Imperfect Thirst


Galway Kinnell - 1994
    Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell is one of America's masters of the art.

The Carrying: Poems


Ada Limon - 2018
    A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—“What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”—and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.”In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart “giant with power, heavy with blood”—“the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it’s going to come in first.” In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display—even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

To The Bravest Person I Know


Ayesha Chenoy - 2021
    

L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems


Elisa Gabbert - 2016
    Drama. Elisa Gabbert's L'HEURE BLEUE, OR THE JUDY POEMS, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

What I've Stolen, What I've Earned


Sherman Alexie - 2013
    Native American Studies. "One of the major lyric voices of our time" (NY Times Book Review), winner of the National Book Award, Alexie publishes his first new collection of poetry and short prose in six years.

Another America / Otra América


Barbara Kingsolver - 1992
    What she found, she says, was “another America.”Interweaving past political events, from the US-backed dictatorships in South America to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver’s early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and immigration system she witnessed at close range. The poems coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the hypocrisy of the national myth of America—a confrontation that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen. With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country deeply divided between those with privilege and those without, and the lives of urgent purpose that may be carved out in between.

The Death Notebooks


Anne Sexton - 1974
    Poetry collection.

Eight American Poets: An Anthology


Joel ConarroeRobert Lowell - 1994
    The 164 selections in Eight American Poets include widely anthologized works like Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," several of Berryman's "Dream Songs," and Anne Sexton's "Ringing the Bells," as well as poems that are less familiar but just as haunting. Prefaced with a discerning introduction and individual biographical essays.

Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy


Neil Astley - 2012
    Each anthology in the Staying Alive trilogy has 500 poems to touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. These books have been enormously popular with readers, especially as gift books and bedside companions. The poems - by writers from many parts of the world - have emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. This new pocketbook selection of 100 essential poems from the trilogy is a Staying Alive travel companion (also available as an e-book). As well as selecting favourite poems from the trilogy - readers' and writers' choices as well as his own favourites - editor Neil Astley provides background notes on the poets and poems. This format makes it even more suitable as a gift book for all those people you're sure would love modern poetry if only they were familiar with these kinds of poems. These essential poems are all about being human, being alive and staying alive: about love and loss; fear and longing; hurt and wonder; war and death; grief and suffering; birth, growing up and family; time, ageing and mortality; memory, self and identity; faith, hope and belief; acceptance of inadequacy and making do - all of human life in a hundred highly individual, universal poems.

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers


Bhanu Kapil - 2001
    Only at the end of the twentieth century could a writer create this compelling combination of experience and imagination, education and tradition, sex and prayer. This magic and modern coming of age could not have been written at any other time, yet its references bring the reader places that are distinctly not 1990s America.

He Felt Unwell (So He Wrote This)


Grant Chemidlin - 2020
    He Felt Unwell (So He Wrote This) is a curated collection of poems and illustrations that create a therapeutic journey and visual experience through the ups and downs of love, loss, fear, and doubt.

English Romantic Verse


David Wright - 1968
    Nearly all the famous piéces de résistance will be found here - 'Intimations of Immortality', 'The Ancient Mariner', 'The Tyger', excerpts from 'Don Juan' - as well as some less familiar poems. As far as possible the poets are arranged in chronological order, and their poems in order of composition, beginning with eighteenth-century precursors such as Gray, Cowper, Burns and Chatterton. Naturally most space has been given over to the major Romantics - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Clare and Keats - although their successors, poets such as Beddoes and Poe, are included too, as well as early poems by Tennyson and Browning. In an excellent introduction David Wright discusses the Romantics as a historical phenomenon, and points out their central ideals and themes.

Lyrical Ballads


William Wordsworth - 1798
    They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure - William Wordsworth, from the Advertisment prefacing the original 1798 edition. When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to what had been voiced before. For Wordsworth, as he so clearly stated in his celebrated preface to the 1800 edition (also reproduced here), the important thing was the emotion aroused by the poem, and not the poem itself. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original contexts as they appeared to Coleridge's and Wordsworth's contemporaries, and includes some of their most famous poems, including Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.

My Poems...: Selected Poetry


Marina Tsvetaeva - 2008
    Tsvetaeva's poetry was often of a very passionate and almost obsessive nature. She writes of unrequited love and heartbreak, of her admiration for other writers, of the devastation of war, and of her generally troubled life. Nonetheless, she is always able to contain this raw emotion in an extremely rigorous and disciplined form, unique only to her. Especially in her later poetry, frequent enjambments, inner rhymes, short lines, word play, and numerous allusions dominate her work. In this dual-language selection, Andrey Kneller offers his attempts to capture this distinctive style of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry by preserving both the message and the music of the originals.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie


Margaret Atwood - 1970
    In 1980, Margaret Atwood's longtime friend, the distinguished Canadian artist Charles Pachter, illustrated, designed, and published a handmade boxed portfolio edition of 120 copies of the poem with silkscreen prints, created as an act of homage to the poet. Atwood herself has said of Pachter's work, His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes. The poem and the prints inspire one another. This is the first facsimile edition of the original, as well as the first one-volume American edition of the poem, with an introduction by Charles Pachter and a foreword by David Staines.