The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.

    In order to escape the invading Mongol armies of Genghis Khan, his family moved west to a town now found in Turkey, where he eventually became the leader of a school of whirling dervishes. It was a fateful day in 1244 when he met Shams Tabriz, a wild mystic with rare gifts and insight. The renowned scholar Rumi had found a soul mate and friend who would become his spiritual mentor and literary muse. "What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, "I met today in a human being."Out of their friendship, Rumi wrote thousands of lyric poems and short quatrains in honor of his friend Shams Tabriz. They are poems of divine epiphany, spiritual awakening, friendship, and love. For centuries, Rumi's collection of these verses has traditionally been bound in a red cover, hence the title of this inspired classic of spiritual literature.

    On What to Remember When Waking, this celebrated poet and teacher offers wisdom for building the essential disciplines that will see us through the difficulties of our human journey—skills of trust, vulnerability, momentum, and courage in the face of the unknown. Engage in the Great Conversation That Defines Your Life Our lives are defined by what David Whyte calls the “great conversation”—a give- and-take relationship between our vision of ourselves and the unfolding mystery of reality. Yet there are many conscious and unconscious ways that we often avoid living at this ever-moving frontier. Do you diminish life by attempting to assign names to everything instead of living more robustly with the unknown? Are you turning a blind eye to the invisible help that is all around you? With penetrating insight and gentle guidance, Whyte illuminates the core competencies that you must build in order to fully engage in the richness that life offers—and to express your true work in the world. What You Can Plan Is Too Small for You to Live “We do not always move forward because of the plans we make or the effort we expend,” teaches David Whyte. “The conversation itself more often does the true work of transformation.” Make sure the conversation is alive and everything takes its place. Combining a teacher’s ability to provide practical guidance with a poet’s insight into the depths of the human soul, he presents a powerful resource for anyone seeking growth and fulfillment on life’s journey with What to Remember When Waking.Highlights: Start where you are—ways of recognizing the first necessary steps to find your path • The gift of vulnerability—why lowering our defenses can enhance our perception, dedication, and joyfulness • Disciplines for cultivating the “fierce interior focus” that helps you maintain momentum in your life’s work • How embracing the feeling that you are out of place in the world can deepen your empathy and compassion for others• The art of knowing when to let your dreams mature in their own time • Beyond the "pursuit of happiness"—opening yourself to the deeper fulfillment available in the high and low points of life• Becoming an "apprentice to life"—how to approach new challenges with a sense of humility and wonder• Learning to delight in the unknown instead of trying to control it through labels and beliefs• Building a mature and welcoming relationship with death by embracing the richness that fragility brings to life• Over 5 1/2 hours of David Whyte's insights, poetry, and essential lessons for fully expressing your gifts in the world

    Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly: the acorn that hides within it an entire tree; the wings of the swan like the stretching light of the river; the frogs singing in the shallows; the mockingbird dancing in air. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.”   As the Los Angeles Times noted, innumerable readers go to Oliver’s poetry “for solace, regeneration and inspiration.” Few poets express the immense complexities of human experience as skillfully, or capture so memorably the smallest nuances. Speaking, for example, of stones, she writes, “the little ones you can / hold in your hands, their heartbeats / so secret, so hidden it may take years / before, finally, you hear them.” It is no wonder Oliver ranks, according to the Weekly Standard, “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced.”

    Whether in stark, haiku-like descriptions of a cancer ward, surrealistic depictions of a social order coming apart, or fluent, defiant outpourings of praise, Wiman pushes his language and forms until they break open, revealing startling new truths within. The poems are joyful and sorrowful at the same time, abrasive and beautiful, densely physical and credibly mystical. They attest to the human hunger to feel existence, even at its most harrowing, and the power of art to make our most intense experiences not only apprehensible but transfiguring.

    debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as -the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy- and by CNN as -the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.- Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

    Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter."—Tony Hoagland"In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, [Mary Ruefle] brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world."—Charles SimicSelected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary Ruefle's distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most expert, surprising, and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining need look no further than this monolithic retrospective by a contemporary master.Mary Ruefle, winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems, has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book; she is also an erasure artist whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

    Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings which address gender, sex, race, poverty, heartbreak, and survival with such stark intimacy, you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you, yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclaim hope. They are as the opening poem suggests, nothing short of communion.

    From the graveyards and battlefields of the Civil War to the ancient forests of Brazil, from desire to despair, landscapes both literal and emotional are traversed in this unforgettable collection of poems. Brimhall guides readers through ever-winding mazes of heartbreak and treachery, and the euphoric dreams of missionaries. The end of days, the intoxication of religion that at times borders on terror, and the post-evangelical experience intertwine with the haunting redemptions and metamorphoses found in violence. These tender yet ruthless poems, brimming with danger and longing, lure readers to “a place where everyone is transformed by suffering.”

    Poems of the Night is a moving collection of the great literary visionary's poetic meditations on nighttime, darkness, and the crepuscular world of visions and dreams, themes that speak implicitly to the blindness that overtook Borges late in life-and yet the poems here are drawn from the full span of Borges's career. Featuring such poems as "History of the Night" and "In Praise of Darkness" and more than fifty others in luminous translations by an array of distinguished translators-among them W.S. Merwin, Christopher Maurer, Alan Trueblood, and Alastair Reid-this volume brings to light many poems that have never appeared in English, presenting them en face with their Spanish originals. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton’s book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet's work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poeets. From the classic texts of Chinese philosophy to intensely personal lyrics, from love poems to startling and strange perspectives on nature, Hinton has collected an entire world of beauty and insight. And in his eye-opening translations, these ancient poems feel remarkably fresh and contemporary, presenting a literature both radically new and entirely resonant.

    Over the years, he has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that seem to come from a skeptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived experience that a poem tries to apprehend.Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes--San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country--are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style--formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Milosz--combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch. It has made him immensely readable and his work widely admired.

    All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biography. Table of Contents T. S. Eliot BiographyList of Works in Alphabetical OrderPoetryPrufrock and Other Observations:The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy NightMorning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr. Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante La Figlia Che PiangePoems:GerontionBurbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a CigarSweeney ErectA Cooking EggLe DirecteurMelange Adultere De ToutLune De MielThe HippopotamusDans Le RestaurantWhispers of ImmortalityMr. Eliot's Sunday Morning ServiceSweeney Among the NightingalesThe Waste LandShort StoryEeldrop and AppleplexEssayEzra Pound: His Metric and Poetry

    Her debut collection The Bones Below delicately carries the reader to a place of brutal, beautiful honesty. DeMulder's personal revelations complete a touching portrait of the young artist and her fearless exploration of the human experience, bare in its rawest and most tender forms.

    Oliver recites from the full range of her poetry-from her classic nature writing, to her verses for her mischievous bichon Percy, to her ever-deepening spiritual poems. The CD comes in a handsome full-cloth package that includes a booklet with an introductory essay by the poet on the magical dynamic between speaker and listener, a table of contents, text of the title poem, and a photo of the poet. Many Miles will be a most welcome addition to the collections of her readers.

    First, read the poems forward (how old-fashioned!), then reverse the lines and read again to give familiar tales, from Sleeping Beauty to that Charming Prince, a delicious new spin. Witty, irreverent, and warm, this gorgeously illustrated and utterly unique offering holds a mirror up to language and fairy tales, and renews the fun and magic of both.

    Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, "from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath." Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called "the history and science of feeling."In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, "the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes." All of Dickinson's preoccupations--death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought--are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as "a master" of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

    These bewitching poems and stories unwind a fevered world of magic and longing and young women who chance the uncanny and gain wisdom beyond their years.

    The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.

    . .In her second collection of poetry, Dorothea Lasky cries out beyond prophecy and confession, through to an even more powerful empathy. On the verge of becoming pure substance and sensation, Black Life is emotion recollected not in tranquility, but in radically affirming intensity.I leave and I am a black life . . .And I want toBe what you made me to beDorothea Lasky is the author of three collections of poetry. Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Washington University, and Harvard University, she currently teaches at Columbia University.

    More intimate and personally revealing than his fiction, and more classical in form than the inventive metafictions that are his hallmark, the sonnets reflect Borges in full maturity, paying homage to many of his literary and philosophical paragons-Cervantes, Milton, Whitman, Emerson, Joyce, Spinoza-while at the same time engaging the mysteries immanent in the quotidian. A distinguished team of translators-Edith Grossman, Willis Barnstone, John Updike, Mark Strand, Robert Fitzgerald, Alastair Reid, Charles Tomlinson, and Stephen Kessler-lend their gifts to these sonnets, many of which appear here in English for the first time, and all of which accompany their Spanish originals on facing pages. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. This book is not solely concerned with overtly religious poetry, but attends to the paradoxical ways in which the poetry of doubt and despair also enriches theology. Developing an original analysis and application of the poetic vision of Coleridge, Larkin and Seamus Heaney in the final chapters, Guite builds towards a substantial theology of imagination and provides unique insights into truth that complement and enrich more strictly rational ways of knowing. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.

    Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the Civil Rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.I can walk down the highway unarmedScott Bond, born a slave, becamea millionaire. Wouldn't you like to run wild.Run free. The Very Reverend Al Greenhailed from here. Sonny Liston a few miles west,Sand Slough. Head hardenedon hickory sticks.The cool water is for white/ the sun-heated for blackThis chair is not for you [N-word]/ it is for the white buttockThis textbook/ is nearly new/ is not for you [N-word]This plot of ground does not hold black bonesToday the sermon once again "Segregation After Death"C.D. Wright has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including the recent volumes One Big Self: An Investigation and Rising, Falling, Hovering, which received the Griffin Poetry Award. A MacArthur Fellow, Wright teaches at Brown University and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

    According to The New York Times, Chin "is sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking." The Advocate wrote her poems, "combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform" and note "Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world."

