give us joy. How quickly the days can slip by, the years all gone, and we, at the end of our lives, mourning the life we dreamed of but never lived. These ten poems, and Roger Housden’s reflections on them, urge us to stand once and for all, and now, in the heart of our own life.This volume brings together the voices of Thomas Merton, David Whyte, the Basque poet Miguel de Unamuno, Anna Swir from Poland, Stanley Kunitz, the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, and Jane Hirshfield, as well as three of Housden’s favorites, Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye. His luminous essays on the poems show us how to integrate the poets’ truth into our own lives.Roger Housden’s love of poetry and life leaps from every page—so much so that his readers feel they have found a guide and mentor through the extraordinary Ten Poems series. He has opened the eyes and hearts of many, not just to the power of poetry, but to the truth and beauty of the life of the soul. What more can one ask?

    This new volume from Roger Housden features a few of the same poets as his extraordinarily moving Ten Poems to Change Your Life, such as Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda, along with contributions from Sharon Olds, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Denise Levertov, and others. Any one of the ten poems and, indeed, any one of Housden’s reflections on them, can open, gladden, or pierce your heart. Through the voices of these ten inspiring poets, and through illustrations from his own life, Housden expresses the tenderness, beauty, joys, and sorrows of love, the presence of which, more than anything else, gives human existence its meaning.As Housden says in his eloquent introduction, “Great poetry happens when the mind is looking the other way and words fall from the sky to shape a moment that would normally be untranslatable. . . . When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.â€

    These unique expressions of Truth are both a celebration of life and an invitation to the deep and joyful surrender into the Self. Although awakened in the Zen tradition, his teachings spring spontaneously from emptiness, free of any tradition or ideology, and touch the heart in the tradition of the great mystic poets, Rumi and Hafiz.

    Modernized spelling, extensive notes, and a helpful introduction make the text immediately accessible to the modern reader.

    Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

    Edited by one of our most respected contemporary poets, Robert Creeley, who provides an informative introduction, George Oppen's Selected Poems includes Oppen's only known essay, "A Mind's Own Place," as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments" which Oppen wrote on envelopes and scraps of paper and posted to his wall, edited by Stephen Cope. Also incorporated is a helpful chronology and bibliography of his writings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, celebrated editor of Oppen's letters. On his death, Hugh Kenner wrote, "George Oppen, gentlest of men...prized what took time, found the grain of materials, exacted accuracy." Oppen's Selected Poems is the perfect text for teaching and a remarkable window into a world of lasting light and clarity.

    Latin American Studies. Translated from the Spanish by William Rowe. INRI responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, that was neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, "the stones cry out."

    So, for that matter, do we all. ?Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage InequalitiesWhen reasoned argument fails, poetry helps us make sense of life. A few well-chosen images, the spinning together of words creates a way of seeing where we came from and lights up possibilities for where we might be going....Dip in, read, and ponder; share with others. It's inspiration in the very best sense. ?Deborah Meier, co-principal of The Mission Hill School, Boston and founder of a network of schools in East Harlem, New YorkIn the Confucian tradition it is said that the mark of a golden era is that children are the most important members of the society and teaching is the most revered profession. Our jour ney to that ideal may be a long one, but it is books like this that will sustain us - for who are we all at our best save teachers, and who matters more to us than the children? ?Peter M. Senge, founding chair, SoL (Society for Organizational Learning) and author of The Fifth DisciplineThose of us who care about the young and their education must find ways to remember what teaching and learning are really about. We must find ways to keep our hearts alive as we serve our students. Poetry has the power to keep us vital and focused on what really matters in life and in schooling. Teaching with Fire is a wonderful collection of eighty-eight poems from such well-loved poets as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda. Each of these evocative poems is accompanied by a brief story from a teacher explaining the significance of the poem in his or her life's work. This beautiful book also includes an essay that describes how poetry can be used to grow both personally and professionally.Teaching With Fire was written in partnership with the Center for Teacher Formation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Royalties from this book will be used to fund scholarship opportunities for teachers to grow and learn.

    . . . This is Kahf's ultimate message: that religion and ethnicity and color and nationality are as nothing in the face of simple humanity; that spirituality and life are beyond all of these, that no creed or ideology may be taken as justification for harm."--Lisa Suhair Majaj   Kahf establishes herself as a new voice in the tradition of ethnic American poets, blending the experiences of recent Arab-American immigrants into contemporary American scenery.  In her poems, Muslim ritual and Qur'anic vocabulary move in next door to the idiom of suburban Americana, and the legendary Scheherazad of the Thousand and One Nights shows up in New Jersey, recast as a sophisticated postcolonial feminist. Kahf’s carefully crafted poems do not speak only to important issues of ethnicity, gender, and religious diversity in America, but also to universal human themes of family and kinship, friendship, and the search for a place to pray.  She chronicles the specific griefs and pleasures of the immigrant and writes an amulet for womanly power in the face of the world’s terrors. Her poetic energy is provocative and sassy, punctuated now and then with a darker poem of elegiac sadness or refined rage.Mohja Kahf is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas.

