Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery's best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander.While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever.Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery's poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by this "national treasure."

    Includes "The Spell of the Yukon," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "While the Bannock Bakes," and "The Squaw Man."

    Selected and introduced by Joseph Parisi, former longtime editor of Poetry magazine, this brilliant collection brings together the greatest poems by all the classic authors, along with the choicest works by today's most accomplished artists in America and abroad. From W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot to John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore to Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver; Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats to Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, this comprehensive anthology features the poems that have best expressed the spirit of our times and helped create modern culture. In addition to such ground-breaking works as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Howl," Mr. Parisi has included the incisive social satire and whimsical wordplay of such wits as Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and Frank O'Hara. Among contemporary poets in the book are Seamus Heaney, Jane Kenyon, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Paul Muldoon, Adrienne Rich, and the redoubtable Billy Collins, all of whom have already achieved wide popular acclaim for poems that speak compellingly about modern life and the perennial concerns of the human heart. Mr. Parisi provides a general introduction to the book and introduces each poem with a brief biographical and critical note. For anyone who wishes to discover or to re-experience the most important and vital poems of our time, 100 Essential Modern Poems is, quite simply, indispensable.

    Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.

    Her admirers include Grace Paley, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith; as Time magazine observed, her stories are "moving . . . and somehow inevitable, as if she has written what we were all on the verge of thinking."In Varieties of Disturbance, her fourth collection, Davis extends her reach as never before in stories that take every form from sociological studies to concise poems. Her subjects include the five senses, fourth-graders, good taste, and tropical storms. She offers a reinterpretation of insomnia and re-creates the ordeals of Kafka in the kitchen. She questions the lengths to which one should go to save the life of a caterpillar, proposes a clear account of the sexual act, rides the bus, probes the limits of marital fidelity, and unlocks the secret to a long and happy life.No two of these fictions are alike. And yet in each, Davis rearranges our view of the world by looking beyond our preconceptions to a bizarre truth, a source of delight and surprise.Varieties of Disturbance is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

    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.

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

    All these creative talents come into play in delightful, unexpected ways in his new bilingual collection Green Poems, which celebrates his innate connection with nature.Gulzar writes about rivers, forests, mountains; snow, rain, clouds; the sky, the earth and space; a familiar tree, a disused well; Kullu, Chamba, Thimpu. Like glimpses of nature, the poems are often short, an image captured in a few words. And sometimes the image gives rise to a striking thought: 'When I pass through the forest I feel my ancestors are around me ...'.For those new to Gulzar's work as well as his many fans, Green Poems will prove to be a true joy.

    The final section of the book includes the long poem 'Endless Life'.

    But in the words of editor Honor Moore, what strikes the contemporary reader is not the sophistication of Lowell's feminist or antiwar stances, but the bald audacity of her eroticism. Her search for an imagist poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite, found its purest expression in sensual love poems that bristle with lyric intensity. This new selection explores Lowell's full formal range, including cadenced verse, polyphonic prose, narrative poetry, and adaptations from the Chinese, and gives a fresh sense of the passion and energy of her work.

    In our versions the original stories are opened up and their moralisitic endings reimagined; the victim might not lose; the timid gets a chance to become strong; the fool can gain insight; the powerful may lose their grip. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. More than a play on these beloved fables, "Who's Got Game?" is AESOP LIVE

    He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's own surprise, he does and becomes a millionaire. Ravelstein suggests in turn that Chick write a memoir or a life of him, and during the course of a celebratory trip to Paris the two share thoughts on mortality, philosophy and history, loves and friends, old and new, and vaudeville routines from the remote past. The mood turns more somber once they have returned to the Midwest and Ravelstein succumbs to AIDS and Chick himself nearly dies.Deeply insightful and always moving, Saul Bellow's heartfelt novel is a journey through love and memory. It is brave, dark, and bleakly funny: an elegy to friendship and to lives well (or badly) lived.

    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." —Time Out New York"The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."—Magill Book ReviewsA girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they’ve been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world.This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and “the joy of self-forgetting,” the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other.Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.