    It is not just that Ocean can render pain as a kind of loveliness, but that his poetic line will not let you forget the hurt or the garish brilliance of your triumph; will not let you look away. These poems shatter us detail by detail because Ocean leaves nothing unturned, because every lived thing in his poems demands to be fed by you; to nourish you in turn. You will not leave these poems dissatisfied. They will fill you utterly.” -Roger Bonair-Agard, author of Tarnish and Masquerade and Gully“Vuong’s perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.” -Grady Harp, Amazon Top Reviewer and critic“Ocean Vuong is a poet of rare lyrical gifts and urgent stories to tell. “Memory,” he writes, “has not forgotten you.” No, it hasn’t forgotten the burning city or the taste of blood nor the hanging of rags or the violence of war. Vuong’s poems are testament to the enduring power of poetry and its place in this human universe.” -Hoa Nguyen, author of Hectate Lochia and As Long as Trees Last

    Newbery Honor-winning poet Joyce Sidman presents another unusual blend of fine poetry and fascinating science illustrated in exquisite hand-colored linocuts by Caldecott Honor artist Beckie Prange.Ubiquitous (yoo-bik-wi-tuhs): Something that is (or seems to be) everywhere at the same time.Why is the beetle, born 265 million years ago, still with us today? (Because its wings mutated and hardened). How did the gecko survive 160 million years? (By becoming nocturnal and developing sticky toe pads.) How did the shark and the crow and the tiny ant survive millions and millions of years? When 99 percent of all life forms on earth have become extinct, why do some survive? And survive not just in one place, but in many places: in deserts, in ice, in lakes and puddles, inside houses and forest and farmland? Just how do they become ubiquitous?

    With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

    Out of necessity, Giovanni admits she cheats a little, selecting a larger, less round number.The result is this startlingly vibrant collection that spans from historic to modern, from structured to freeform, and reflects the rich roots and visionary future of African American verse. These magnetic poems are an exciting mix of most-loved classics and daring new writing. From Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes to Tupac Shakur, Natasha Trethewey, and many others, the voice of a culture comes through in this collection, one that is as talented, diverse, and varied as its people.African American poems are like all other poems: beautiful, loving, provocative, thoughtful, and all those other adjectives I can think of. "Poems know no boundaries." They, like all Earth citizens, were born in some country, grew up on some culture, then in their blooming became citizens of the Universe. "Poems fly from heart to heart," head to head, to whisper a dream, to share a condolence, to congratulate, and to vow forever. The poems are true. They are translated and they are celebrated. They are sung, they are recited, they are "delightful." They are neglected. They are forgotten. They are put away. Even in their fallow periods they sprout images. And fight to be revived. And spring back to life with a bit of sunshine and caring. -Nikki Giovanni"Read" Gwendolyn Brooks Kwame Alexander Tupac Shakur Langston Hughes Mari Evans Kevin Young Asha Bandele Amiri Baraka"Hear" Ruby Dee Novella Nelson Nikki Giovanni Elizabeth Alexander Marilyn Nelson Sonia Sanchez"And many, many, more"Nikki Giovanni is an award-winning poet, writer, and activist. She is the author of more than two dozen books for adults and children, including "Bicycles," "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea," "Racism 101," "Blues: For All the Changes," and "Love Poems." Her children's book-plus-audio compilation "Hip Hop Speaks to Children "was awarded the NAACP Image Award. Her children's book "Rosa," a picture-book retelling of the Rosa Parks story, was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Both books were "New York Times "bestsellers. Nikki is a Grammy nominee for her spoken-word album "The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection "and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She has been voted Woman of the Year by "Essence," "Mademoiselle," and "Ladies' Home Journal." She is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where she teaches writing and literature.

    Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Oñate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A letter that was sent to Oñate by the Viceroy of New Spain, asking that should he come upon the North Sea in New Mexico, he should give a detailed report of "the configuration of the coast and the capacity of each harbor" becomes the inspiration for many of the poems in this artfully composed debut.

    His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot’s on English-language verse. This volume serves as the first comprehensive survey of Adonis’s work, allowing English readers to admire the arc of a remarkable literary career through the labors of the poet’s own handpicked translator, Khaled Mattawa.Experimental in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry sings exultantly of both the sweet promise of eros and the lingering problems of the self. Steeped in the anguish of exile and the uncertainty of existence, Adonis demonstrates the poet’s profound affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those very aesthetic and moral sensibilities. This collection positions the work of Adonis within the pantheon of the great poets of exile, including César Vallejo, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Celan, providing for English readers the most complete vision yet of the work of the man whom the cultural critic Edward Said called “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.”

    Leave Your Sleep features a daring and delightful selection, ranging from the beloved (e.e. cummings, Edward Lear, and Jack Prelutsky) to the undiscovered (the young Nathalia Crane). Natalie Merchant's brilliant musical renderings, selected from her highly praised album, share the stage with Barbara McClintock's richly imagined art to create a memorable reading, looking, and listening experience.

    The wind is winning.When you’re a guy, nature is one big playground—no matter what the season. There are puddles to splash in the spring, pine trees to climb in the summer, maple seeds to catch in the fall, and icicles to swordfight with in the winter.      Nature also has a way of making a guy appreciate important stuff—like how many rocks it takes to dam up a stream, or how much snow equals a day off from school.So what kind of poetry best captures these special moments, at a length that lets guys get right back to tree-climbing and kite-flying? Why, guyku, of course!

    Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address.Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

    They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citationfrom “The Piano Speaks”     For an hour I forgot my fat self,     my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.     For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.     For an hour I was a salamander     shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,     and under his fingers the notes slid loose     from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs     that took root in the mud.

    An exacting and honest conversation between two of our most interesting writers and our most dedicated activists.

    Poems by Phil Kaye

    Her genius is in the interweaving of God and Vodka, bees and bras, astronomy and astrology, quotes from Einstein and Dickinson, a world in which gossip rags in checkout lines and Neruda hum in the writer's mind with equal intensity."—Jeannine Hall Gailey"These are poems of remarkable liveliness. Here is a fresh, distinctive voice that is consistently engaging and surprising."—Carl DennisKelli Russell Agodon is the author of Small Knots and Geography and lives in a seaside community in the Pacific Northwest.

    Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””

    Schmidt offers the first anthology to gather poems by the 43 poets laureate of the United States.

    Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales and childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving and careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole world on fire.” —KATE BERNHEIMER“Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But We Take Me Apart is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, and she does so imaginatively and with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry.” —CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY“If you consider her novella poetry, then it borrows much from prose. And if you see it as prose, it allows for a poetic flavor. Gaudry walks this line with great poise and in that poise we find her greatest strength as a writer.” —THE BROAD SET WRITING COLLECTIVE“A Molly Gaudry word is so precise, it feels like a sentence.” —GREAT TWIN CITIES POETRY READ & ROAD SHOW“An epic poem of epic mastery, We Take Me Apart centers on a girl who grows into a woman who grows into a heroine.” —PRICK OF THE SPINDLE“This incredible verse novel(la) is infused with fairy tales and Gertude Stein, not to mention Gaudry’s own dreamlike, luscious voice. An almost visceral delight.” —FLAVORWIRE“Gaudry’s mastery of language, [her] use of . . . silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale—the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts.” —AMBER SPARKS“A cross between silence and fairy tale, Gaudry’s Beckettian narrative sews bright bits to near-faint whispers, slowly swaddling us in quiet and darkness.” —BRIAN EVENSON“Amid this stark environment, Gaudry’s gorgeous lyric voice guides us through.” —ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FANS“Molly Gaudry must have revised this gem of a novella over and over and over to get the wording, the rhythms, the images, etc. just so. . . . Not a word is out of place, nothing is missing, no extra words are added. Molly Gaudry has worked this section, and every other section in the book, to the very essence of what is necessary to capture her readers and not let them go.” —EMERGING WRITERS NETWORK“[Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian] is famous for its poetic prose and unflinching violence, but there’s a void of femininity. . . . Enter Molly Gaudry. . . . [Her] prose, steeped in poetry as much as McCarthy’s, spirals upward, elevating and exploding. The creators and destroyers, the beautiful and the gory, and the mythical and contemporary all thrive in balance. To read Molly Gaudry is to read Angela Carter’s cutthroat narrative spoken through the hopelessly hopeful characters of Lydia Millet, all arranged in space with the care of an impressionist painter.” —HOBART“We Take Me Apart is a dazzleflage of a book. The stuttering disrupted language of this cubist concoction disappears before your ears, sinks into your eyes. This aggressive dress camouflage reweaves Gertrude Stein’s rewoven grammar of worsted silk-screened gabardine into a fully ripped patois-ed pattern of stunning wonder.” —MICHAEL MARTONE“Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart works ‘thread into lace.’ . . . Especially vivid in this book-length work is the mother’s entrance and exit, where the ragged lines swell and turn sonnet-like with love.” —TERESE SVOBODA“In Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, the ordinary becomes mythical, what may be autobiographical becomes a fable, and simple lines or sentences ring with ominous music. Even the empty space between the lines seems to resonate with invisible narrative. A stunning debut.” —RICHARD GARCIA “White space, planes and planes of it. . . . We Take Me Apart is a novel’s answer to a room. . . . I read it three times . . . inhaling its perfume. . . . The scent is delicate and leaves a trace of itself. . . . The book details grace. . . it will haunt like a remembrance of fragrance or swoosh of hair or panoply of mother as tart then sweet and suddenly elusive as memories of one’s own.” —AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW“Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied. . . . We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift.” —[PANK]

    Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

    William Shakespeare: Selected Poems

    The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.

    From maple ice cream to Z-shaped fire escapes, these poems carry a flashlight you'll want to follow: unexpected as night swimming, entertaining as a music video in sign language.

    "Not only my favorite title of the year, but this is also a book I have been waiting to hold in my hands with great anticipation for quite some time--as a friend, yes, but more so in language glee. Adam can truly speak it in a way I have never heard anyone else speak. This is going to be one to drink milk in bed with"--Blake Butler. "From trompe l'oeil title to anomalous index, this is a book of pristine openings and closings, preoccupied with structure, literary convention, popular and intellectual culture, biography, genre and identity. Somewhat skeptically, it marks out a testing ground for poetry. And poetry, confident in those sparkling titles and last lines, jumps into the ring"--Mairead Byrne.

    BLACK-EYED HEIFER is a mighty anthem to down home local culture--the deeply rooted--the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land. These lyrical prose poems sing a 'rampant fire' tune 'to yesterday's hands-up hinterland' and the fact that 'there were horses, there always are.' There is abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty in Shelly Taylor's contemporary Georgian eclogues, 'all the while mindful of the color turn' and 'silent footwork & news'--Brenda Iijima.

    Each of the book's seven sections is devoted to a particular art form--film, photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, and theory--and includes both text and found photographs as it explores the idea of what it means to be a book in an era when reading is disappearing into a diverse array of cultural products, media formats, and aesthetic practices. Seven Controlled Vocabularies will be available in a variety of print and electronic book delivery systems and formats.

    But add images and story, and you have more than enough for a lifetime, an overabundance…an excess of wisdom, beauty, and pleasure. This book will be one of the few I take wherever I go.” —Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Original SelfThis richly illustrated collection delivers a fresh and inspiring way to read Rumi’s most intimate poems of love, rage, sadness, joy, and longing. No other edition of Rumi’s poetry combines his singularly passionate words with authentic, rare, and wonderful Sufi and Islamic art. Readers moved by Sappho, Hafiz, Rilke, or by Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi will relish the beautiful imagery and new translations in this unique volume of some of the finest works by “the most popular poet in America” (Time magazine).

    "Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda."—The New York Times Book Review"Her language is refreshing, musical, attenuated."—Anne WaldmanSimone Muench lives in Chicago.

    She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The two hundred poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

    MacCaig's fresh eye saw remarkable newness even in the everyday so each poem, although grouped in related subjects, is a tiny revelation, a new look at an old friend. Celebrate, renew, discover Norman MacCaig on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.

    One of the UK’s most exciting up-and-coming hip-hop artists, Scroobius Pip, is a master of the spoken word lyric.From his childhood musings in the school playground to his feelings on the rat race, Pip has selected from his online fan collective artistic collaborations that bring the power of his lyrics to the printed page, creating an innovative multimedia collection of modern poetry.

    How can recklessness guide the poet, the artist, and the reader into art, and how can it excite in us a sort of wild receptivity, beyond craft? "Poetry is not a discipline," Young writes. "It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application, an affect . . ."

    LGBT Studies. Like Tennyson's In Memoriam, Teare's book sees within a personal loss evidence of an epochal shift at work, a shift at once historical, political, and cosmological. Asserting the lover's body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of "the fall"--its iconic imagery as well as Gnostic reinterpretations--the book also records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California. The book is haunted throughout by the task of "writing the disaster" of AIDS; its lyrics link emergency to inquiry in an attempt to make a memorial "in language sufficient/to pain: not in itself the world: the thought of it."

    her first published collection is unabashed, uninhibited, unafraid, and unforgettable. she writes about death, sex, and mental disorders as easily as she writes about getting haircuts and sparkly tiaras. this volume was conceived after finally conquering her fear of sharks and of dying alone. kelsey rakes currently studies english and spanish at the university of virginia, and after graduation she plans to join the circus and write some more about haircuts. her life is a constant work in progress.

    PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE enters the crisis that is the love between the colonizer and the colonized. These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan's hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map. Along the way we visit historical moments including a botched circumcision as performance art, the Rape of Nanking, and 17th century missionaries in the Philippines. Through this intertwining of narratives the book reveals how the past and present are visceral beasts caught in a cycle of passion and destruction. Like an epic murder ballad, Hall moves from collage to epistle, suffering to ecstasy, while pinpointing what is at stake in the pursuit of love and the dismantling of the self.

    He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North, including the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew", "The Law of the Yukon", and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", all of which are included in this collection of 82 poems. Contains the poems from the following works: Songs of a Sourdough, and The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses

    Here we find DaDa dynamite and typographical talismans freshened by a poet whose native gifts imbue this exciting work with a whole new sense of poetic object. Siegell's haptic heroism compels the reader to re-examine the basic elements of a language that we too often take for granted, in the process creating an energetic and always surprising work of both visual art and poetry. Not to be missed!" —Vladimir Slender-Hedge

    Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.

    This beautiful collection of poems will make you rise, rise up." - PANK Magazine "Mindy Nettifee poems inspire and fulfill. Rise of the Trust Fall has become a necessary book for me." -Beau Sia, Def Poetry Jam On Broadway "Mindy Nettifee is destined to be the next Dorothy Parker." -Poetic Diversity

                         —from “The Return of Colored Only” Skin, Inc. is Thomas Sayers Ellis’s big, ambitious argument in sound and image for an America whose identity is in need of repair. In lyric sequences and with his own photographs, Ellis traverses the African American and American literary landscapes—along the way adding race fearlessness to past and present literary styles and themes, and perform-a-forming tributes for the Godfather of Soul, James Brown; the King of Pop, Michael Jackson; and the election of President Barack Obama. Part manifesto, part identity repair kit, part plea for poetic wholeness, this collection worries and self-defends, eulogizes and casts a vote, raises a fist and, often, an intimidating song. One sequence is written as a sonic/ visual diagram of pronouns and vowels; another quotes from editors’ rejections of his own poetry included in the book; another poem, “Race Change Operation,” begins: “When I awake I will be white, the color of law.” Skin, Inc. is the latest work by one of the most audacious and provocative poets now writing.

    Offered here are tales of battle, travel, and adventure, but also songs of heartache and longing, pearls of lusty innuendo and clear-eyed stoicism, charms and spells for everyday use, and seven "hoards" of delightfully puzzling riddles.Featuring all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets—including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Jane Hirshfield, David Ferry, Molly Peacock, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, and many others—The Word Exchange is a landmark work of translation, as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

    "My advice: those who are to read Sasha Fletcher's delightful enjoinder WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED should go into an empty house of an afternoon, shut themselves in a backroom closet on a low shelf, and read straight through without stopping"--Jesse Ball. "Sasha Fletcher, with his dream catastrophes and immense loves, can wand us into a new world. Here is a story that glistens"--Deb Olin Unferth.

    In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

    Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship with its rider.

    Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

    At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital--perhaps viral--new strain of female poetics: the "Gurlesque," a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. Poets include Brenda Coultas, Brenda Shaghnessy, Cathy Park Hong, Matthea Harvey, and Sarah Vap.

    Calling poets away from civilization, back towards the wilderness, Lasky brazenly urges artists away from conceptual programs, resurrecting imagination and faith-in-the-uncertain as saviors from mediocrity.

    African American Studies. MULE is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at the time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God. "Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song"--Katie Ford.

    Her poems both celebrate the sensual world and seek to transcend the body's limitations through encounters with art, memory, and the divine. At once imagistic, lyrical, and meditative, Silver's verse begins in the personal sphere and then looks outward toward the wider human experiences of illness, faith, fear, and love. From chemotherapy to doing laundry, from observation of deformed pussy willows to contemplation of the word girl, Silver does not shrink from life's blazonry of loss. Instead, she ultimately affirms the possibility of praise and joy.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    Anyone who still wants to view experimentation as a purely intellectual exercise will be convinced otherwise by Donna de la Perri�re's exquisite second collection. Under the threat or promise of erasure and at the edge of silence, the poet deftly leads us through a shifting, minimalist landscape. Wrestling with change and stasis, with the resistance and sudden give of the real, she delicately monitors each stage of what feels like a pilgrimage, while defamiliarization pressures vision and makes each breath at once artful and endlessly brave. SAINT ERASURE saves us by exposing the beauty of our vulnerability: 'Welcome to the new body / tonight we lose everything.'--Laura Mullen

    You are definitely on to something. You should really examine my other poems too (just google me) and notice the clues I have left behind. You might want to share what you find with others by starting a blog, informing the media, making videos, etc. I have said to my wife and others that I don't understand how few people notice the prophecy in my work. For reasons that are probably obvious to you, I don't want to directly address what I'm not openly addressing, except to say that, yes, I am addressing what you think I am. I know; it blows my mind too!

    Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight."—James TateThin Kimono continues Michael Earl Craig's singular breed of brilliant absurdist poetry, utterly and masterfully slanting the realities of daily existence.Michael Earl Craig is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006) and Can You Relax in My House (Fence Books, 2002). He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a certified journeyman farrier.

    Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language.White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century--a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and--perhaps most surprisingly--getting older.

    From coconut palms and bristlecone pines to baobabs and banyans, Douglas Florian explores the arboreal world with his signature wit and whimsy. Featuring a dynamic vertical format that illustrates the incredible heights and shapes of the trees, this book illuminates the natural history of these majestic beings as well as their unique and quirky characteristics.

    Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo's work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative 'paintings' with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist's near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo's world. Each poem is an evocation of 'how art works on the pain spectrum', laced with splashes of ferocious colour.

    By turns moving and witty, sharp-eyed and impressionistic, Gabbert writes with technical sophistication and keen intelligence. This is a terrific book"--Kevin Prufer.

    Their linguistic 'making' is informed by vivid evidence of a serious self-making, soul-making, and heart-making. We are lucky to have these English incarnations of Nikola Madzirov."—Li-Young LeeBorn 1973 in a family of Balkan Wars refugees, Nikola Madzirov's poetry has already been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. A regular participant in international literary festivals, he has received several international awards including an International Writing Program fellowship at the University of Iowa. Remnants of Another Age is his first full-length American collection and carries a foreword by Carolyn Forché who writes, "Nikola Madzirov's Remnants of Another Age is aptly titled, as these poems seem to spring from elsewhere in time, reflective of a preternaturally wise and attentive sensibility. As we read these poems, they begin to inhabit us, and we are the better for having opened ourselves to them. Madzirov is a rare soul and a true poet.""I SAW DREAMS"I saw dreams that no one remembersand people wailing at the wrong graves.I saw embraces in a falling airplaneand streets with open arteries.I saw volcanoes asleep longer thanthe roots of the family treeand a child who's not afraid of the rain.Only it was me no one saw,only it was me no one saw.

    A contemporary reimagining of Frankenstein that takes us forwards, backwards and sideways through time and space, this is a cutting-edge novel for the multimedia age.With enormous tenderness and craft – - (this writer is a design genius in a way that extends to the wiring of the lines themselves) – Lee asks her readers: What erodes an originating point? Why do people disappear? What brings a body back to the optic and sensate domains, where it thrives, where it has a love, where it had a mother? I am not sure that this book answers these question, but it repeats them until the reader’s blood rises in response. Until the reader, alchemically, becomes – also – “red.”-Bhanu Kapil, Author of Incubation: A Space For Monsters and A Vertical Interrogation of StrangersIf Frankenstein’s monster was not taken for granted, or was taken as the a priori product of our current mind, it would be named G.I.L.L., and made by Janice Lee. Lee’s is our neurological nightmare and native hope: the act of consciousness grasping towards itself, which is the original act of writing itself.-Vanessa Place, Co-Director of Les Figues Press & Author of Dies: A Sentence and La MedusaKērotakis, by Janice Lee, is a strange and uncanny fissioning operant on exponential levels. It animates through alchemical repartee, elements, which flare across the text, tuning themselves, line by line, phrase by phrase, into an energy of flammable gold. -Will Alexander, Author of Asia & Haiti and Sunrise in Armageddon

    I’m not as black as you dream.                      —from “Luke Cage Tells It Like It Is With humor and the serious collector’s delight, Gary Jackson imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend.

    Expertly gathered by Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters, these sixty poems range from old favorite poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sylvia Plath, and Eleanor Farjeon to beloved contemporary poets like Marilyn Singer, Lee Bennett Hopkins, and Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman. Beautifully illustrated by G. Brian Karas with richness and whimsy, SWITCHING ON THE MOON is the perfect book to share with a child to usher in a night of sweet dreams.

    African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. "Up jumps the boogie. That's almost all one needs to say. Murillo is headbreakingly brilliant. I didn't have a favorite poet for this year: Now I do. But with this kind of verve and intelligence and ferocity Murillo just might be a favorite for many years to come."—Junot Diaz"The feel of now lives in John Murillo's UP JUMP THE BOOGIE, but it's tempered by bows to the tradition of soulful music and oral poetry. The lived dimensions embodied in this collection say that here's an earned street knowledge and a measured intellectual inquiry that dare to live side by side, in one unique voice. The pages of UP JUMP THE BOOGIE breathe and sing; the tributes and cultural nods are heartfelt, and in these honest poems no one gets off the hook."—Yusef Komunyakaa

    See Expanded Edition, 2018, Bloof Books. Poetry. Wander with CAConrad and Frank Sherlock through this psychogeographical poem. Experience peoples' histories and magical traditions rooted in the first capital of the American possible--the city of Philadelphia. Visit landmarks that remain standing, revisit citizens that live on in memory, and participate in the future mappings of your city yet to be realized--the city real and imagined.