    For the first time ever in English, here is the complete text, with an introduction and extensive notes by renowned translator, Red Pine. Over one hundred poets are represented in this bilingual edition, including many of China’s celebrated poets: Li Pai, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Wang Po, and Ou-yang Hsiu.Poems of the Masters was compiled during the Sung dynasty (960–1278), a time when poetry became the defining measure of human relationships and understanding.As Red Pine writes in his introduction: "Nothing was significant without a poem, no social or ritual occasion, no political or personal event was considered complete without a few well-chosen words that summarized the complexities of the Chinese vision of reality and linked that vision with the beat of their hearts . . . [Poetry’s] greatest flowering was in the T’ang and Sung, when suddenly it was everywhere: in the palace, in the street, in every household, every inn, every monastery, in every village square.""Chiupu River Song" by Li PaiMy white hair extends three milesthe sorrow of parting made it this longwho would guess to look in a mirrorwhere autumn frost comes fromRed Pine (the pen name of writer and independent scholar Bill Porter) is one of the world’s most respected translators of Chinese literature, bringing into English several of China’s central religious and literary texts: Taoteching, The Diamond Sutra, Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, and Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

    As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

    Thirty years later, this thorough and sensitive revision freshly renders the remarkable range of styles, subjects, and voices in English-language poetry, from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Carol Ann Duffy and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first century.With 195 poets and 1,596 poems, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry richly represents the major figures—Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Hughes, Olson, Bishop, Larkin, Plath, Rich, Heaney, and Walcott, among others. It also gives full voice to postcolonial and transnational poets, ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, and the long poem. Each volume concludes with a Poetics section that provides essential contexts for reading the poems.With substantially new introductions, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies by the award-winning scholar and teacher Jahan Ramazani, this anthology is indispensable for all who love poetry. Two volumes, slipcased.

    Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays "Immanence" and "Work and Love" and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel—who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century--she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing," situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism. Whether discussing Weil, Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.

    D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical abomination. This book, while angry and sorrowful and bewildered, has humor, constant levity and candor, and countless moments of incredible beauty." —Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence.”—The New YorkerInspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons—where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a “factotum” for a portrait photographer—One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and “counts” of things—from baby’s teeth to chigger bites:Count your folding moneyCount the times you said you wouldn’t go backCount your debtsCount the roaches when the light comes onCount your kids after the housefireOne Big Self—originally published as a large-format limited edition that featured photographs and text—was selected by The New York Times and The Village Voice as a notable book of the year. This edition features the poem exclusively.C.D. Wright is the author of ten books of poetry, including several collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. She is a professor at Brown University.

    Where dawning genius never met the day, Where useless ignorance slumbers life awayUnknown nor heeded, where low genius triesAbove the vulgar and the vain to rise.--from "Helpstone""I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare is the first anthology of the great "peasant poet"'s remarkable verse that makes available the full range of his accomplishments. Here are the different Clares that have beguiled readers for two centuries: the tender chronicler of nature and childhood; the champion of folkways in the face of oppression; the passionate, sweet-tongued love-poet; and the lonely visionary confined, in old age and senility, to asylums.

    Winner of the 2003 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, judged by Joe Wenderoth, who comments, in his introduction: There are many ways to hear 'it takes off the top of my head.' For me, the most important way to hear it is: it makes me suddenly and oddly aware that I am alive--aware that I am simultaneously at the end and the beginning of my power, which is simply to be there and to say so. Foust's poems do this for me; I feel akin to the mute struggler that lurks all around these poems that eludes so many attempts at saying that and where and how he is. The struggle is, in my view, dignified -- never self-congratulatory, never self-pitying -- and it has produced sounds for us to come back to--sounds for us to set out from--Joe Wenderoth, from the introduction.

    T. Stepanek has won the hearts of millions with his inspiring poems from his first two New York Times bestsellers. Now he's ready to spread a little love with Loving Through Heartsongs, a beautiful collection of poems written about innocence and trusting love from a child's perspective. Mattie's struggle with muscular dystrophy has never kept him from feeling deep love for his family, friends, country, and faith--heartfelt emotions that are reflected throughout these pages.

    Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura. I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

    This anthology serves as an introduction to Jeffers's work for the general reader and for students in courses on American poetry. Jeffers composed each volume of his verse around one or two long narrative or dramatic poems. The Wild God of the World follows this practice: in it, Cawdor, one of Jeffers's most powerful narratives, is surrounded by a representative selection of shorter poems. At the end of the book, the editor has provided revealing statements about Jeffers's poetry and poetics, and about his philosophy of nature and human nature.

    In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain.This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn Buck, who is an American political prisoner, exiled in her own land.Cristina Peri Rossi is the author of thirty-seven works, including The Ship of Fools.

    His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

    The book encourages children to listen, read, and learn. Full color illustrations.

