Life and Death


Robert Creeley - 1998
    Both honors made specific notes of his experimental style, his long influence, and his ongoing importance. Creeley's 1998 collection, Life Death, now available as a New Direction paperback, is the capstone of a career that has poignantly combined "linguistic abstraction with specificity of time and place." (R.D. Pohl, Buffalo News)

Poems 4 A.M.


Susan Minot - 2002
    We find her awake in the middle of the night, contemplating love and heartbreak in all their exhilarating and anguished specifics. With astonishing openness, in language both passionate and enchanting, she offers us an intimate map of a troubled and far-flung heart: “Can you believe I thought that?” she asks, “That we would always go/roaming brave and dangerous/on wild unlit roads?”At once witty and tender, with Dorothy Parker–like turns of the knife and memorable partings from lovers in New York, London, Rome and beyond, these poems capture a restless movement through loves and locales, and charm us at every turn with their forthrightness.From the Hardcover edition.

A Hummock in the Malookas


Matthew Rohrer - 1991
    In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.

The Glass Age


Cole Swensen - 2007
    Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.

Queen of a Rainy Country


Linda Pastan - 2006
    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

Departmental Ditties & Barrack Room Ballads


Rudyard Kipling - 1892
    John Whitehead, critic and biographer who himself served with the Indian Army in Burma, has provided this in full measure in his entertaining and scholarly Introduction and comprehensive textual Notes. This Centenary Edition of the ballads is unlikely ever to be superseded.

Frail-Craft


Jessica Fisher - 2007
    The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

Book of Anonymous Letters


AMKA Publishing - 2021
    Real people. Real stories.

Long Live Man


Gregory Corso - 1962
    Whether he is musing on antic glories amid the ruins of the Acropolis or watching a New York child invent games on the city’s sidewalks, Corso is there in it, putting us into it, with the magic of vision, with the senses—awakening images, that transmute reality into something more—insights that let us share his joy and echo his shout of Long live Man!

So They Call You Pisher!: A Memoir


Michael Rosen - 2017
    Born in the North London suburbs, his parents, Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage Communists in the 1930s Jewish East End. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe.Unlike the children around them, Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution; Party meetings were held in the front room, summers were for communist camping holidays, till it all changed after a trip to East Germany, when in 1957 his parents decided to leave “the Party.” Michael followed his own journey of radical self-discovery: running away to the Aldermaston March to ban the bomb, writing and performing in experimental political theatre, getting arrested during the 1968 movements.

The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger


Bill Jenkinson - 2007
    Jenkinson takes readers through Ruth's 1921 season, in which his pattern of battled balls would have accounted for more than 100 home runs in today's ballparks and under today's rules. Yet, 1921 is just tip of the iceberg, for Jenkinson's research reveals that during an era of mammoth field dimensions Ruth hit more 450-plus-feet shots than anybody in history, and the conclusions one can draw are mind boggling.

The Flowering Woman: Becoming and Being


Q. Gibson - 2016
    Gibson. The pages explore hurt, healing, love, forgiveness, self-discovery and the journey towards becoming a woman. Written in four chapters each piece encourages healing and the journeying of self.

Resurrection Update: Collected Poems, 1975-1997


James Galvin - 1997
    The complete works of an extraordinary poet who consistently refines the notion of what constitutes an American sound.

Hello Sunshine


Ryan Adams - 2009
    He is proof that poetry will find its writer."—Mary-Louise Parker, actress"Ryan Adams, one of America's most consistently interesting singer/songwriters, has written a passionate, arresting, and entertaining book of verse. Fans are going to love it, and newcomers will be pleased and startled by his intensity and originality."—Stephen King, on Infinity BluesRyan Adams may be acclaimed primarily for albums such as Cardinology, Heartbreaker, Gold (which includes the popular hit songs "When the Stars Go Blue" and "New York, New York"), and Easy Tiger, but the world-renowned singer/songwriter has always been a poet and fiction writer at heart.With the release of Hello Sunshine, Ryan continues to break literary ground beyond what he established with his wildly popular first book, Infinity Blues. Ryan's new work provides perhaps an even deeper insight into the man than is revealed through the songs that have resonated with his hundreds of thousands of fans.Where his debut was characterized by the bitterness of heartbreak, Hello Sunshine is a graceful, sensual assertion of the other side of the emotional coin. This is a 2009 fever dream—inside Ryan's heart and mind—replete with unforgettable verse that will shock and delight those expecting a mere continuation of where Infinity Blues left off.Ryan Adams is known for his prolific nature, which in the last ten years has resulted in various international hit albums. Ryan has also produced Willie Nelson's album Songbird and contributed to records by Toots and the Maytals, Beth Orton, the Wallflowers, Counting Crows, and Cowboy Junkies; additionally, he has appeared on CMT's Crossroads with Elton John.

Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway ... and More


Russell Simmons - 2003
    Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.