Now the video of that performance has been forwarded to mothers and daughters (and fathers and sons) all over the world. Originally written in 2007, "B" is a thank you note, a love letter, a wish, a promise, a confession, and a secret. With beautiful illustrations by Sophia Janowitz, "B" is finally available in this whimsical, magical book.

    Her fist book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns opened the door to Gibson's unapologetic voice, yet The Madness Vase manages to take an even more intimate look at the subjects of family, war, spirituality, gender, grief and hope. The poems' topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibson's work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases out the other side. Moments later, we find ourselves inhaling words that fill us with light. Her luminous imagery is a buoy that allows us to resurface from her world clutching new possibilities of our own. Throughout her career, Gibson's poems have always been a call to social justice. But this collection goes beyond awareness. Her images linger in our psyches and entreat us to action. They challenge us to grow into our own skin. The journey may be raw at times but we are continuously left inspired, held, and certain we are not alone. By the time you finish reading The Madness Vase, you too will believe, "Folks like us/We've got shoulder blades that rust in the rain/But they are still G-sharp/Whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption/So go ahead world/Pick us/To make things better."

    From New York Times bestselling Shel Silverstein, celebrated creator of Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up, comes an amazing collection of never-before-published poems and drawings.Have you ever read a book with everything on it? Well, here it is! You will say Hi-ho for the toilet troll, get tongue-tied with Stick-a-Tongue-Out-Sid, play a highly unusual horn, and experience the joys of growing down.What's that? You have a case of the Lovetobutcants? Impossible! Just come on in and let the magic of Shel Silverstein bend your brain and open your heart.And don't miss Runny Babbit Returns, the new book from Shel Silverstein!

    Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.

    As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own". In 'teaching my mother how to give birth', Warsan's debut pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

    It's a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

    In The Conference of the Birds Caldecott Honor-winning children's book author and illustrator Peter Sís breathes new life into this foundational Sufi poem, revealing its profound lessons. Sís's deeply felt adaptation tells the story of an epic flight of birds in search of the true king, Simorgh. Drawn from all species, the band of birds is led by the hoopoe. He promises that the voyage to the mountain of Kaf, where Simorgh lives, will be perilous and many birds resist, afraid of what they might encounter. Others perish during the passage through the seven valleys: quest, love, understanding, friendship, unity, amazement, and death. Those that continue reach the mountain to learn that Simorgh the king is, in fact, each of them and all of them. In this lyrical and richly illustrated story of love, faith, and the meaning of it all, Peter Sís shows the pain, and beauty, of the human journey.

    With learned insight and a delicate hand, Daniel Ladinsky explores the many emotions addressed in these verses. His renderings, presented here in 365 poignant poems—including a section based on the translations of Hafiz by Ralph Waldo Emerson—capture the compelling wisdom of one of the most revered Sufi poets. Intimate and often spiritual, these poems are beautifully sensuous, playful, wacky, and profound, and provide guidance for everyday life, as well as deep wisdom to savor through a lifetime.

    Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me is Mark Leidner's first full-length collection of poems. A collection of poems that might make you feel like a flower, like a black hole, like punishment meted out at night by a giant tractor, like you have to get on fire, then slowly walk around your old neighborhood, like the town was real, like she thinks swoon is a funnier word than mulligan, and he thinks swoon is a funny word too, but no way in hell is it funnier than mulligan, like he's searching for the Holy Grail and she has little Holy Grail-shaped pupils, like an effusion of steam, like what's cool changes, like hemisphere paint, like a blue flower, like the house you have lived above forever.

    Alice Oswald has won several literary awards.

    Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

    In The Feather Room, Mojgani further explores storytelling in poetic form while traveling farther down the path of magic realism, endowing his tales with a greater sense of fantasy and brightness. The work recounts loss and heartbreak while discovering lightness and beauty on the other side. Throughout the book, Mojgani opens tree trunks to reveal chandeliers. He leads us through the rooms inside himself, using poems to part curtains and paint walls. He is lifting windows to let the fantasy indoors.

    Bringing the Shovel Down is a re-imagination of the violent mythologies of state and power.

    Here Harrison—forthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerning—a gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico García Lorca to how he touched a bear’s head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual musings, Harrison celebrates movement as the pulse of life, and art, which ‘scrubs the soul fresh.’” —Booklist“Harrison has written a nearly pitch-perfect book of poems, shining with the elemental force of Neruda's Odes or Matisse's paper cutouts....In Songs of Unreason,, his finest book of verse, Harrison has stripped his voice to the bare essentials--to what must be said, and only what must be said." —The Wichita Eagle“Songs of Unreason, Harrison’s latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living.… His are hard won lines, but never bitter, just broken in and thankful for the chance to have seen it all.” —The Industrial Worker Book Review“Unlike many contemporary poets, Harrison is philosophical, but his philosophy is nature-based and idiosyncratic: ‘Much that you see/ isn’t with your eyes./ Throughout the body are eyes.’… As in all good poetry, Harrison’s lines linger to be ruminated upon a third or fourth time, with each new reading revealing more substance and raising more questions.” —Library Journal“It wouldn’t be a Harrison collection without the poet, novelist, and food critic’s reverence for rivers, dogs, and women…his poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison’s voice.” —Publishers WeeklyJim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns—creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial love—emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.

    Laura Purdie Salas, the acclaimed author of Stampede!, is back with another collection of wild and weird, wacky and winsome poems about all the magic to be found on a single bookshelf. In BookSpeak!, each poem gives voice to a group that seldom gets a voice . . . the books themselves! Characters plead for sequels, book jackets strut their stuff, and we get a sneak peek at the raucous parties in the aisles when all the lights go out at the bookstore!Illustrator Josée Bisaillon’s mixture of collage, drawings, and digital montage presents page after page of richly colored spreads filled with action and charm. Together, Salas and Bisaillon deliver a unique collection brimming with ideas as much about spines and dust jackets as they are about adventure and imagination.

