African American Studies. TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. From a poet unafraid to take risks, this book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language."Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"--Terrance Hayes"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an anime-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"--Maria Damon"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK--is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates--download now!"--Rodrigo Toscano

    Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua'i and the Big Island. In the gut-punch of “Wanle,” a beautiful and tough young woman wants nothing more than to follow in her father’s footsteps as a legendary cockfighter. With striking versatility, the title story employs a chorus of voices—the women of Waikiki—to tell the tale of a young tourist drawn to the darker side of the city’s nightlife. “The Old Paniolo Way” limns the difficult nature of legacy and inheritance when a patriarch tries to settle the affairs of his farm before his death. Exquisitely written and bursting with sharply observed detail, Kahakauwila’s stories remind us of the powerful desire to belong, to put down roots, and to have a place to call home.

    An encounter with grace. A restoration of the heart. A healing of wounds. An anthem of freedom. All Along You Were Blooming is the ultimate love letter from the pen of popular Instagram poet Morgan Harper Nichols to your mind, heart, soul, and body.On Instagram @morganharpernicols, Morgan has over a million followers. Fans can add Morgan's beautiful artwork and thoughts for boundless living to their library.All Along You Were Blooming is a striking collection of illustrated poetry and prose, inviting you to "stumble into the sunlight" and delight in the wild and boundless grace you've been given. Morgan reminds you:There is a purpose in every seasonNo matter how you want to race through this day or run away from this place, you are invited to live fully--right here, right nowLight will always find you, even when the sun sets and you sit awaiting the dawnThat you are always blooming in the way you were meant toAll Along You Were Blooming is perfect:For men and women of all agesFor teachers to share with classrooms during poetry focused lessonsValentine's Day, Mother's Day, National Best Friend Day, birthdays, and holiday giftingIn each small moment, whether in the light or the dark, you can make room for becoming, for breathing, for stumbling, and for simply being--for there is grace, today and every day.

    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

    Every woman should know the feelings of being loved and radiating those feelings back to her mate. This is a beautiful expression of heartfelt emotion using short, gratifying sentiments. If there is a lover in you, you will not get enough of "Her."

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Yet for all their metaphorical suggestiveness, Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poems about the natural world neither preclude nor erase nature’s relevance as an actual living environment. In their respective poetic projects, the earth matters both figuratively, as a realm of the imagination, and also as the physical ground that is profoundly affected by human action. This double perspective, and the ways in which it intersects with their formal innovations, points beyond their traditional status as curiously disparate icons of American nature poetry. That both of them not only approach nature as an important subject in its own right, but also address human-nature relationships in ethical terms, invests their work with important environmental overtones. Dickinson and Whitman developed their environmentally suggestive poetics at roughly the same historical moment, at a time when a major shift was occurring in American culture’s view and understanding of the natural world. Just as they were achieving poetic maturity, the dominant view of wilderness was beginning to shift from obstacle or exploitable resource to an endangered treasure in need of conservation and preservation.A Place for Humility examines Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry in conjunction with this important change in American environmental perception, exploring the links between their poetic projects within the context of developing nineteenth-century environmental thought. Christine Gerhardt argues that each author's poetry participates in this shift in different but related ways, and that their involvement with their culture’s growing environmental sensibilities constitutes an important connection between their disparate poetic projects. There may be few direct links between Dickinson’s “letter to the World” and Whitman’s “language experiment,” but via a web of environmentally-oriented discourses, their poetry engages in a cultural conversation about the natural world and the possibilities and limitations of writing about it—a conversation in which their thematic and formal choices meet on a surprising number of levels.

     Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation. CONSOLATIONS invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

    It is a compilation of every word Sana wishes someone had said to her when she was a young girl. When she was struggling. Falling. Breaking. Bleeding. It is a reflection of the responsibility she feels to say these words to everyone waiting to hear them. Consisting of four chapters titled "the naivety," "the refusing," "the understanding," and "the growing," the collection is meant to take the reader on a journey of pain and hope, reinforcing the idea that life is still worth living. That life is always worth living.

    Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson” (Donald Revell,The Colorado Review).

    Now, twenty-five years on, Simon Armitage's reputation as one of the nation's most original, most respected and best-loved poets seems secure. Paper Aeroplane: Poems 1989-2014 is the author's own selection from across a quarter-century of work, from his debut to the latest, uncollected work. Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor and Seeing Stars, this generous selection provides an essential gathering of this most thrilling of poets, and is key reading for students and general readers alike.

    Many of the poems take place along the coastline known as Omaha Beach in Normandy, and move between visions of that beach during the Allied invasion of Europe (whose code name was Operation Overlord) and that landscape of beaches, fields, and hedgerows as it is known to the speaker today. In every sense the work meditates on our new world, ghosted by, and threatened by, competing descriptions of the past, the future, and what it means to be, as individuals, and as a people, "free."

    You will feel at home eating your own heart off a commemorative plate featuring a picture of your corpse.You won't learn anything except that, "No one can do anything to you that's worse than what you're already thought to yourself. No one can do anything worse to you than the things you've already done. No one can do anything worse to you than you can."

    Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous, and is certain to receive an enormous amount of attention.

    It explores the duality of what it means to be human, and why connection is essential to our experience.