    Part tragedy, part comedy, these poems reflect Raworth's view of life's fated inevitabilities. His sense of modern urgency plays against a similar sense of readiness in the spirit of Shelley and Byron. His eager verse will both challenge and fascinate those who wish to understand the value of British poetry.

    The city was a place of endless possibility, and he captured the pace and rhythms, the quandaries and exhilarations of city life. This selection of his work is edited by Mark Ford.

    Giovanni gives searing commentary on Spike Lee and the making of Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, affirmative action, President JFK and the state of urban schools. Racism 101 adds an important chapter to the debate on American national values. Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988) received the Ohioana Library Award. In it Nikki’s esays and articles take on the loftiness of higher education and personal major life crises. In Gemini (1971), Giovanni explores one of the most tumultuous periods in our history. Her essays take us from her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, through her work in the Black revolution of the sixties, to her emergence as an acclaimed poet. Nikki interweaves warm recollections of her personal history with incisive vignettes of cultural and political history, including her often surprising opinions of Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Lena Horne, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and others.

    Seeking cures through language—with the help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language itself—she was, as Henry Munn describes her, "a genius [who] emerges from the soil of the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a native Mexican campesino people." She may also have been, in the words of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, "the greatest visionary poet in twentieth-century Latin America." These selections include a generous presentation from Sabina's recorded chants and a complete English translation of her oral autobiography, her vida, as written and arranged in her native language by her fellow Mazatec Alvaro Estrada. Accompanying essays and poems include an introduction to "The Life of María Sabina" by Estrada, an early description of a nighttime "mushroom velada" by the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, an essay by Henry Munn relating the language of Sabina's chants to those of other Mazatec shamans, and more.

    "Graham Foust has an unerring sense of the exact contours of a particular thought and is able to express them with mathematical precision and emotional delicacy; yet pushing against lyric constraint is wildness, uneasiness, sometimes terror"— Susan Howe

    By arranging the poems chronologically, Makoto Ueda has created an overview of the way in which this enigmatic seventeen-syllable form has been used and experimented with during different eras. At the same time, the reader is admitted to the often marginalized world of female experience in Japan, revealing voices every bit as rich and colorful, and perhaps even more lyrical and erotic, than those found in male haiku.

    This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and the children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's poetry is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.

    Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shaped their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longingsexual and filialand on the poet's Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.

    LGBTQIA Studies. Stacy Szymaszek places her readers in a border situation. Here is a poetics of extreme condensation. 'ink a hinge here/ 'n here/ 'n mother/ make me limber.' Where traces are, lines remain. Magic is implicated in every shot and countershot. This is idiosyncratic and stunning work.--Susan HoweEach poem is what I am looking for: a resonance with a particular location, an intelligence unafraid of its humanity, a sort of desperate adequacy with the people or objects that Szymaszek encounters.--Etel AdnanEMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS is a setting out into crucial waters. Each word here has its own weight and position--its own vital movement between poles of loss and discovery. With our sight-lines thus widened, the observance itself becomes activated--another mode of transport. A poetry of brevity is a tough task (especially the word-as-line), but in these pages it registers as achievement.--George AlbonThese stanza-pearls are dressed in tight corsets emulating a Roman, masculine brevity. Her use of craft ('last to touch / your craft') tells us shucks we are outside the law...--Julian T. BrolaskiReading EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS...one is lulled, as by waves, by narrow lines of verse flowing, page by page, most of them composed of only one or two words. The whole book takes seafaring as its m�tier, and this is both literal and metaphoric, historical and current, about craft and emotion.--Vincent KatzTo read EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS is to enter an unfixed universe of ideas with taut internal logic, multiple shifts in perspective, syntactic gaps, and a strapping, nearly epic synechdoche. It is a world where sensual juxtapositions abound and elude, keeping the reader off balance. The form is at once concrete and motion-filled... [D]rawings throughout the book act as cartography to mark our way through the unsettled whole, while Brenda Iijima's ghostly and panoramic cover art brings us right into the vortex of water's creative and destructive force.--Denise Nico Leto

    Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of contemporary American culture, Simic matches meditations on spiritual concerns and the weight of history with a nimble wit, shifting effortlessly to moments of clear vision and intense poetic revelation. Chosen as one of the New York Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2003, The Voice at 3:00 A. M. was also nominated for a National Book Award. The recipient of many prizes, Simic most recently received Canada's Griffin Prize. The poems in this collection--spanning two decades of his work--present a rich and varied survey of a remarkable lyrical journey.In the StreetBeauty, dark goddess,We met and partedAs though we parted not.Like two stopped watchesIn a dusty store window,One golden morning of time.

    There are 366 poems (one for each day of the year, and one for leap years), to delight, inspire and excite. Chosen for their magic and memorability, the poems in this anthology are an exultant mix of old and new from across the world, poems to learn by heart and take to heart.