    Dynamic and eye-opening, this debut by a National Poetry Slam finalist critiques an America sleepwalking through its days and explores the contradictions of race and class in America.Bao Phi has been a National Poetry Slam finalist and appeared on HBO's Def Poetry. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including 2006 Best American Poetry. Phi lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and works at the Loft Literary Center.

    Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune).from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.

    "Being Human" is the third book in the "Staying Alive" poetry trilogy. "Staying Alive" and its sequel "Being Alive" have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. "Being Human" is a companion volume to those two books - a world poetry anthology offering an even broader, international selection of "real poems for unreal times". The range of poetry here complements that of the first two anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about being human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. There are more great poems from the 20th century as well as many recent poems of rare imaginative power from the first decade of the 21st century. But this book is also rare in reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Such has been the appeal of "Staying Alive" and "Being Alive" that many people have written not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which have been important in their own lives. "Being Human" draws on this highly unusual publisher's mailbag, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by our readers.

    These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.Your music makes me feel lonelyYour music makes me feel lonelyYour musicMakes me feel lonelyPicking a lemonLate at nightMy heart tightensI fear natureYour music makes me feel lonelyI must be responsible for itI’m aliveI have this hair helmet onI’m so aliveI say yes to the megaplexYou say it’s awful isn’t it awfulI say yeahSo what. Something sentimentalThis placeI agreeHugeWe’re gonna go into the movie. . .The day is long enoughThe day is long enoughThe day is so long enoughTo contain all this and more

    What Would your life say if it could talk?                                                            —from “No Fly Zone”With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

    Ken, the publisher, here. I couldn't be more thrilled to make this book flesh. This collection of aphorisms concise, eloquent truths contains so much poetry and passion and deep thinking, I've been caught by single pages for hours. This book is sharp, funny, tragic, irreverent, wise. All beauty. It puts fire in me. I invite you to enjoy that fire, too."

    Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames.

    . . and her dilemma. How can one small girl be sweet, funny, imaginative, playful, and affectionate as well as a clinging vine, brat, tattletale, and nuisance–all at the same time? Why is Jess supposed to be a good big sister while Emma doesn't have to be a good little sister? The highlights and low points of this sibling relationship are insightfully evoked in short and simple poems, some funny, some touching, and all resonant with emotional truth. Every child with a younger sibling will recognize Jess's dilemma and the combination of ambivalence and deep loyalty that is built into the sibling relationship. Nancy Carpenter's graceful illustrations perceptively complement Kristine O'Connell George's agile poems.

    Although he was born over a century ago, his starkly original poems provide a window into the psyche of the early twentieth century with its anguish, melancholy, and occasional exaltation. From a life inflicted with drug addiction and mental torment, Trakl paints a vivid, musical portrait of his autumn soul. This bilingual edition includes all of Trakl's mature published work, as well as his youthful poems and prose, drama fragments and selected letters, and is the most comprehensive collection of his work in English to date.

    Indian folk art triumphantly meets 17th-century English trick verse in this sophisticated graphic venture fit for middle graders on up." - Starred, Kirkus Reviews"A stunning reminder of why people keep making real-live books... Visually delicious and beautifully made. . . a testament to the vitality of two art forms that just won't answer to their death knells: poetry and the book." - NPR Summer Reads PickThis 17th century British poem is a form of trick verse. Here, the very design of the book brings clarity to the verse, as whimsical die-cuts in each page reveal the poem's nuanced meaning. Read straightforwardly, the poem sounds interestingly surreal. But if the lines are broken up in the middle, then everything falls into place. Illustrations by award-winning Gond artist Ramsingh Urveti (of The Night Life of Trees), book design by Jonathan Yamakami.US Grade Level Equivalent: 2US Guided Reading Level: K

    LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty--especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

    In THE TREES THE TREES, the follow-up to Heather Christle's acclaimed first collection, THE DIFFICULT FARM, each new line is a sharp turn toward joy and heartbreak, and each poem unfolds like a bat through the wild meaninglessness of the world.

    With a storyteller’s rhythm, Lease braids humor, political bite, psychological intensity, and lyric beauty, taking us to a place of warning, critique, and elegy.

    Topics include, nature, fantasy, Love, loss, and sarcasm. Some were written for specific people, others just observations.

    Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."— William StaffordDuskwhere is the name no one answered togone off to live by itselfbeneath the pine trees separating the houseswithout a friend or a bedwithout a father to tell it storieshow hard was the path it walked onall those years belonging to noneof our struggles drifting underthe calendar page elusive asresidue when someone saidhow have you been it wasstrangely that name that triedto answerNaomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity.Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

    East Asia Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. The celebrated Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes from a radiant black zone where matter becomes dark matter, human becomes trinket, garbage becomes god, a zero-point for our present moment's grotesque and spectacular inversions. This volume includes a selection of recent work, the landmark poem "Manhole Humanity," and the essay "In the Oxymoronic World." With fiercely incisive translations and a preface by Don Mee Choi. "As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!"—Aase Berg

    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

    Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U .S. Poet Laureate, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years. Selecting from the canon of American poetry throughout the twentieth century, Dove has created an anthology that represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities-from styles and voices to themes and cultures-while balancing important poems with significant periods of each poet. Featuring poems both classic and contemporary, this collection reflects both a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern American poetry and outlines its trajectory over the past century.