    "I can't remember when a book of poems has invited such an attentive reading as Cindy King's marvelous first volume, PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA. Each poem, a descent through shifting strata of syntax and history, requires a sustained renegotiation of one's balance in language and the world. As I read I had the feeling of launching myself from an opening line and falling past gorgeous and complex surfaces, an intricate landscape of experience, until landing on the solid earth of the final lines of these extraordinary poems. PEOPLE ARE TINY IN PAINTINGS OF CHINA is a work of uncommon talent"--Lynn Emanuel.

    While the collection only represents a small fraction of the writing done over two decades (1990-2010) it is an almost complete collection of the pieces performed. The ranting and rambling contained within this book is often juvenile, sometimes petty, and commonly complaining; however all the works are all born of passion.The people and places that inspired the words between these covers are too numerous to mention individually, but they are all held very dear. It is because these souls, times, and locations have touched so deeply that a permanent mark was left. These memories are now yours to share, for what they're worth.These are all very different works of varied style and subject matter, plucked at random from a collection of writing. They are in no order whatsoever. What is the common thread? Everyone one of them was written to be performed, and with only two exceptions, they all have been.

    A collection of ninety pieces of poetry by Shawna Howson, Insomniatic Dreams is the first anthology by this talented author.

    Transitional places and phases are imagined as frightening and ripe, capable of producing a space where anxiety and creativity cohabit the narrated realm of the speaker. The poet employs a dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, her probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.

    The tragedy escalated to fifty-eight murders in 2006, then again to eighty-six in 2008, and current estimates top four hundred deaths. Now poet Valerie Martínez offers a poetic exploration of these events, pushing boundaries—stylistically and artistically—with vivid poems that contextualize femicide.Martínez departs from traditional narrative to reveal the hidden effects and outcomes of the horrific and heart-wrenching cases of femicide. These poems—lyric fragments and prose passages that form a collage—have an intricate relation to one another, creating a complex literary quilt that feels like it can be read from the beginning, the end, or anywhere in between. Martínez is personally invested in the topic, evoking the loss of her sister, and Each and Her emerges as a biography of sorts and a compelling homage to all those who have suffered. Other authors may elaborate on or investigate this topic, but Martínez humanizes it by including names, quotations, realistic details, and stark imagery.The women of Juárez, like other women around the world, are ravaged by inequality, discontinuity, politics, and economic plagues that contribute to gender violence. Martínez offers us a poignant and alarming glance into another world with these never-before-told stories. Her refreshing and explosive voice will keep readers transfixed and intrigued about these events and emotions—removed from us and yet so close to the heart.

    With language of devastating beauty and complexity, he investigates conflicted personal history and political tragedy, and how the human body fares against both. A book-length sequence of linked poems, Sanctificum is Abani’s most intimate and ambitious book to date, a tour de force bringing together religious ritual, the Igbo language of his Nigerian homeland, and reggae rhythms in a complex, liturgical love song.

    These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

    Including such subjects as "I Heart Unending Paranoia," "Because You Know You're Avoiding Going Somewhere But Don't Even Know Where Yet," and "I'm Not Going To Change My Clothes Today," Pink's collection is bizarre, funny, and original.

    The 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, is Julie Carr's provocative 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE. Carr obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence babies and the urge to protect them and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame."

    Art work and inlay by German artist THS (www.ths.nu), Edited by Ian Shearer with thanks to Mike Daily.

    "Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."

    Using the techniques of concrete and visual poetry, Heimrad Bäcker presents quotations from the Holocaust’s planners, perpetrators, and victims. The book offers a startling collection of documents that confront us with details from the bureaucratic world of the Nazis and the intimate worlds they destroyed. Bäcker’s sources range from victims’ letters and medical charts to train schedules and the telephone records of Auschwitz. His transcriptions and reworkings of these sources serve as a reminder that everything about the Shoah was spoken about in great detail, from the most banal to the most monstrous. transcript shows us that the Holocaust was not “unspeakable,” but was an eminently describable and described act spoken about by thousands of people concerned with the precision and even the beauty of their language.

    He edits SIR! Magazine and was recently selected by Pam Rehm for the Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Massachusetts where he attends the MFA for Poets and Writers at Umass Amherst.

    These are Illustrated with beautiful images by Japan's most famous artists.The haiku form is a perfect way of capturing a moment of experience, and in this book, the experiences are extended by the illustrations.Special use is made of the artist Utamaro's exquisite Ehon mushi erabi (A Selection of Insects). The fact that this sophisticated artist chose insects for one of his most luxurious woodblock printed albums underlines the Japanese appreciation of even the most diminutive of animals in the haiku.This beautiful book inspires readers to regard the animal kingdom with new eyes.

    It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Volume: 2; Original Published by: Johnson in 1801 in 318 pages; Subjects: English poetry

    No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”— from the prefaceI was born to grow,alongside my garden of plants,poemslikethis oneSo writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.