    A Carnage in the Lovetrees begins at the moment the speaker reaches this realization. He resolves then to rebuild a world caught in the crosshairs of repeated annihilation, regrounding love as the only viable stratagem for survival. Richard Greenfield’s sequence of poems searches for a way to live in the aftermath of private trauma and public disaster. It represents a struggle to reconcile the historical with the present and to find a language that allows the speaker to endure past calamities. These relentless, acrobatic, and self-aware poems resist settling for easy solutions, or even closure, but instead push toward the difficult compromise of the livable.

    A long-awaited new title from Elizabeth Willis, who was born in 1961 in Awali, Bahrain and grew up primarily in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. She currently teaches at Wesleyan University after teaching for many years at Mills College in Oakland. "Nothing is moving but me: I'm a blackbird. The neighbor's in labor, but so am I, pushing against the road. Physics tells us nothing is lost, but I've been copping time from death and can't relent for every job the stars drop on my back"-from "September 9." SPD also carries THE HUMAN ABSTRACT, SECOND LAW, and A/O by Elizabeth Willis.

    Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade, is based on the poet's own retrospective Antologia Breve ("Brief Anthology") of 1998, expanded and edited for English-speaking readers by his longtime translator, Alexis Levitin.Marguerite Yourcenar spoke of "the well-tempered clavier" of Andrade's poems, Gregory Rabassa of his "succinct lyricism...summing things up in a moment, much like haiku." His verse, deeply rooted in the rural landscapes of his childhood and in the ancient Greek lyric, have the clarity of light on sand, radiating pagan intimations of immortality.

    With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.

    She left behind this anthology, chosen by her from the hundreds of poems that she used in her series of novels known as "The Lymond Chronicles". It contains an extensive collection of Renaissance poetry, featuring work by Thomas Wyatt and King James I, extracts from the Psalms and even an anonymous poem called "Monologue of a Drunkard". As Dorothy herself writes, here in one volume is "the poetry of love, of folk-humour and ballad, the songs of Persian poets and of the troubadours, translated where need be into English".

    Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado—like his contemporary Rilke—is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collection, the unparalleled translator Willis Barnstone, returns to the poet with whom he first started his distinguished career, offering a new bilingual edition which provides a sweeping assessment of Machado’s work. In addition, Border of a Dream includes a reminiscence by Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez and a foreword by John Dos Passos. from "Proverbs and Songs" Absolute faith. We neither are nor will be. Our whole life is borrowedWe brought nothing. With nothing we leave.*You say nothing is created?Don’t worry. With clayof the earth make a cupso your brother can drink. Born near Seville, Spain, Antonio Machado turned to a career in writing and translating in order to help support his family after the death of his father in 1893. His growing reputation as a poet led to teaching posts in various cities in Spain and, eventually, he returned to finish his degree from the University of Madrid in 1918. He remained in Madrid after the outbreak of civil war, committed to the Republican cause, but the violence finally forced him to flee. He died an exile in France. Willis Barnstone is one of America’s foremost translator-poets, bringing into English an extraordinary range of work, from Mao Tse-tung to the New Testament.

    The Answers Are Inside the Mountains lives up to those deceptively simple ethics, and confirms William Stafford's enduringly important voice for our uncertain age.William Stafford (1914-93) authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl, You Must Revise Your Life, Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.

    This volume brings together his significant writings in poetry and prose, and provides information on the life and times of Ghalib.

    But there is also joy in Sikelianos’s work. Amidst the fears and despair for her own life and those of her children, the author recognizes the beauty of nature of the fleetingness of the natural world: "summer summer summer thunder, thief, thief, thief in the night it’s something you love, it’s there only for you.

    . . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

    Weinberger begins with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), and includes translations by three other major U.S. poets -- William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder -- and an important poet-translator-scholar, David Hinton, all of whom have long been associated with New Directions. Moreover, it is the first general anthology ever to consider the process of translation by presenting different versions of the same poem by various translators, as well as examples of the translators rewriting themselves. The collection, at once playful and instructive, serves as an excellent introduction to the art and tradition of Chinese poetry, gathering some 250 poems by nearly 40 poets. The anthology also includes previously uncollected translations by Pound; a selection of essays on Chinese poetry by all five translators, some never published before in book form; Lu Chi's famous "Rhymeprose on Literature" translated by Achilles Fang; biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves; and also Weinberger's excellent introduction that historically contextualizes the influence Chinese poetry has had on the work of American poets.

    You'll go from tears to laughter with just one poem."

    Throughout a century of conflict he remained convinced that wars simply don’t work. In his writings, Stafford showed it is possible—and crucial—to think independently when fanatics act, and to speak for reconciliation when nations take sides. He believed it was a failure of imagination to only see two options: to fight or to run away.This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime’s commitment to nonviolence, including an account of Stafford’s near-hanging at the hands of American patriots. In excerpts from his daily journal from 1951-1991, Stafford uses questions, alternative views of history, lyric invitations, and direct assessments of our political habits to suggest another way than war. Many of these statements are published here for the first time, together with a generous selection of Stafford’s pacifist poems and interviews from elusive sources.Stafford provides an alternative approach to a nation’s military habit, our current administration’s aggressive instincts, and our legacy of armed ventures in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and beyond.

