The perfect gift for the mentors in our lives, this charming, illustrated poem reminds us of the beauty in, and importance of, cultivating curiosity, creativity, and confidence in others.

    Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

    This new book takes place in Lockdown Three. This time Key can make Government-sanctioned expeditions out onto the streets of London (remember?). And it is there that the inaction takes place. Phone calls to his mother, promenades with his loyal friend, bubble-negotiations, sitting his fat arse down on benches, drinking mocha. Another three months of mind-freezing inertia. This time on the move. Conversations interspersed with poetry.

    Men have been tickling children for generations with their funny and charming antics. The Mr Men for Grown-Ups series now gives adults the chance to laugh along as the Mr Men and Little Miss try to cope with the very grown-up world around them. Featuring Roger Hargreaves classic artwork alongside hilariously funny new text.Little Miss Busy hadn't always been so busy. She used to enjoy lazy weekends and leisurely lie-ins. But then she had kids. Now her life is a constant juggle of demands and pressure to be the perfect mum. How does Little Miss Busy do it?The perfect book for anyone who has ever faced the trials and tribulations of the wonderful and exasperating world of parenthood.Also available The Mr Men for Grown-Ups series:Mr Greedy Eats Clean to Get Lean, Little Miss Shy Goes Online Dating and Mr Happy and the Office Party.

    Rod McKuen's most personal book of poetry.

    This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

    Children eagerly hang up their stockings, families go to church together, and everyone enjoys Christmas cake and other treats of the festive season. For heartwarming reading there is no writer to rival Miss Read, and this delightful Christmas collection of novels is packed with unforgettable characters, enchanting stories, and festive cheer.

    I love how thick this writing is, sublimely claustrophobic yet expansive, like a child's nightmare of scale."—Dodie Bellamy"Autodidact and knight-errant, Ward often betrays the procedural forms he tries to impose on his labyrinthine ruminations in order to remain faithfully engaged to the traditional task of the post-Romantic poet, an 'ecstatic commingling' of okay-you know and 'starry anaphor.'"—Tyrone Williams"I should write a real blurb with real blurb-like things in it, but TCOIW, a kind of lullaby arranging the psychic terrain of my future prosodically, is saving my stupid ass."—Anselm Berrigan

    I want nothingto reveal feeling but feeling--as in freedom,or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,or the sound of water poured in a bowl.--from "Gravity and Center" In his sixth collection of poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems--often hovering within the realm of the sonnet--combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in Blackbird and Wolf, he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.

    She was a teacher, and it was morning on the first day of school. In this haunting new collection of poems, Taylor Mali, once a teacher himself, explores her life and their love as well as the shape and texture of his own guilt and resilience.

    You are the achiever and status seeker of the zodiac. The signs of the zodiac can give us great insight into our day-to-day living as well as the many talents and qualities we possess. But in an increasingly unpredictable world, how can we make sense of them? And what do they mean? This insightful and introductory guide delves deep into your star sign, revealing unique traits and meanings which you didn't know. Along the way, you will discover how your sign defies your compatibility, how to improve your health and what your gifts are. ***The Pocket Astrology series will teach you how to live well and enhance every aspect of your life. From friendship to compatibility, careers to finance, you will discover new elements to your sign and learn about the ancient art of astrology. Other books in the series include: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius,Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces

    Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

    The book teaches that a person's softness is their biggest strength and that having a big heart is not always a bad thing and that a glimmer of light can be found in the darkest places.A Handful of Stars is raw and unapologetic, soft and kind, reflective and inspirational all at the same time. Some of Ruby's most loved poems are shared within the pages of this book, in hope that they will have the same effect on readers the second time as they did the first.

                         —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.

    . . . Her poems offer a curative gift of merciful vision to a country blinded by its own blood and pain, as her narrators wait more or less patiently in their 'difficult knowledge' for the healing of their country's wounds" (San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle).