His unique poetry is now recognized as among Poland's finest. Largely self-taught, he left Poland at the age of 21, moving widely around Europe - befriended by Chopin among others - before travelling to America. Persistently dogged by financial crises, he was forced to return to Paris in 1854. There he spent the rest of his life, dying in a hostel for Polish insurrection veterans in Ivry in 1883. Norwid's work is introduced by Bogdan Czaykowski, the eminent Polish poet, who is also a noted scholar and critic. Adam Czerniawski, born in Warsaw in 1934, has translated widely from Polish (including Tadeusz Rózewicz's selected poetry, They Came to See a Poet', also from Anvil) as well as publishing poetry, stories, criticism and a memoir in his first language. He has lived in Palestine, Lebanon, Germany, England and Scotland, working in a variety of academic and literary posts.

    But I wrote a lot of good poems.”So maintains Anita Liberty, the caustically funny New York City performance artist who was going along happily healing her hurt by hating and humiliating her detestable ex-boyfriend on stage and in print until the unthinkable happened: she had a good date. And one good date deserves another. And another. And another. And, all of the sudden, Anita Liberty finds herself in a predicament. Getting dumped launched Anita’s career–Will falling in love finish it? Who’s more important: her devoted audience or her newly devoted boyfriend? And on top of everything, Hollywood won’t stop calling and Anita can’t figure out if It wants a serious commitment or just a little bit of no-strings-attached fun. From digging mercilessly into the minutiae of her new relationship to dramatically torching every professional bridge she crosses in L.A., Anita refuses to let a big load of bliss get dumped right in the middle of her career path.“He said that my work was amazing and hilarious and smart and that he can’t wait to see me perform.So I had sex with him.”“My boyfriend asked me to change my look.To something other than contemptuous.”{BARGAIN} Whatever Hollywood ends up paying me for the rights to the story of my life.“It’s easier to go back to fantasizing about perfection . . .than to accept that perfection is just a fantasy.”“Boyfriend thinks I’d rather be right than happy.Boyfriend’s right.But I’m not telling him that.”Through blog entries, film scenes, poems, and to-do lists, Anita Liberty documents the perils and pitfalls of dating, sex, relationships, artistic success, and the kind of true love that sucks the creative life out of you to the point where you just end up staring at a blank computer screen and thinking gooey thoughts about your new boyfriend even though you should be writing.

    The design of this anthology is inspired by the structure of a sonnet: 14 Poems for 14 Themes Love; Parting and Sorrow; Inspiration; Mystery and Enigmas; Humour and Curiosities; Rapture; A Door Opens, A Door Closes; Memory; Tales and Songs; Nature; Cities; Solitude; Contemplation; and Animals. There are poems for every mood and occasion, and alongside the more famous works, are some lesser known gems of English poetry.Included are masterpieces by Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Yeats, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Christina Rossetti, and many other outstanding poets. Please view the preview of this book for a full listing.At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful Kindle Books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between poems. You can return at any time to the contents page by clicking on the title of each poem.The Best of Poetry Series:Volume 1: The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that BurnVolume 2: The Best of Poetry: Shakespeare, Muse of Fire Foreword Anthologies of English verse are as abundant as mushrooms after rain. So why create another?Our defence amounts to this: the kind of anthology that we wanted to own did not exist – a collection in which the poems were as carefully arranged as selected; where Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” could ignite the beauty of Hart Crane’s “Brooklyn Bridge”; where the enigmas of Browning’s “Meeting at Night”, and Hardy’s “Once at Swanage” might unravel each other; and the doubts besetting Anne Gregory in Yeats’s poem, find answers in Thomas Moore’s “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms”. In this collection, we have tried to place poems together that will strike fire off one another, and bring new light to familiar lines. We decided to structure the anthology as a sort of sonnet sequence, with fourteen poems for fourteen themes. A two-poem prologue and epilogue bring the collection to exactly two-hundred poems. In selecting which poems to include, our aim was to present the best-loved poems in the English language alongside some less commonly anthologized masterpieces. Committed as we were to a definite fourteen by fourteen structure, there were of course, many wonderful poems that we were unable to include. Shorter, lyrical pieces have generally been favoured over the longer canonical works of English poetry. Each theme in this anthology is introduced by a famous definition of poetry. Taken together, these definitions give some idea of the beauty, enchantment, and richness that poetry can offer. But it is in the poems themselves that the real treasure is to be found. We hope you will enjoy reading them.Rudolph Amsel and Teresa Keyne

