B


Sarah Kay - 2011
    Now the video of that performance has been forwarded to mothers and daughters (and fathers and sons) all over the world. Originally written in 2007, "B" is a thank you note, a love letter, a wish, a promise, a confession, and a secret. With beautiful illustrations by Sophia Janowitz, "B" is finally available in this whimsical, magical book.

Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields


Ashley Capps - 2006
    Desperate for something solid to believe in, Capps still mistrusts authority, feeling disenchanted with God, family, eros, even her own impulsive self. And yet while the absence of faith hints at despair, these poems often achieve, almost inspite of themselves, an odd buoyancy. Playful, fearless, wary, there's a dazzling resilience in this book. One poem can make a grand and eccentric claim, "I forgive the afterlife," while another takes as its title something humbler and more poisonous, "God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake." No matter how adrift this poet may feel, poetry itself remains her anchor and lifeline.

Theories of Falling


Sandra Beasley - 2008
    THEORIES OF FALLING is the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Judge Marie Howe said of THEORIES OF FALLING, "I kept coming back to these poems--the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground." "Sandra Beasley slices her way down the page with precision and punch. Her haunting 'Allergy Girl' series will set off such an itch, I doubt you'll ever fully recover...This poet leaves us to smolder and ache in small kingdoms where 'even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.'"--Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Swarm


Jorie Graham - 1999
    Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery -- and Jorie Graham. The New Yorker places Ms. Graham in this distinguished line of poets, heralding the Pulitzer Prize winner as a profound voice in American poetry. Now, in her eighth collection, she further enhances her reputation with a book-length sequence of verse that is a stunning work of grandeur.The New Republic writes, "for 'swarm,' in other words...read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning.... Beauty -- that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham -- is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is...[and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding."

X: Poems


James Galvin - 2003
    In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.Something has to be true enough to beTaken for granted.In the hospital I sawAn old manCaressing the face of an old woman.This same man, young, caressed her faceIn just that way.That’s the stillnessAt the center of change—A sadness worth dying for, I swear—There is no other.—from "Dying into What I’ve Done""James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."—The Nation"In James Galvin we have a superior poet."—American Book Review"Galvin’s poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure."—Harvard ReviewJames Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Bloom for Yourself II: Let go and grow


April Green - 2018
    And in the process of building myself back up, I learned that you are allowed to leave some pieces behind-you are allowed to become the person you design yourself to be.'A collection of notes and poetic reflections, journaling how April learned to let go of everything that was holding her back in order to grow into the person she deserved to become.Bloom for Yourself II is a book you can plant in your soul and return to each time you feel ready to let go and grow.April Green's second book in the 'Bloom for Yourself' series gives readers even more help and guidance in overcoming pain and heartache. Her words are shared by thousands of people all over the world, including Jenna Dewan and Shantel Vansanten.The 'Bloom for Yourself' books are written for anyone feeling lost, alone, depressed or unworthy. They are books to be read many times over as you come to experience April's extraordinary gift for helping you understand that you are never truly alone.

Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod


Traci Brimhall - 2020
    In this ambitious collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other—much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2


Mary Oliver - 1992
    This collection presents forty-two new poems-an entire volume in itself-along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.

100 Selected Poems


E.E. Cummings - 1954
    Cummings is without question one of the major poets of the 20th century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

Rapture


Carol Ann Duffy - 2005
    Carol Ann Duffy's 'Rapture' is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.

The Continual Condition: Poems


Charles Bukowski - 2009
    The Continual Condition is a collection of never-before-published poems by the inimitable Bukowski—raw, tough, odes to alcohol, women, work, and despair by a rebel author equally adept at poetry and prose. Charles Bukowski lives on in The Continual Condition, a godsend for admirers of his previous collections Slouching Toward Nirvana, The Pleasures of the Damned, and Love is a Dog From Hell, as well as his novels Factotum, Ham on Rye, and Pulp.

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998


Zbigniew Herbert - 2000
    Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's SSelected Poems, is "bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate." He continues, "For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor—in his case well-tempered and shining indeed—for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic nor ethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them frorn that poverty which every form of human evil finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely."

Raptus


Joanna Klink - 2010
    The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.

The Black Automaton


Douglas Kearney - 2009
    . . These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."—Terrance Hayes

Fever Dream


Samanta Schweblin - 2014
    A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. One of the freshest new voices to come out of the Spanish language and translated into English for the first time, Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, unsettling, taut novel.