    A poet who favours dark suits, lager and long hot baths, he works on BBC Four in Charlie Brooker's Newswipe and on Radio 4, doing his late night poetry show.In 2009 he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his poetical recital The Slutcracker and has filmed some of his verse in black and white to overwhelming critical approval. Billed by Time Out as “He’s a genius plain and simple” Tim’s incomplete and unabridged reading of his book is hilarious and inventive, playful and punchy, and light and dark by turn.

    With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

    That he wrote the words seven hundred years ago in a medieval Persian world that bears little resemblance to ours makes their uncanny resonance to us today just that much more remarkable. Here is a treasury of daily wisdom from this most beloved of all the Sufi masters—both his prose and his ecstatic poetry—that you can use to start every day for a year, or that you can dip into for inspiration any time you need to break through the granite of your heart.

    the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago--for example, the election of an African American president--will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades--changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures.

    “Andrea Gibson is a truly American poet, or rather, she represents the America I want to live in. Her work lights a candle to lead us where we need to go.” – Cristin O’ Keefe Aptowicz

    Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

    Comics. "'All objections to progress,' writes Hans Blumenberg, 'could come down to the fact that it hasn't yet taken us far enough.' That's philosophy—and it's funny—but no one would ever level the same complaint at pain or laughter, this fine book's subjects and two phenomena that can take human beings great distances almost immediately. Absolutely modern—but never resolutely maudlin—Sommer Browning doesn't settle for making it new; rather, she lets it bleed and gets us there on time"—Graham Foust.

    These poems explore temptation, transgression, and heavenly presences in a landscape that is far from holy.

    Embracing the elegiac, angry, and amorous with surrealistic wordplay and off-kilter music, Young coaxes us to "fall higher" into an intimate, vulnerable, expansive exchange. This is a major new book by one of America's most inventive poets.I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,but now I want a Russian novel,a 50 page description of you sleeping,another 75 of what you think staring outa window. I don't care about the plotalthough I suppose there will have to be one,the usual separation of the lovers, turbulentseas, danger of de-commission in spiteof constant war, time in gulps and glitchespassing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sledout-racing the wolves on the steppes, the hugeglittering ball where all that mattersis a kiss at the end of a dark hall . . .Dean Young has published ten books of poetry, including finalists for the Pulitzer and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

    A Thousand Vessels reveals the common and complex experiences of women across the ages—loneliness, friendship, fear, hope, violence, love, bitterness, consolation. Fellow poet Jeanne Murray Walker says, "The two [worlds] are so wonderfully imagined and entwined that I found myself turning the pages of A Thousand Vessels as compulsively as if it were fiction."

    In Jean’s work the influence of this culture and history combined with the more familiar French poetics of Rimbaud and Michaux results in a work of haunting lyricism. The poems are both playful and mythic, while still seriously engaging in questions of inherited violence.In If I were born in Prague Jean’s work is beautifully re-imagined in versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky allowing English readers an entry point into the vital work being done by one of our neighbors.

    The great nineteenth-century preacher C. H. Spurgeon and his wife would sometimes read Herbert's poetry together on Sunday evenings. Richard Baxter wrote, --Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God.-- C. S. Lewis described Herbert as --a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment . . .-- Regrettably, as the years have passed, Herbert's poetry has been increasingly neglected outside the academy. Many who would love Herbert have never even heard of him. Others feel intimidated by his poetry, fearing that they do not have the education necessary to understand what Herbert has written. In this book, Jimmy Scott Orrick has made the poetry of George Herbert accessible even to those who have had no experience reading poetry. In addition to providing thorough notes for each poem, Orrick also gives basic pointers about how to read poetry. Why not follow C. H. Spurgeon's example and --have a page or two of good George Herbert-- on your Sunday evenings? Those who follow this prescription will be deeply enriched for having spent A Year with George Herbert. Jim Scott Orrick is Professor of Literature and Culture at Boyce College, the undergraduate school of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville. This is his first book.

    With Radial Symmetry, she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's inventive lyrics lead the reader through vertiginous landscapes—geographical, phenomenological, psychological—while always remaining attendant to the speaker's own fragile, creaturely self. An experienced research scientist and field ecologist, Larson dazzles with these sensuous and sophisticated poems, grappling with the powers of poetic imagination as well as the frightful realization of the human capacity for ecological destruction. The result is a profoundly moving collection: eloquent in its lament and celebration.Metamorphosis [excerpt]We dredge the stream with soup strainers and separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs- their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping at the light as if the world was full of tiny traps, each hairpin mechanism tripped for transformation. Such a ricochet of appetites insisting life, life, life against the watery dark, the tuberous reeds.

    In his third collection of poems, Patrick Rosal continues his rhythmic march through a world in which violence and beauty mix all too often—a paradoxical world in which the music of Chopin gives way to a knifing, yet the funk of homelessness cannot stifle the urge for human connection.

    The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos      of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King;      from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball,      The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz,      The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coímbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce;      Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches      to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball.

    Belief was in the air. Then the soldiers ceased fire and the magic of Christmas took hold.Carol Ann Duffy’s brilliant new poem celebrates the miraculous truce between the trenches, when enemy shook hands with enemy, shared songs, swapped gifts, even played football, and peace found a place in No Man’s Land.

    "Sonnet 18" is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.

    In these poems you will find sex and survival turned inside out, offering fresh perspective on what it means to be counted among the wounded. Where we expect to find liability, we find muscle. Where we expect to find numbness, we find thirst. Bring Down the Chandeliers is an exploration of trauma, body and faith. It is also an inquiry into forgiveness. As such these poems are not just for sexual assault survivors; they are for anyone who has struggled to forgive oneself and/or one's trespassers. They are for anyone making a life in the midst of aftermath. Tara Hardy is, as Dorothy Allison claims, "The real deal. Passionate, brave, gifted, insightful, dead-on in language and craft.� Find yourself strangely hopeful amid her explorations of addiction and justice. Consider your own compass as she navigates body, as she confronts sex as the site of what was both stolen and returned. Find a surprising bit of yourself in a story may not be yours, but in which you're invited to grapple with your own vulnerabilities and strengths. Walk away with a more intricate understanding of your own humanity.

