The Chaos of Longing


K.Y. Robinson - 2016
    This revised and expanded edition contains over 50 pages of all-new material.Organized in four sections – Inception, Longing, Chaos, and Epiphany – K.Y. Robinson's debut poetry collection explores what it is to want in spite of trauma, shame, injustice, and mental illness. It is one survivor's powerful testimony, and a love letter "to those who lie awake burning."

New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001


Czesław Miłosz - 2001
    Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that “to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.”Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile—most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His later poems also reflect the sharp political focus through which this Nobel Laureate never fails to bear witness to the events that stir the world.Digging among the rubble of the past, Milosz forges a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work, wrote Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, is “one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age.” With more than fifty poems from the end of Milosz’s career, this is an essential collection from one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018


Ursula K. Le Guin - 2018
    Le Guin." --Salon"She never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." --Margaret Atwood"There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Le Guin's." --Grace PaleyLegendary author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her ground- breaking science fiction novels, but she began as a poet, and wrote across genres for her entire career. In this clarifying and sublime collection--completed shortly before her death in 2018--Le Guin is unflinching in the face of mor- tality, and full of wonder for the mysteries beyond. Redolent of the lush natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with rich sounds playfully echoing myth and nursery rhyme, Le Guin bookends a long, daring, and prolific career.From "How it Seems to Me" In the vast abyss before time, self is not, and soul commingleswith mist, and rock, and light. In time, soul brings the misty self to be.Then slow time hardens self to stone while ever lightening the soul, till soul can loose its hold of self . . .Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over sixty novels, short fiction works, translations, and volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her books continue to sell millions of copies worldwide. Le Guin died in 2018 in her home in Portland, Oregon.

Selected Poems


Marina Tsvetaeva - 1971
    An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

The Rain in Portugal


Billy Collins - 2016
    Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering nearly fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him America's favorite poet.The Rain in Portugal, a title that admits he's not much of a rhymer, sheds Collins's ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical "the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they're in Minneapolis" to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, here Collins contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, The Rain in Portugal amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.On Rhyme It's possible that a stitch in time might save as many as twelve or as few as three, and I have no trouble remembering that September has thirty days. So do June, November, and April. I like a cat wearing a chapeau or a trilby, Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa, old men who are not from Nantucket, and how life can seem almost unreal when you are gently rowing a boat down a stream. That's why instead of recalling today that it mostly pours in Spain, I am going to picture the rain in Portugal, how it falls on the hillside vineyards, on the surface of the deep harbors where fishing boats are swaying, and in the narrow alleys of the cities where three boys in tee shirts are kicking a soccer ball in the rain, ignoring the window-cries of their mothers.

The Trip to Echo Spring


Olivia Laing - 2013
    Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often they did their drinking together—Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of 1920s Paris; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

Collected Poems


Jane Kenyon - 2005
    Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon's Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994


Jorie Graham - 1995
    The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987


Diane Wakoski - 1988
    Here are all the lyrics, series, and narratives that established Wakoski as a mythologizer of sex and self, a fierce free-verse imagist, and one of the most important and controversial poets in the United States today (Contemporary Poets). About these poems, Wakoski writes: My themes are loss, justice, truth, transformation, the duality of the world, the possibilities of magic, and the creation of beauty out of ugliness. My language is dramatic, oral, and as American as I can make it. I am impatient with stupidity, bureaucracy, and organizations. Poetry, for me, is the supreme art of the individual using language to show how special, different, and wonderful his perceptions are. With verve and finesse. With discursive precision. Arid with utter contempt for pettiness of imagination or spirit. Emerald Ice is a contemporary classic, the essential poems of a uniquely American female sensibility..

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley


Robert Creeley - 1991
    Here, in a new selection of 200 poems from five decades, is the distinctive voice of Robert Creeley, reminding us of what has made him one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

Bright Minds Empty Souls


Jennae Cecelia - 2016
    It’s a book made with love about falling in and out of love with yourself, and others. Enjoy over 60 poems from Jennae's second edition of, Bright Minds Empty Souls.

Here


Wisława Szymborska - 2009
    When Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, “How is it that she keeps getting better?” These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest work. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought. From the title poem: I can’t speak for elsewhere, but here on Earth we’ve got a fair supply of everything. Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams, and quips . . . Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere, you’re given your own torso here, equipped with the accessories required for adding your own children to the rest. Not to mention arms, legs, and astonished head.

The Axion Esti


Odysseas Elytis - 1959
    The Axion Esti [is] the work on which Elytis's reputation rests, and which almost certainly won him the Nobel Prize."New York Review of Books

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


John Ashbery - 1975
    Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

Collected Poems


Dylan Thomas - 1952