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.

    In formally ambitious poems and lyric essays, Sun in Days gives voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. Wresting a recuperative beauty from one’s days, O’Rourke traces an arc from loss and illness to the life force of pregnancy and motherhood. Along the way, she investigates a newfound existential awareness of all that vanishes. This is O’Rourke’s most ambitious book to date: unsentimental yet deeply felt, and characterized by the lyric precision and force of observation for which her work is known.From “Idiopathic Illness”What can be said? I came w/o a warranty,Stripped of me—or me-ish-ness—I was a will in a subpar body.I waxed toward all that waned inside.

    This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. . . . francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet's toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind's eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work."—Evie ShockleyLyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."From "low visibility":I have light in my mouth. I hunger you. You wantwhat comes in drag. a black squirrel in a black tar lane,fresh from exhaust, hot and July's unearthed steam.You want to watch it run over. to study the sog. You want the stink of gristle buried in a muggy weather.I want the faulty mirage. a life of grass.we want the same thing. We want their deathsto break up the sun.francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

    They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem--and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice's Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.

    The school’s football team was the pride of the university and the city. Before the late 1970s, however, the relatively small school had trouble recruiting and struggled to keep up with the big-time football universities that were often more than double its size. Under pressure to compete, the SMU football program engaged in ethics, rules, and recruiting violations for years. When the corruption came to light, the NCAA handed out its most serious punishment in the history of college sports—the “death penalty”—which cancelled the team’s entire 1987 schedule.In A Payroll to Meet, author David Whitford details the Mustangs’ descent into corruption and the fallout when it was discovered. Most egregiously, the football program ran a huge slush fund that was used to pay players from the mid-1970s through 1986. Bill Clements, chairman of the SMU board and soon to be reelected governor of Texas, knew all about the slush fund before the NCAA did. He opted, however, to phase out the payments rather than stop them immediately, for fear that angry players might go public and create still more problems for SMU. Clements and the athletic director Bob Hitch decided that the football program had “a payroll to meet.”

    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

     Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

    The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind—a kind of circus of the soul.

    Controversial, revolutionary, ethereal, or illuminating, her poems about race, Black lives, violence, gender, and family move readers of all ages and backgrounds.With BICYCLES, she’s collected poems that serve as a companion to her 1997 LOVE POEMS. An instant classic, that book--romantic, bold, and erotic--expressed notions of love in ways that were delightfully unexpected. In the years that followed, Giovanni experienced losses both public and private. A mother’s passing, a sister’s, too. A massacre on the campus at which she teaches. And just when it seemed life was spinning out of control, Giovanni rediscovered love--what she calls the antidote. Here romantic love--and all its manifestations, the physical touch, the emotional pull, the hungry heart--is distilled as never before by one of our most talented poets. In a time of national crisis or personal crisis, this is a collection that will open minds and change hearts as only the best art can.

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    Through unprecedented access to Krzyzewski’s best friends, closest advisers, fiercest adversaries, and generations of his players and assistants, three-time New York Times bestselling author Ian O’Connor takes you behind the Blue Devil curtain with a penetrating examination of the great, but flawed leader as he closes out his iconic career.   Krzyzewski  built a staggering basketball empire that has endured for more than four decades, placing him among the all-time titans of American sport, and yet there has never been a defining portrait of the coach and his program. Until now. O’Connor uses scores of interviews with those who know Krzyzewski best  to deliver previously untold stories about the relationships that define the venerable Coach K, including the one with his volcanic mentor, Bob Knight, that died a premature death. Krzyzewski was always driven by an inner rage fueled by his tough Chicago upbringing, and by the blue-collar Polish-American parents who raised him to fight for a better life. As the retiring Coach K makes his final stand, vying for one more ring during the 2021-2022 season before saying goodbye at age 75, O’Connor shows you sides of the man and his methods that will surprise even the most dedicated Duke fan.

    K.Williams's work: more than four hundred poems that, though remarkable in their variety, have in common Williams's distinctive outlook—restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in the drive to find words for the truth about life as we know it today.Williams's rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and in these pages we watch them unfold from his confrontational early poems through the open, expansive Tar and With Ignorance. His voice is both cerebral and muscular, capable of both the eightline poems of Flesh and Blood and the inward soundings of A Dream of Mind—and of both together in the award-winning recent books Repair and The Singing. These poems feel spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which they sing; open to life, they chafe against summary and conclusion.Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement. C. K. Williams is one of them.

    This collection of more than 100 poems that honestly and artfully confront topics ranging from poverty and motherhood to Van Gogh and Mandela is presented in Tupac Shakur's own handwriting on one side of the page, with a typed version on the opposite side.

    Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.