    East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women"--Pam Brown

    THE GIRL WITHOUT ARMS is a figure in Japanese folklore a young girl whose arms are lopped off by her father, and is left to die in the mountains. The father, at the behest of his evil wife the girl's stepmother lures the girl into the mountains at the promise of attending a neighboring festival. This is only the beginning of the tale. The poems of Brandon Shimoda's THE GIRL WITHOUT ARMS are birthed of the rainy shut-in pause between steps forward and back in a season of great floods. In successive and interlocked sequences, these poems grapple with a seemingly unbridgeable confusion related to love, the impossibility of life outside of love, and the unbearableness of life within it as a way to give shape to the dark weather that permeates our lives, so as not to drown at its coming."

    I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is poignant & brilliant; it's worth the investment.Christian Hawkey, author of Ventrakl

    He won four Pulitzer prizes for his poetry and was invited to read his poetry at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. His life was filled with personal tragedy which his poetry often reflected. Collected here are more than seventy-five of Frost's most celebrate poems. Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

    Art. Images by Jonathan Marshall. "I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl's poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it's always too late—that our adventure is a constant failure—their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough"—Zachary Schomburg.

    Laced with searing indictments of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and war, Remi tackles some of the most important issues facing the world today. Additionally, included in the collection are forty-eight three-line poems for Palestine and a full-length spoken word poetry CD.

    Literary Nonfiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer. Dolores Dorantes's STYLE is a prose book in which a plural feminine voice narrates the vicissitudes of a war designed to suppress that voice. A voice that represents the war on the Mexico-U.S. border? Guerilla adolescents taking their revenge? Enslaved girls who appear in order to combat a macho presidential figure linked to our current-day Central America? Latin America advancing on a fascist-capitalist government? These are some of the questions that might arise from STYLE. The book was written in 2011, in some dark place in Texas, during the first three months Dorantes was awaiting political asylum.

    Poetics. Writing Reference. WINGBEATS: EXERCISES AND PRACTICE IN POETRY is an exciting collection of exercises by fifty-eight wonderfully diverse teaching poets both in (Oliver de la Paz, Ravi Shankar, Patricia Smith) and out (Ellen Bass, Robert McDowell, Naomi Shihab Nye) of academia. In seven chapters, ranging from "Springboards to Imagination" to "Chancing the Accidental" to "Complicating the Poem," each exercise includes not only clear step-by-step instructions, but numerous poems that exemplify the successful completion of the exercise, some by the authors of the exercises, some by their students. WINGBEATS' exercises incorporate numerous approaches: working in pairs and/or groups, incorporating research and/or the Internet, writing outdoors, and others, all easily found in the book's unique Alternate Table of Contents. Of course, traditional poetic techniques covering metaphor, persona, forms, and revision are also included. WINGBEATS, which poet Cole Swensen calls "indispensable," belongs in every poet's library.Contributors: Rosa Alcala, Wendy Barker, Ellen Bass, Tara Betts, Catherine Bowman, Susan Briante, Sharon Bridgforth, Nathan Brown, Jenny Browne, Andrea Hollander Budy, Lisa D. Chavez, Alison T. Cimino, Cathryn Cofell, Sarah Cortez, Bruce Covey, Oliver de la Paz, Lori Desrosiers, Cyra S. Dumitru, Blas Falconer, Annie Finch, Gretchen Fletcher, Madelyn Garner, Barbara Hamby, Carol Hamilton, Penny Harter, Kurt Heinzelman, Jane Hilberry, Karla Huston, David Kirby, Laurie Kutchins, Ellaraine Lockie, Ed Madden, Anne McCrady, Robert McDowell, Ray McManus, David Meischen, Harryette Mullen, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Hoa Nguyen, Naomi Shihab Nye, Katherine Durham Oldmixon, Kathleen Peirce, Georgia A. Popoff, Patty Seyburn, Ravi Shankar, Shoshauna Shy, Patricia Smith, Jessamyn Johnston Smyth, Bruce Snider, Lisa Russ Spaar, Susan Terris, Lewis Turco, Andrea L. Watson, Afaa Michael Weaver, William Wenthe, Scott Wiggerman, Abe Louise Young, and Matthew Zapruder."WINGBEATS is a fabulous toolbox of innovative and practical ideas that literally every teacher of poetry workshops and at every level, from elementary poets-in-the-schools through the graduate MFA, will find indispensable. Covering a vast range from image to sound to form, the exercises are all concrete and clearly presented--a marvelous way to mine the imaginations and experiences of today's most dynamic poets. Invaluable "--Cole Swensen"I opened WINGBEATS--and fell in headfirst, caught in the feathers of the creative impulse. WINGBEATS proves that poetry matters, that writing is an experimental discovery process, that there are many avenues to success, that writing poems is a gift we can all claim. The wealth of enabling nudges by the poets of WINGBEATS--who share their energy, wisdom, and examples--opens the door wide to our creative Selves. No teacher, no aspiring poet, should be without the gentle guidance of this book."--Gabriele Rico

    What is the hermit? A crab? A card drawn from a tarot deck? Sage, lunatic, scholar, mad scientist, philosopher or monk? A rebel or recluse, a wandering samurai, a stranger in an even stranger land, an immigrant, an exile, a tourist, a hero or anti-hero? Do hermits live apart from others or alone among others like them? Do they abide in the remote landscapes of legends or in our modern-day cities? Can a woman be a hermit? Who is not a hermit? In this third collection of poems by Laura Solomon, the Hermit embodies the complicated search for simplicity and shared solitude both at home and abroad. These poems explore the struggle to articulate a precision in language, people, places, and emotions by placing the poet at the heart of a monomyth. This is a gut-wrenching collection that meditates on truth, the unconscious, and the sacrifices of love.

    This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as “The End”, which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to “Walk towards the light.” See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book. -Rae AmrantroutI've always found Kendal Frey's poems fascinating to the point of transfix—they make compelling reading: I've never started one I didn't finish, something I can say of very few other poets' work. Her first full-length collection surely places her among the most brilliant of today's young poets. The Grief Performance commands and rewards the mind's richest attendance.--Bill KnottEmily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.--Dorothea LaskyEmily Kendal Frey's poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.--Zachary Schomburg

    Now featuring an introduction by Susan MusgraveAlden Nowlan, one of Canada's finest and most influential poets, died in 1983. He leaves a rich legacy of poetry that is accessible yet profound, and that speaks to people's lives with wry observation and keen insight. Alden Nowlan Selected Poems is for Nowlan fans and new readers alike. The poems included in this volume reflect the recurring themes that illuminate Nowlan's work, and it is truly the best of his poetry. Above all, this volume is a tribute to a poet who deserves to be treasured for all time.

    His reader is gifted with visions of a darker world, an autumnal place of surreal beauty and a dying splendor. It is not a world friendly to people—it is full of death, desolation, and decay, strange creatures and arcane gods. But it is beautiful nonetheless. Hauntingly beautiful."—Chris Faatz, Powells.com"I do not understand them; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius."—Ludwig WittgensteinSong of the Departed brings back into print poems written at the height of Georg Trakl's career. Trakl boldly confronted the conflicts created by the pursuit of truth amidst the fallenness of the human condition, writing of the unspeakable that lies beyond language, creating poetry that is intensely personal and eerily beautiful. Included in this revised edition are several new translations and an introduction by the translator.All roads disgorge to black decay.Beneath the golden boughs of night and starsThe sister's shadow flutters through the silent groveTo greet the spirits of the heroes, bleeding heads.And softly in the reeds drone the dark flutes of autumn.O prouder grief! you brazen altars;Tonight a mighty anguish feeds the hot flame of spirit:Unborn grandchildren.Georg Trakl was born in Austria in 1887. He served as a medical officer during World War I. As a lyric poet, he set a dark, introspective tone that deeply influenced the course of German expressionism. He died in 1914 after an overdose of cocaine.

    Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets—both emerging and acclaimed—from regions underrepresented in anthologies.They write from disparate zones and parallel experience, from lands of mounded earthwork long-since paved, from lands of ancient ball courts and the first great cities on the continents, from places of cold, from places of volcanic loam, from zones of erased history and ongoing armed conflict, where “postcolonial” is not an academic concept but a lived reality. As befits a volume of such geographical inclusivity, many poems here appear in multiple languages, translated by fellow poets and writers like Juan Felipe Herrera and Cristina Eisenberg.Hedge Coke’s thematic organization of the poems gives them an added resonance and continuity, and readers will appreciate the story of the genesis of this project related in Hedge Coke’s deeply felt introduction, which details her experiences as an invited performer at several international poetry festivals. Sing is a journey compelled by the exploration of kinship and the desire for songs that open “pathways of return.”

    Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into a moment’s essence and exchange something of herself with its finite music—and then, in seemingly simple, inevitable words, to deliver that exchange to us in poems that vibrate with form and expression perfectly united. Hirshfield’s poems of discovery, acknowledgment of the difficult, and praise turn always toward deepening comprehension. Here we encounter the stealth of feeling’s arrival (“as some strings, untouched, / sound when a near one is speaking. / So it was when love slipped inside us”), an anatomy of solitude (“wrong solitude vinegars the soul, / right solitude oils it”), a reflection on perishability and the sweetness its acceptance invites into our midst (“How suddenly then / the strange happiness took me, / like a man with strong hands and strong mouth”), and a muscular, unblindfolded awareness of our shared political and planetary fate. To read these startlingly true poems is to find our own feelings eloquently ensnared. Whether delving into intimately familiar moments or bringing forward some experience until now outside words, Hirshfield finds for each face of our lives its metamorphosing portrait, its particular, memorable, singing and singular name. Love in AugustWhite mothsagainst the screenin August darkness.Some clamor in envy.Some spread largeas two handsof a thiefwho wants to put back in your cupboardthe long-taken silver.

    Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature. From a myriad of lenses, these poems examine the human capability for perseverance in the wake of heartbreak; the loss of beloved heroes and landscapes; and our determination in the face of everyday struggles. Dungy explores the dual nature of our presence on the planet, juxtaposing the devastation caused by human habitation with our own vulnerability to the capricious whims of our environment. In doing so, she reveals with fury and tenderness the countless ways in which we both create and are victims of catastrophe.This searing collection delves into the most intimate transformations wrought by our ever-shifting personal, cultural, and physical terrains, each fraught with both disillusionment and hope. In the end, Dungy demonstrates how we are all intertwined, regardless of race or species, living and loving as best we are able in the shadows of both man-made and natural follies. Flight It is the day after the leaves, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand pendulums, clock trees, and squirrels, fat in their winter fur, chuckle hours, chortle days.  It is the time for the parting of our ways.   You slid into the summer of my sleeping, crept into my lonely hours, ate the music of my dreams. You filled yourself with the treated sweet I offered, then shut your rolling eyes and stole my sleep.   Came morning and me awake.  Came morning. Awake, I walked twelve miles to the six-gun shop. On the way there I saw a bird-of-prayer all furled up by the river. I called to it.  It would not unfold.  On the way home I killed it.   It is the time of the waking cold, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand metronomes, tock time, and you, fat on my summer sleep, titter toward me, walk away.  It is the time for the parting of our days.

    Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace."[BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." —Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree"This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other.”—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFrom "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries:How else can I quench this thirst? My lipstravel down your spine, drink the smoothnessof your skin. I am searching for the core:What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the lawsof nature be defied? Your body tells me: comeclose. But beauty distances even as it drawsme near. What does my body want from yours?My twisted legs around your neck. You bendme back. Even though you can't give the bonesat birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside.You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, youexpose my missing bones. And my heart, longbefore you came, just as broken. I don't know whoto blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my bodydoesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. Ifinnocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful.Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship.Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school.Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

    I flow with an artistically unique rhythm that is all my own. Step into a world created to sooth, center and expose the senses. I’m artistry through fluent and flowing poetry in motion and I’m letting it flow……..

    It becomes a journey that not only describes the divine parable penned by Solomon, but a journey that every longing lover of Jesus will find as his or her very own. In this new Passion Translation, the translator uses the language of the heart based on a passion for love to translate the book from Hebrew to English. While many translations overlook the story line of how Jesus makes His bride beautiful and holy by casting out her fear with perfect love, this unparalleled translation focuses on the anointed words of adoration of our Bridegroom for His radiant bride. This heaven-sent revelation is waiting to be received with all its intensity and power to unlock the deepest places of your heart. Indulge in the art of the inspired Song of Songs, sung from the heart of Jesus Christ for His longing bride. It is full of cultural symbols, subtle art forms, and poetry that all point to a story of unending love. Be prepared to see yourself in this journey as you hear His lyrics of love sung over you in the greatest song of all time.

    Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work—including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality—showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the true affinity between writer and subject, human and nature; the tenuous relationship between description and actuality; and the search for a truth that transcends change and death.Bye-and-Bye is a wonderful introduction to the late work of one of America's finest and best-loved poets.

    This treasure of a book collects 29 of the bard s most romantic sonnets, each one lovingly illustrated by the talented Caitlin Keegan. Pretty and contemporary, the illustrations tastefully accentuate the depth of sentiment in each sonnet. A brilliant sun rises over the 17th Sonnet ( Shall I compare thee to a summer s day? ) and a graceful animal adorns the 19th Sonnet ( Devouring time, blunt thou the lion s paws ). Available just in time for Valentine s Day but appropriate for any spontaneous expression of love, this is an ideal, sophisticated gift for the legions of Shakespeare fans.

    In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.

    With drawings by painter Alexandra Grant, text by actor Keanu Reeves, and in collaboration with mutual friend Janey Bergam, this facsimile artists' book is about making the best of a bad situation. In the tradition of a classic "hurtin' song," Reeves' text externalizes a melancholy internal monologue and subtly pokes fun at it. Grant's images, delicately realised in sombre inky washes, reflect the dark and light, the pathos and humour of the text. Neither entirely earnest nor wholly ironic, Ode to Happiness is both a meditation and a gentle tease about how we cope with life's sorrows.

    He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Language.  "I admire the assurance, the formal authority of Graves’ craft."—Robert Morgan“Here is a welcome new voice offering strengths in craftsmanship and music, but always grounded in a profound sense of place. Read these poems for their wisdom, listen closely to their cadence, let them take you where they will.”—­­­Jeff Daniel Marion“Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is more than an extraordinary first book. These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America’s finest young poets.”—Ron Rash

    His brave and quirky poems hum and crackle off the page; they wrangle with the violence in contemporary American society without wavering. They leap and leap without falling, and their incantatory grace is poignant, funny, terrifying, and profound. Erika Meitner "I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken," wrote Walt Whitman from amid the unsolved arson case of the nineteenth century. Now, from under the charred rubble of a new millennium, Adam Fell calls out to search parties and marauding zombies alike: "I am not a pioneer." Uncovering a negative poetics of identity - "not" is the operative word throughout this humble and humbling work - Fell alerts us to the fragility of inwardness itself. Through the smoldering embers of ruin, however, we glimpse new forms of ardor. Srikanth Reddy Adam Fell's I Am Not a Pioneer whispers right up against you and riots in your ear, "Even killing machines have to lick their cubs clean./Even men have to be emptied of their stadiums." This is the one book of poems you actually need in your backpack. Heartfelt- and breaking-it's the blueprint for what happens next and forever: bomb shelter, survival manual, a way to stay attached to the people you love. Matt Hart

    Though there are no answers here, the poems themselves become a kind of testament, small acts of creation and re-creation that afford a weary, hard-won hope.

    At its heart beats the 999-line poem, "Pale Fire," penned by the distinguished American poet John Shade. This first-ever facsimile edition of the poem shows it to be not just a fictional device but a masterpiece of American poetry, albeit by an invented persona -- "the greatest of invented poets," according to Nabokov's own accurate evaluation. This attractive box contains two booklets, the poem "Pale Fire" in a handsome pocket edition and the book of essays by renowned Nabokov authority Brian Boyd and poet R.S. Gwynn, as well as facsimiles of the index cards that John Shade (like his maker, Nabokov) used for composing his poem, printed exactly as Vladimir Nabokov described them. Artist Jean Holabird, who conceived the project, illustrates key details of the poem's pattern and pathos.40 Pages in Book 1 "Pale Fire," 48 Pages in Book 2 "Pale Fire" Reflections, 80 Index Cards2 Paperback Books in a deluxe box

    In this poetical fantasy, Marie becomes the ultimate artist/poet, composing a codex-calligraphy, writings, paintings, collage-from materials left at the dump. She is a "culture of one." The story is told in long-lined, clear-edged poems deliberately stacked so the reader can keep plunging headlong into the events of the book. Culture of One offers further proof of how Notley "has freed herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be" (The Boston Review).