    

    His thousands of extemporaneously composed songs communicate complex ideas in a simple, lucid style. This volume features the best and most highly esteemed of the religious leader's songs of love and compassion that include lessons on the negative aspects of ambition and the importance of finding inner peace. In addition, he stresses the briefness of life: ". . . so apply yourself to meditation. Avoid doing evil, and acquire merit, to the best of your ability, even at the cost of life itself. In short: Act so that you have no cause to be ashamed of yourselves and hold fast to this rule."

    Asian-American. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of the very few poets writing in the United States today whose voice and writing style are immediately recognizable. In her new collection, NEST, the medium of her poetry continues to be the sentence. To the formalities of syntax and grammar she adds the structures of domestic architecture, isolation, health, desire, play, and family life. Her writing offers a unique poetics of metaphysics and manners. As always the poetry is sensuous and stunning, and Richard Tuttle has once again designed an arresting cover.

    He appeared at a crucial point in the history of Serbian literature, the turn of the century, when the era of Romantic and Realist poetry was coming to a close and another, Modernism, was just beginning. By introducing new themes and sources of inspiration, Ducic was instrumental in setting Serbian poetry on a new course. He was an aesthete, and cultivated refined tastes and an aristocratic spirit. He is the best known practitioner of "l'art pour l'art" in Serbian literature. In his poetry, he strove for formal excellence expressed through clarity, precision, elegance, musical quality, and picturesque images. His subject matter and unique style, reflecting the manner of French verse—Parnassian, Symbolist, Decadent. Unlike previous Serbian poets, who were either romantically or realistically oriented, Ducic was attracted to esoteric, sophisticated, thought-provoking, and soul-searching themes, creating his own lonely world of the imagination, and reacting to it. --Vasa D. Mihailovich, from the Introduction

    In playful narratives, lyrical outbursts, and overheard conversations, Hoagland cruises the milieu, exploring the spiritual vacancies of American satisfaction. With humor, rich tonal complexity, and aggressive moral intelligence, these poems bring pity to our folly and celebrate our resilience.

    "What good is poetry at a time like this?" Andrew Joron asks at the start of his book of poetry. "A kind of topological fold or failure (called a 'catastrophe' in mathematics) precedes the emergence- constitutes the emergency- of the New. If poetry 'makes language new, ' then it must be defined as the translation of emergency. Even politically engaged poetry represents (translates) the motion of social change more than it does the facts of social change"-FATHOM. Andrew Joron is also the author of SCIENCE FICTION, and THE REMOVES, both available from SPD

    In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power.The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters.The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

    When. 'In Losing the Blues, ' she writes, 'I could burn / the hands off a man, ' you have no doubt that she is singing a true song." --- Kim Addonizio

    Winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for PoetryPublished by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

    Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.

    H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to his Collected Earlier Poems (continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater.He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribesTentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,Comes to a minute point,Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,Preoccupied, intentOn a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant scriptIncised with twin steel blades and qualifiedPerfectly to express,With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly grippedBehind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,A glancing happiness.From the Hardcover edition.

    "Noah Eli Gordon can spin, scratch, sample, and dub to mix a sound all his own. THE FREQUENCIES tunes in desire, poetry, static, and laughter - all the while broadcasting with the intensity and joy of first things"--Peter Gizzi. "This is the new music - listen to it"--Lisa Jarnot.

    Kong is hip and horrendous, always terribly in love with a small screaming blonde, and still bearing the biggest, brightest heart that Hollywood has ever broken. Kong treads fortissimo where mortals fear to go and holds forth in these poems with the fresh, no-nonsense voice that makes Trowbridge one of poetry’s most cutting edge bards.

    For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term"blindsight" used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. "This is one reason," explains Waldrop, "for using collage: joining my fragments to other people's fragments in a dialogue, a net relation that might catch a bit more of the 'world.'" The collectionthe author's fourth with New Directionsis divided into four thematic sections. The first, "HÜlderlin Hybrids," resonates against the German poet's twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. "'As Were,'" says Waldrop, "began with looking at the secondary occupations of artistsfor example, Mallarme teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeauxbut this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures." The title section, "Blindsight," is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. "Cornell Boxes," in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem "box" composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.

    As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide,” and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods.From the Hardcover edition.

    In an examination of the savage, and savagely beautiful particularity of our existence, this is equally and essentially a poetry that respects, even as it implicates, the mystery and peril of speaking through one's own limited frame. A word might at one moment allude to the 'tracer' who exposes an image's delicate outline and then, at the next, to the 'tracer' rounds that lethally illuminate a target in the dark. These lyric poems are deeply ethical and austerely honest in their implication of, and reflections upon, the limits of morality and honesty. Nonetheless, this is also a poetry that seeks to emancipate the voice of witness from the generalities of despair through its exacting engagement with this world.

