Actual Air


David Berman - 1999
    His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. This debut collection has received extraordinary acclaim from readers and reviewers alike and is quickly becoming a cult classic. As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. . . . It's a book for everyone."

Ghost Girl


Amy Gerstler - 2004
    In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler’s abiding interests—in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic—are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler’s reputation as an important contemporary poet.

Accidental Agent: Behind Enemy Lines with the French Resistance


John Goldsmith - 2017
    Not easily deterred he eventually became a tank driving instructor in the ranks.In 1942 accidental circumstances saw his recruitment into Buckmaster s F Section of the Special Operations Executive. His faultless French and upbringing in Paris were to prove invaluable. Commissioned overnight and after intensive training he was parachuted into France for the first of his three missions.His adventures included crossing the Pyrenees, sabotage, forming his own circuits, being captured by the Gestapo, a daring escape and black-marketeering. In 1944, now a Major, he was advisor to the Maquis in the Mont Ventoux area where they fought the Germans in pitched battles and won.Although this refreshingly modest account does not admit to it, Goldsmith s extraordinary war is best summed up by his DSO, MC, three Croix de Guerre and Legion d honneur.Accidental Agent is as thrilling an account of war behind enemy lines as has ever been written. The author s descriptions of his experiences and the many colorful characters he came across are a joy to read."

Nikitta: A Mother’s Story - The Tragic True Story of My Daughter's Murder


Marcia Grender - 2016
    Marcia and her partner Paul, Nikitta’s father, rushed to the scene but there was nothing they could do. Firefighters had already discovered Nikitta’s body in the wreckage of the home she’d lovingly built with her childhood sweetheart. To add to their agony, Nikitta had been eight months’ pregnant. The fully formed yet unborn baby girl she’d already named Kelsey May was gone, too.But it soon became apparent Nikitta’s death was far from an accident. Within hours, the investigation became a murder inquiry and Ryan’s cousin Carl Whant was the prime suspect. Whant had been openly infatuated with Nikitta and boasted that he thought of her every time he had sex.As her world collapsed around her, Marcia could only watch in horror. Shortly after Whant was charged with murder, child destruction, rape and arson, she began charting her feelings in a searingly honest diary, the contents of which are published for the first time in this book.Marcia painstakingly recalls the agony of holding her granddaughter for the first time in a police mortuary, but being unable to see her dead daughter because of the shocking state in which Whant had left her. She charts the pain of laying them both to rest, knowing she will have to face their killer every day in court when Whant’s case comes to trial. For the first time, she opens up about her turbulent relationship with Ryan and the devastating revelations which almost cause her world to shatter for a second time. But, above all, she speaks of the indescribable hell of learning to live without the most important thing in her life.

The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe


Laura Gilpin - 1976
    Laura Gilpin's first collection of poetry, for which she won the 1976 Walt Whitman Award.

The Complete Poetry


Edgar Allan Poe - 1831
    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.

Jackself


Jacob Polley - 2016
    In one of the most original books of poetry to appear in the last decade, Jackself spins a kind of 'fictionalized autobiography' through nursery rhymes, riddles and cautionary tales, and through the many 'Jacks' of our folktale, legend, phrase and fable - everyman Jacks and no one Jacks, Jackdaw, Jack-O-Lantern, Jack Sprat, Cheapjack and Jack Frost. At once playful and terrifying, lyric and narratively compelling, Jackself is an unforgettable exploration of an innocence and childhood lost in the darker corners of Reiver country and of English folklore, and once more shows Polley as one of the most remarkable imaginations at work in poetry today.

Colors Passing Through Us


Marge Piercy - 2003
    Feisty and funny as always, she turns a sharp eye on the world around her, bidding an ex-hausted farewell to the twentieth century and singing an "electronic breakdown blues" for the twenty-first. She memorializes movingly those who, like los desaparecidos and the victims of 9/11, disappear suddenly and without a trace. She writes an elegy for her mother, a woman who struggled with a deadening round of housework, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so on, "until stroke broke / her open." She remembers the scraps of lace, the touch of velvet, that were part of her maternal inheritance and first aroused her sensual curiosity. Here are paeans to the pleasures of the natural world (rosy ripe tomatoes, a mating dance of hawks) as the poet confronts her own mortality in the cycle of seasons and the eternity of the cosmos: "I am hurrying, I am running hard / toward I don't know what, / but I mean to arrive before dark." Other poems-about her grandmother's passage from Russia to the New World, or the interrupting of a Passover seder to watch a comet pass-expand on Piercy's appreciation of Jewish life that won her so much acclaim in The Art of Blessing the Day. Colors Passing Through Us is a moving celebration of the endurance of love and of the phenomenon of life itself-a book to treasure.

A Woman of Property


Robyn Schiff - 2016
    This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

Jiya Jale: The Stories of Songs


गुलज़ार - 2018
    He remains as popular today, and as sensitive a chronicler of our emotions, as he was half a century ago. And throughout, his work has been gloriously distinctive—especially for the unforgettable images and the intimacy he brings to his songs.In this book of conversations with the acclaimed author and documentary filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir, Gulzar speaks about the making of his most enduring songs—from ‘Mora gora ang lai le’ (Bandini; 1963) and ‘Dil dhoondta hai’ (Mausam; 1975) to ‘Jiya jale’ (Dil Se; 1998) and ‘Dil toh bachcha hai ji’ (Ishqiya; 2010). He also discusses the songs of other greats, like Shailendra and Sahir Ludhianvi; his favourite music directors, like SD and RD Burman, Hemant Kumar and AR Rahman; and several playback singers, among them, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle, Vani Jairam, Jagjit Singh and Bhupinder Singh.Full of insight, anecdote and analysis—and containing over 40 songs, in roman script and English translation—this book is a treasure for students and lovers of Hindi cinema, music and poetry.

Heavenly Questions: Poems


Gjertrud Schnackenberg - 2010
    In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

Weeds and Wild Flowers


Alice Oswald - 2009
    Within its pages, everyday flora take on an extraordinary life, jostling tragically at times, at times comically, for a foothold in a busying world. Stunningly visualised and skilfully animated, this imaginative collaboration beckons us toward a landscape of botanical characters, and invites us to see ourselves among them.

Landing Light


Don Paterson - 2003
    Eliot PrizeDear son, I was mezzo del camminand the true path was as lost to me as everwhen you cut in front and lit it as you ran.See how the true gift never leaves the giver . . .—from "Waking with Russell"Hailed for its "seriousness and moral urgency" (The Independent), Landing Light is one of the most important and resonant poetry collections to come out of Britain in recent years.

Homage to the Lame Wolf: Vasko Popa - Selected Poems


Vasko Popa - 1979
    The new version adds two sequences--"Give Me Back My Rage" and "Heaven's Ring"--as well as some previously unpublished sections of the justly famous series, "The Little Box." Simic and Popa are a perfect match. A book for surrealists, mythographers, postmodernists, scientists, and lovers of poetry and games. Winner of the PEN Translation Prize.

Smokes and Whiskey


Tejaswini Divya Naik - 2018
    I hope that this book makes everyone feel what I felt while writing it, and that love is a universal thing, and my story is not unique. And I hope that this makes them see that there is a beyond and that they can come out happy and clean. And, that this makes them braver than they already are, and gives them that little extra push and strength that they probably need