    But after being named the conference’s top defensive player his junior season, the budding star was sidelined by a persistent, debilitating pain in his left leg.After months of tests, Herzlich received a shocking diagnosis: He had Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Doctors put his odds of survival as low as fifteen percent—and no one thought he would be able to run, much less play, again. Then Herzlich learned of a radical alternative treatment that would give him the best chance to regain his strength and maybe even play football again. He had a choice to make, one that would allow him the chance to return to the game he loved, but it came at the risk of his life.Herzlich relied on family, friends, faith, and deep wells of determination to help him through treatment, and his drastic plan worked. Not only could he run, but he was stronger than ever physically, and mentally ready to battle his way to a spot on an NFL roster. When he was passed over by all 32 teams in the draft, he dug deeper and continued his training, winning a spot in the Giants’ training camp, and eventually, on the team.Mark Herzlich fought a battle against cancer, against statistics, and some days against himself. Told with candor and raw emotion, this is a story for anyone who has ever fought to beat the odds, for anyone who has ever been told that what they are about to attempt is next to impossible.Herzlich’s story embodies powerful lessons about what can be achieved through persistence and belief, and he serves as living proof that overcoming the impossible is only the beginning.With a foreword by New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin

    It is an epic journey not only affirming that “there is a difference between sadness and suffering;” but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. The Book of Joshua calls out in hunger and loneliness, “I didn’t feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.”

    The commentary will contain background on the poems or more deeply delve into themes or topics discussed in the poems themselves. The spiritual seeker as well as the mature in faith will both benefit from the poems.

    . .Taking as its starting point the classic 'wheel of balance' life-coach model, this beautifully packaged collection of extracts and short poems gathers wisdom old and new in a perfect gift for anyone who needs comfort in this f**ked up world of ours.'This is not a poetry book as you know it, this is a life raft.' Emerald Street on Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

    But while the selected poems in this volume may focus upon loss and grief, they also reflect solace, respite, and joy.  A goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy, and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is rather than what it was. Goodbyes can be poignant, sorrowful, sometimes a relief, and—now and then—even an occasion for joy.  They are always transitions that, when embraced, can be the door to a new life both for ourselves and for others. In this inspiring and consoling volume, Housden encourages readers to embrace poetry as a way of enabling us to better see and appreciate the beauty of the world around and within us.

    "[Thomas Lynch's] poems . . . are as stark and graceful as geese lifting off backwater. The poems trace from the rural midwest to London and County Clare, a quiet elegy of loss and testament. But then Lynch is by trade a mortician, and by craft a bard."—Amazon.com "[Lynch] evinces a steady wisdom drawn from years of passionate attention to daily experience."—Seattle Weekly

    I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

    John McKnight shows how competent communities have been invaded and colonized by professionalized services -- often with devastating results. Overwhelmed by these social services, the spirit of community falters: families collapse, schools fail, violence spreads, and medical systems spiral out of control. Instead of more or better services, the basis for resolving many of America's social problems is the community capacity of the local citizens.

    

    This captivating book, masterfully illustrated by Lulu Delacre, is dedicated with tenderness to the young readers for whom José Martí wrote this beautiful poem.

    She has since published many more books in multiple genres and for readers of all ages, but poetry remains at the heart of her work. Many-Storied House is her fifth collection. While teaching aspiring writers, Lyon asked her students to write a poem based on memories rooted in a house where they had lived. Working on the assignment herself, Lyon began a personal