Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

    From friendship break-ups to the annual identity-crisis, and first love to facing climate change, this is a zine-collection of what it means to faff and fail through our first decade as an adult; and how we might come out glittering.

    Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, "How My Family Grieved," to the political, "What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't a Pillar of Salt)," Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller.

    The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

    These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.

    With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.

    The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books (The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes , Entry In An Unknown Hand , The Night World and the Word Night and Rorschach Test) of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    This book contains the poem “Grace”, which the Poetry Society of America chose for their Poetry in Motion series to entertain public transit passengers in major metropolitan areas.

    River Hymns is the lyrical journey of a young black man’s spiritual reckoning with his family history.

     Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark. The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward's collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence--so clear and pared-down, they become universal. From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society's expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward's bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human. "You will come away bruised. You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry."

    This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers' notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers--among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Gl�ck. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes. At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry--its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

    Highly recommended."—Library Journal"Intimate and hypnotic."—Ploughshares"Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue, and fierce mind of the truly prophetic."—Rain Taxi"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world."—Boston Review"Death is the new and unshakeable lens through which I see," writes Dana Levin about her third book, in which she confronts mortality and loss in subjects ranging from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec human sacrifice. Shaped by dreams and "the worms and the gods," these poems are a profound investigation of our inescapable fate. As Louise Glück has said: "Levin's animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history: to Blake's tiger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament."They took you in an ambulance even though you were dead,they took youand my sister saidWhy are you saving her if she is dead?     shey shey—Curve of sky a crescent blade.Vultures wheeling     on thermal parapets, shunyata,     void that flays—Yak butter,     barley flour and tea: you watch him     make the paste.Dana Levin's debut volume In the Surgical Theatre won the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors—techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America’s true poetic geniuses.

    Carol Ann Duffy's 'Rapture' is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.

    As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own". In 'teaching my mother how to give birth', Warsan's debut pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.