The excitement, compassion, lyricism, and humor that epitomize his writing for the theater are all present in his poetry. It was as a young poet that Williams first came to the attention of New Directions' founder James Laughlin who initially presented some of Williams' verse in the New Directions anthology Five Young American Poets 1944 (before he had any reputation as a playwright), and later published the individual volumes of Williams's poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956, revised in 1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). In this definitive edition, all of the playwright's collected and uncollected published poems (along with substantial variants), including poems from the plays, have been assembled, accompanied by explanatory notes and an Introduction by Tennessee Williams scholars David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis.The CD included with this edition features Tennessee Williams reading, in his delightful and mesmerizing Mississippi voice, several of the whimsical folk poems he called his "Blue Mountain Ballads,"poems dedicated to Carson McCullers and to his longtime companion Frank Merlo, as well as his long early poem, "The Summer Belvedere."

    It can often seem like there's no way things will ever get better. I wrote this book to remind you that it will, and to give you some comfort and hope along the way. May you find the healing and love your heart deserves. -Illiana Cenjur

    “Mean free path” is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection are full of layered collisions—repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations—that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there’s the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.You startled me. I thought you were sleepingIn the traditional sense. I like lookingAt anything under glass, especiallyGlass. You called me. Like overheardDreams. I’m writing this one as a womanComfortable with failure. I promise I will neverBut the predicate withered. If you areUncomfortable seeing this as portraitureClose your eyes. No, you startledBen Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

    One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

    But deeper under the surface are his observations on war, environmental degradation, language, and history, as a father—troubled by violence and human mismanagement of the world—offers advice to a newborn son.

    One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

    The paintings are in brilliant color and each features the Japanese parasol.Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694) was born Matsuo Kinsaku during the early Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Basho was recognized for his work in a poetic form that was a precursor to the haiku. Over the course of time, Basho became recognized as an unparalleled master of the haiku. His work is internationally renowned, and his poems are reproduced at many historical sites in Japan.

    The title, Regarding Wave,reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through theIndo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'GoneBeyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder'swife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder'sprevious collection of poems, The Back Country, this newvolume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth… the fertilityof the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, theterrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,the common work of the tribe…”

    For readers devoted to poetry, it offers illuminating examples of the infinitely various ways a poem reaches a reader.In both the book and the videos on the accompanying DVD, poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, and Dickinson as well as contemporary poets are introduced by people from across the United States—a construction worker, a Supreme Court justice, a glassblower, a marine—each of whom speaks about his or her connection to the poem. Their comments are variously poignant, funny, heartening, tart, penetrating, and eccentric, showing some of the ways poetry is alive for American readers. An Invitation to Poetry will inspire a fresh experience of poetry's pleasure and insight.

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    ****** This book is for you, sweet stranger. You with the galaxy eyes and that feeling in the pit of your stomach that something is missing. You with the stars up your arm and a ceaseless chill down your spine. You with your face turned to the moon and the darkness snapping at your back. You in the bookstore with your fingers upon the pulse of the universe and your day filled with the infinite nature of possibility.You.I have felt you in my bones every day of my life and searched for your face though I do not know it.This book is for you. This book is my search for you.

    Something is wrong.” Frederick Seidel—the “ghoul” (Chicago Review), the “triumphant outsider” (Contemporary Poetry Review)—returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel—and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work.

    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

    SmithThe poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences. In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author's East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.