    "Readers familiar with Susanna Childress's Jagged with Love will recognize her distinctive voice in these poems: her nerve, her honest, quirky, irreverent, immediate and embodied yearning that rushes, wordy, right up to the ragged margins In this second collection, new formal approaches bring breath and space to the lines, even delicacy sometimes, but these fine poems move with no less urgency because they are compelled by her signature quest for truthfulness. This search refuses perfectionism and mere aestheticism, yet admits beauty en route, as Childress claims, There needs to be no right word / There needs to be a wide hole / a whole mouth / where the right word / isn't"--Julia Spicher Kasdorf.

    Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARD THEM is a dark re-visioning of J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy--as only Jenny Boully could have written.

    LGBT Studies. "Amy King's poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the 'natural' world, i.e., sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem 'This Opera of Peace.' She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: 'Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor, / Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged, / Let time's contagion mar us / until spoken people lie as particles of wind'." John Ashbery"

    Franki Elliot. Franki is a twenty-something living in Chicago. This is her first book. Pre-order your copy at curbsidesplendor.com.What’s it about? It’s about you. Something you said to me five years ago, five days ago, five minutes ago. It’s about sex, honesty, sadness, falling in and out of love, firsts and lasts, awkward moments. It’s my secrets and yours.Blurbs / Praise:"The 44 pieces in Franki Elliot’s Piano Rats are like the best kind of chance meetings—weird and unsettling, specific and transformative. They are Frank O’Hara meets Ellen Kennedy, “first kiss” meets “fuck off,” “hell” meets “rainstorm,” poetry meets prose, narrative meets lyric, trailer park meets city street. But they are also entirely themselves, places where you “remember who you wanted to be.”” ~Kathleen Rooney, author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion), managing editor of Rose Metal Press."Piano Rats is a homage to being stuck between where you've been and where you still might go. It's just that you haven't quite figured out how to escape where you've been and frankly you have know no idea what comes next. And it is this tension of stuckness in all its messy, druggy, sometimes hopeful, youthful confusion that lives here in these poems and explodes across these pages, all oozy and terribly electric."~Ben Tanzer, author of of Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine, 99 Problems, My Father's House, and You Can Make Him Like You, among others."I want to find Franki Elliot, really find her, and hug her hard and whisper that it is going be okay. I want to push her away because I know she won't believe me, and why should she? I want to hug her because she is wildly honest as she depicts the awkward reality of a twenty-something in Chicago. In Piano Rats you will find a young women drowning in sadness, and not worried about how she can hide it. Franki Elliot exposes what most bury beneath layers of shallow conversations, bottles of alcohol, and innuendo. She will subtly make you love her and hate her in the matter of a few well placed lines."~Jason Behrands, managing editor of Orange Alert Press."From page one, Franki's honesty and ability to drop an F-Bomb won my heart. Here is a woman who is no stranger to love. She’s suffered its beauty, its jealousy, and its brutal end. Her poetry is like a mirror hanging on my wall, reflecting my own emotions and thoughts back at me. She makes me want to scream "Fuck You" to every guy I dated who didn't "get me". She makes me want to get behind the pretty words people throw around, quit beating around the bush, and see things for what they really are. She creates a language of her own, breathing out lines like: " Love sometimes is just another word for jealousy", and "We can't save ourselves from anything that's supposed to happen""~Lori Hettler of The Next Best Book Club (TNBBC) Blog."Contemporary poetry with urban flair, driven by madness, insecurity, and raw emotion."~Lavinia Ludlow, author of Alt.Punk.

    Photography. Titled after pirate Jean Lafitte's name for Galveston Island, CAMPECHE is a cautionary lyric composed of poems and photographs in which a real place is overlaid with the parable of a mythical world on the verge of an apocalyptic flood. Like the body fishermen of the Yellow River, this book combs water for remains and meditates on evidence, while attempting to reckon with the self as a troubled song within a greater song. "If the soul is a souvenir in human shape, / the sun is half its shadow and discloses / who is what when in public." This is the first book of Joshua Edwards's eschatological trilogy.

    Dan Beachy-Quick has produced six collections of solo or collaborative poetry and a unique prose companion to Moby Dick. In the process, this amazingly productive writer has become recognized as one of the nation's most exciting dramatists of the mind in ferment, and of our urgent and ongoing connections with a tradition that extends back to the origins of literature. After a series of book-length poems, Beachy-Quick's new volume is as carefully structured as a suite of chamber music pieces, yet made of distinctly individual poems. "Dan Beachy-Quick's splendid new collection reveals the echoes between the measure of verse and the measure of time.... CIRCLE'S APPRENTICE vividly reminds us that all our human life may be marked by ritual but it is returned to us through song"--Susan Howe.

    They speak of the endless summers of youth, the sober winters of the Pacific Northwest, the violence of children, and the benign neglect that nature offers even its acolytes. Throughout the book, fish are this speaker’s consorts. Fish, both real and imagined, stream through these poems, past the various totems of working class poverty to the inevitable sea.

    Inspired by her experiences as a Vietnamese-American woman who earned a degree in mathematics before becoming a physician, these poems are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes based on flights of imagination. Peopled by a diverse array of characters drawn from the pages of history and mythology (including the computer programmer Ada Lovelace and the sculptor Louise Bourgeois), and displaying familiarity with a broad gamut of forms ranging from the European sonnet to the Asian haibun, this sensual and often funny book introduces a strong, original new voice in poetry.

    In the search to clarify the past-and thus transform the present, these poems turn over the shards of memory like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope, looking for an angle that will light up the great mystery of how we become and continue becoming who we are.

    Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas and the fluid details of the African American South. Her poems become panhandle folktales revealing the weight of memories so clear and on the cusp. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people and geography will keep the reader rooted in a good earth of extraordinary verse.

    In this evocative collection of poems illustrated by beautiful handmade quilts, Anna Grossnickle Hines explores peace in all its various and sometimes surprising forms: from peace at home to peace on a worldwide scale to peace within oneself.  Pondering the meaning of peace and its fleeting nature, this book compels each of us to discover and act upon peace ourselves.

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey.From her first poem, written in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a wild patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of ''found language'' a deep curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics. This verse is more inclusive than exclusive; consistently Spahr includes grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, endangered plant, fish, and wildlife species, the melting of the polar ice caps, and comparative poverty rates in her eclectic repertoire. She also knows how to sing in the oldest tradition of poetry of loss, and her lament for nature is the most keen.

    This collection of Siegfried Sassoon's poetry contains 2 collections of poems--War Poems and Counter Attack--totaling 103 poems! It includes an active table of contents for smooth navigation and has been formatted for optimal viewing on the Nook! The collection includes:War Poems, including:PRELUDE: THE TROOPSDREAMERSTHE REDEEMERTRENCH DUTYWIRERSBREAK OF DAYA WORKING PARTYSTAND-TO: GOOD FRIDAY MORNING"IN THE PINK"THE HEROBEFORE THE BATTLETHE ROADTWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTERTHE DREAMAT CARNOYBATTALION RELIEFTHE DUG-OUTTHE REAR-GUARDI STOOD WITH THE DEADSUICIDE IN TRENCHESATTACKCOUNTER-ATTACKTHE EFFECTREMORSEIN AN UNDERGROUND DRESSING-STATIONDIED OF WOUNDS"THEY"BASE DETAILSLAMENTATIONSTHE GENERALHOW TO DIEEDITORIAL IMPRESSIONFIGHT TO A FINISHATROCITIESTHE FATHERS"BLIGHTERS"GLORY OF WOMENTHEIR FRAILTYDOES IT MATTER?SURVIVORSJOY-BELLSARMS AND THE MANWHEN I'M AMONG A BLAZE OF LIGHTS …THE KISSTHE TOMBSTONE-MAKERTHE ONE-LEGGED MANRETURN OF THE HEROESTWELVE MONTHS AFTERTO ANY DEAD OFFICERSICK LEAVEBANISHMENTAUTUMNREPRESSION OF WAR EXPERIENCETOGETHERTHE HAWTHORN TREECONCERT PARTYNIGHT ON THE CONVOYA LETTER HOMERECONCILIATIONMEMORIAL TABLETTHE DEATH-BEDAFTERMATHSONG-BOOKS OF THE WAREVERYONE SANGCounter Attack, including:PRELUDE: THE TROOPSCOUNTER-ATTACKTHE REAR-GUARDWIRERSATTACKDREAMERSHOW TO DIETHE EFFECTTWELVE MONTHS AFTERTHE FATHERSBASE DETAILSTHE GENERALLAMENTATIONSDOES IT MATTER?FIGHT TO A FINISHEDITORIAL IMPRESSIONSSUICIDE IN THE TRENCHESGLORY OF WOMENTHEIR FRAILTYTHE HAWTHORN TREETHE INVESTITURETRENCH DUTYBREAK OF DAYTO ANY DEAD OFFICERSICK LEAVEBANISHMENTSONG-BOOKS OF THE WARTHRUSHESAUTUMNINVOCATIONREPRESSION OF WAR EXPERIENCETHE TRIUMPHSURVIVORSJOY-BELLSREMORSEDEAD MUSICIANSTHE DREAMIN BARRACKSTOGETHER

    The purpose is to use a poetic text as the basis for 'slow reflection' during Lent and Eastertide.

    Each poem represents specific moments of their life that embrace vivid rich imagery, and illustrate the turmoil of emotions both experience while together. The collection is divided into four parts that flow one into the other from childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and post-death.

    Edward Mullany's first book is a collection of poems that Graham Foust called "devices that help us help ourselves to all the mirages and illusions—and then some—that we know to be true."

    Very Beautiful Women is an e-book comprised of stories, poems, and artwork created by emerging female writers inside and outside of the online literary world.Published by Pangur Ban Party.It is freely available on the Internet to read.http://verybeautifulwomen.blogspot.com/

    Known for densely textured visionary epics influenced by poets like Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological, and historical concerns. Highlights include a monologue from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin," a song by the "New Water on Mars," and Alexander's autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of his artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism. Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.

                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

    The poems in NO EDEN merge the landscapes of a rainy girlhood in the American South and the mythic world of Noah and the Flood. In these poems, a backyard stretches between a mother and daughter--the lessons of "distance tender and biblical." The Carolina yard opens to hold the fruits of Eve and Lilith, the flight of Noah's raven and dove, the small terrors of curbs and classrooms. These are poems of "a family awake through a storm," an intimate theology of floods, loss, and betrayal. But NO EDEN suggests a source of possible comfort, of slow quiet mercy and forgiveness. Perhaps there once was an Eden, even if it is no longer there. Its having possibly existed offers us hope that there may still be an Eden within, one we can somehow attain through beauty, luck and hope.

    Sizzling with current, stimulating and sometimes even shocking work, this chapbook promises to plug into you, turn you on and leave you tingling all over. No batteries required."Electric Company is brilliantly balanced with humor and tragedy, Creation and Destruction, such as in 'Out and In Audible' and continues goes throughout your work whether dealing with hospital bills or 'recalling funerals / follow many wakes.' The whole book is a superb examination of duality. I love the rhythm that you use within you work." — John Greiner, author of Turnstile Burlesque.