    The language of Small Arguments is simple yet there is nothing simple in its ideas. The work touches on the structures of argument, orchestrating material around repetition, variation and contrast. Thammavongsa's approach is like that of a scientist/philosopher, delicately probing material for meaning and understanding. The poet collects small lives, and argues for a larger belonging: a grain of dirt, a crushed cockroach, the eyes of a dead dragonfly. It is a work that suggests we can create with what we know and with that alone. -- "This is the voice of a pilgrim, the one who bends to see, leans to hear... Thammavongsa has distilled her meaning from her details so masterfully and with such confident wisdom that she seems to be reading nature. Through her eyes, we can believe we see the true meaning in things." - Anne Michaels"A formidable work." - George Elliot Clarke

    A CD featuring Waldman’s performance of her signature work accompanies this exhilarating and vital addition to American poetry. While reading these poems is essential, hearing the poet’s voice lift them off the page is transcendent. Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, cultural activist, professor, and author of over forty books. In an ongoing -mission to "make the world safe for poetry," she teaches seminars and -performs her work around the globe.

    The constant drive to make use of formal possibilities at the level of page and opening brings graphic format into substantive play... A machinic drive echoes in this work as a human, subjective voice struggles to come through the registers of current language events, noise, news, records, communications. The shape of human outcry presses through thr mass of mediated material. Form embodies possibilities enabled by the instructions of forced justification, font shifts, hard returns, tabs, chunked blocks, and other basic elements of text processing... Before we can ask what something means when we read it, we must ask what it means to read--and Edwards poses that as a high-stakes question providing the point of departure for current poetic production."-- Johanna Drucker.

    Lohren Green's POETICAL DICTIONARY concludes with chaos and begins with acrobatics. In between these he presents us with "both a book of words and a cosmos"; a linguistic gas cloud bounded by the universal and the particular. Green's project departs from the traditional dictionary, a peculiar contraption of sense and order. In the preface, he reviews the architectures of these teetering, teeming, linguistic edifices. His attitude towards words is almost that of a material scientist, exploding an individual specimen of language-"bulwark" "heft" "oyster" "purple" "torpid" "foreplay"--in order to ascertain its "synthesis of body and concept." Organized into SUBJECT WORD, PRONUNCIATION, ETYMOLOGY, and DEFINITION, each entry in the POETICAL DICTIONARY makes the traditional dictionary hiccup, divulging the stanza within the standard definition and the wiggle of wit in the pronunciation key. "addressable / glow unit of / information"--from "pixel."

    "THE LOVE BOOK", transcendental jewel of American Poetry, banned as part of an illegal program of harassment, arrests, and mass confiscations  instituted by then-governor Ronald Reagan, is back in all its notorious glory to claim its rightful place in San Francisco literary history.

    Woloch understands a person’s true -relationships with family, friends, and lovers arrive late—if at all. The exquisite pathos in these poems disclose Woloch’s abiding empathy for family, children, ex-lovers, and strangers.Born in Pittsburgh in 1956, Cecilia Woloch grew up in Pittsburgh and in Kentucky. She earned degrees in English and Theatre Arts from Transylvania University. Woloch has been active as a poet in the schools and teacher of creative writing workshops. She has received poetry prizes from The Wildwood Journal, Literal Latte, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

    "Paul Guest's poems are infused with tenderness toward the world despite its harsh indifference toward us. Literally and metaphorically, these are poems scratched out with a stick held between the teeth. And they manage to fashion, from life's rough lot, testaments of good faith to the flesh, the world, the word, and love in all its various garments"-Lucia Perillo. "Filled with irony, fantastic leaps of imagination and a poetic maturity most poets don't achieve for several books, this incredible debut works dialectically to resurrect our world among all its broken bodies. Here is a voice smart enough and sentient enough to know that the pain and the love of that world are two sides of the proverbial coin-a poet who, like Stevens' eagle, clearly sees the infinite alps of our emotions as a single nest"-Richard Jackson.

    Wise beyond her years and wildly creative, Varl must choose between the only life she's knownher Mamalee, her friends (especially her beloved Dob), the farmland she's explored since childhoodand her growing need for self-determination. Standing in her path, waiting to quash her spirit, is her master, the cunning Peter Perry, "a collector of rare things" who aims to add Varl herself to his perverse assortment of oddities.With Slave Moth, Thylias Moss shows herself yet again to be "a visionary storyteller" (Charles Simic). Written in gorgeous verse, it is an explosion of life in the face of servitude.

    Her animating intelligence descends into the concrete facts of our existence to discover the divine force that shapes the world and maintains its being. Her poetry recapitulates that intimate naming by which man defines himself-the first role God assigned to the human creature." Harold Fickett, author of The Holy Fool "Longtime readers of these poems will renew old acquaintances and pick up a sheaf of new friends besides. New readers will welcome her gifts of Word-crafted icons by which we behold the Glory, see the Holy." Eugene H. Peterson "Polishing the Petoskey Stone is a wonderful compilation of many of the richest of Luci Shaw's poems, both old and new. It's wonderful to see growth in her understanding of the joys and tragedies of life as they can be expressed in poetry. I sense a new, and perhaps harsher, view of reality which is always redeemed by the never failing love of God." Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time Luci Shaw is the author of many books, including God in the Dark, Listen to the Green, and Writing the River. A speaker, teacher, poet, editor, and writer, she lives in Bellingham, Washington.

    Asian American Studies. In The THE TEMPERATURE OF THIS WATER, Ishle Yi Park samples the climates of New York and Korea to present an unflinching, meticulously detailed view of lives cracked open as much by love as they are by overwork, violence, and racism. Sharp street wit and a sensual attention to detail give vivid, palpable form to the lovers and criminals, mothers and gangbangers who live behind the closed doors of New York immigrant life. Within each poem lies a story; within each story lies a whole community waiting to be uncovered. Whether tracing the path of prisoners meeting girlfriends or Korean comfort women or .44s shot from rooftops in Brooklyn, Park's passion and uncompromising honesty lays bare the ruined heart of a city still pulsing with light.

    JE NATHANAEL is an endangered text. Neither essay nor poem nor novel nor sex show, what it takes from language it gives back to the body. Through Nathanael, Andre Gide's absent, imagined and much desired apprentice in Les nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth), this text explores ways in which language constrains the body, shackles it to gender, and proposes instead an altogether different way of reading, where words are hermaphroditic and in turn transform desire (consequence). Suggesting that one body conceals another, JE NATHANAEL lends an ear to this other body and delights in the anxiety it provokes. Nathalie Stephens writes in English and French, and sometimes neither. She is the author of several published works, including PAPER CITY, which is also available from SPD.

    The newly titled Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry now available in two paperback volumes includes 1,596 poems by 195 poets (half of the poems are new), from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Anne Carson and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry continues to be the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English. It richly represents the major figures, while also giving full voice to ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, postcolonial poetry, and the long poem, eclipsing all other anthologies in scope, clarity, and balance."

    A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance.With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

    Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public.Before becoming a poet, Brenda Coultas was a farmer, a carny, a taffy maker, a park ranger, a waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence, and Open City. She lives one block from the Bowery in New York City.

    This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

    To bring it up-to-date, the authors have added fifty new entries and examples. The Dictionary of Poetic Terms is compact enough for classroom use, but thorough enough to be the definitive reference handbook for poets and scholars, and the many writers who are both.

    Similarly, The Ha-Ha, the latest offering from poet David Kirby, is both an exploration of the ways in which the mind invites chaos yet keeps it at a distance and an apologia for humor, reflecting Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh's observation that tragedy is merely underdeveloped comedy. Embracing wit, wide-ranging scholarship, and an equal love of travel as well as the pleasures of home, The Ha-Ha depicts comedy as a radical form of intelligence, a way of thinking that just happens to be noisy and rumbustious.We are staying with Barbara's parents on Oahu, and the first night we're there, I notice an angry-looking man is staring at meout of the neighbor's upstairs window and mumbling something, but the second night I realize that it's that poster of Bo Diddleyfrom the famous Port Arthur concert, and there's a phone wirein front of his face that bobs up and down when the trade winds blow, which they do constantly, making it seem as though Mr. Diddley is saying something to me.From The Ha-Ha, Part I: The Tao of Bo Diddley published in The Ha-Ha: Poems by David Kirby. Copyright (c) 2003 by David Kirby. All rights reserved. - See more at: http: //lsupress.org/books/detail/the-ha-ha/#...

    It was Baudelaire, and it intoxicated me, inspiring ten lousy years of trying to write poetry before I threw in the rag and accepted I couldn’t. By the age I’d started, Anno had finished, and if I’d read him then I wouldn’t have bothered. A real poet can perform feats of magic, claim the world is flat if he wants, so he can sweep all the trash off the edge of it. Anno had that right.I can’t write poetry but I can read it and Anno didn’t need death to be brilliant. Death isn’t part of the judgement. I don’t know where he’s at in relation to others and I couldn't give a toss – comparisons are a waste of time. I love his rage, and truth, and he touches me like I was still young, although I was 35 when he was born and 55 when he died. I've always believed that art is the opposite of death, and if I'm right then Anno is very OK. He's just there before the rest of us, presently travelling at 176,000 miles a second, having left better than most of us will ever achieve in his wake. He's eternal now, even if only in this little book, and such a thought gives me comfort. Just as it comforts me to know he's gone and the sinners he despised are condemned to stay, destined for eternal reincarnation as tapeworms in Richard Nixon's gut. I haven't got much of a God, but spare me another fucking Christian with a cluster bomb ... "Behold, one of several little christs." You know who you are, and so did Anno, and Kenneth Patchen had them nailed before most of these arseholes were born. I choose to quote Patchen because Anno loved him, and was inspired by him, and is with him. Anno too is a great poet, a teenage poet, and we can only be amazed by what he could do with half a yard of ink. My love to you, Anno, and to your glorious mother, and your father, my friend, for loving enough to put this book together. I turn the pages grateful that you wrote them – they really are like you – and they leave me with a sense of hope and sadness, like a child in a garden with a dying bird. Bruce RobinsonAnno's lyrics [are] poetic masterpieces in their own right. -- Rock Sound, August 2003

    The continuation of the project begun in Hejinian's best-selling MY LIFE also available from SPD MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES provides important glimpses into related works such as HAPPILY, THE BEGINNER, and SLOWLY. Part prose poetry, part autobiography, and part radical modernist experiment, MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES is a masterpiece of recent writing on identity, language, and politics."

    Wonderful as gifts or keepsakes, these books feature heartfelt messages and exquisite illustrations that are sure to bring readers everlasting warmth and encouragement. With the introduction of two outstanding new titles, The Forever Series continues to create a lasting impression with people everywhere. The Love Between a Mother and Daughter Is Forever is a collection of poems and flections about the special love that exists between a mother and daughter. Writing selections by noted authors Susan Polis Schutz, Madeleine L'Engle, and Natasha Josefowitz, together with a host of popular Blue Mountain Arts authors, take the reader on an emotion-filled journey through the laughter, the learning, the growing, and all the fun moments that mothers and daughters share. It is a celebration of the strongest and wonderful relationship of all... the love between a mother and daughter.

    Heralded as "one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers" by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets.The poems in Gone describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "The Passion," consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. The New York Times Book Review said, "Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvelously free of sentimental piety." With Gone, readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe’s continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

    Translated from the Russian by Tatiana Tulchinsky. Preface by Catherine Wagner. Almost ten years ago UDP published CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein's "note-card poems," a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a "hybrid genre": "at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them." As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of "language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)" and organized "in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material."

    In addition to clear and forceful verses on the evils of violence, the perils of self-serving attitudes and the supreme importance of love for the nation and our fellow human beings, the collection also contains moving and very personal poems written at moments of crisis.

    Faithfully rendering each moment's aliveness and attuned to experience as a kind of wordless address, he repeatedly enlarges the parameters of what language can encompass and communicate.

    Flarf. Rodney Koeneke was born in Omaha in 1968 and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles, and has lived in or about San Francisco since 1986. His book of history, Empires of the Mind, which tells the story of the British literary critic I.A. Richards, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. ROUGE STATE is his first full-length poetry collection. "In ROUGE STATE, Rodney Koeneke puts the blush back on the demotic. His idiomatic montage is a careening screed dictated from a state of alert, all puns intended to turn the hose back on a culture run literally amuck, and whose marquee reads: Raw, Red, Rouge, Incarnadine. Welcome to these states!"-- Michael Gizzi.

    William Carlos Williams proclaimed Lorine Niedecker "the Emily Dickinson of our time." It's taken a while for more than a handful of poets with extremely acute ears and sensibilities to see how true that is. This is something that comes from the poetry itself, not in the projection of Dickinson's semi-mythical reclusiveness onto Niedecker, but in the way both women wrote poetry that can be read for a lifetime without losing its magic or becoming dull. This book, produced as a celebration of the author's 100th birthday, is the first to follow Niedecker's conception of how her most intensely autobiographical poem should be presented. This is the first time Niedecker's work has been thus treated in print. The work chronicles her life and the lives of her parents, all three of which included great sorrow and loss, but Niedecker's clarity and sparkling verse never descend into sentimentality, bringing out that which makes life worth living despite its disasters. Edited by Cid Corman.

    First published by the Jargon Society in 1958, LETTERS announces the major phase of Robert Duncan's writing. Though long unavailable, it stands as a foundational book of postmodern poetry, setting "self-creation and self-consciousness in constant interplay" (in the author's own words). Edited by Robert J. Bertholf, this new edition includes an afterword as well as a series of memos from Duncan to the typesetter Claude Fredericks. Also included are Duncan's original illustrations for the book.

    He published numerous collections, including The Templars of Hazard and The Book of Demons, his last book. It recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism as well as the great love of those who helped save his life--though only for three more years. When he died he had just assembled a retrospective of his work. Wolf Tongue is his own selection, with the addition of the last two books that many regard as his finest work, Pearl and The Book of Demons. Most of his poetry was out-of-print, and much had never been widely published. The title is his. He was a contrary, a lone wolf. His ear for soaring, lyric melody was unmatched, and his poetry became dark as blue steel, edging towards what became his domain: the lament--The Independent. His poetry places a radical, critical energy, unsparing of illusions, and bitter and comic in its self-appraisal, at the disposal of a clear-eyed celebration of the world.