A Blood Condition


Kayo Chingonyi - 2021
    S. ELIOT PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*The moving, expansive, and dazzling second collection from award-winning poet Kayo ChingonyiKayo Chingonyi's remarkable second collection follows the course of a 'blood condition' as it finds its way to deeply personal grounds. From the banks of the Zambezi river to London and Leeds, these poems speak to how distance and time, nations and history, can collapse within a body.With astonishing lyricism and musicality, this is a story of multiple inheritances -- of grief and survival, renewal and the painful process of letting go -- and a hymn to the people and places that run in our blood.

The Glimmering Room


Cynthia Cruz - 2012
    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

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.

A Rustic Mind


Manali Manan Desai - 2018
    Through ‘A Rustic Mind’ I aim to provide a thoughtful take on such actions and incidents. Poetic in its expression, these words will strike a chord which is not only deep but relatable on many levels.

Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution


Mark EisnerPablo Neruda - 2020
    The poets of Resistencia explore feminist, queer, Indigenous, and ecological themes alongside historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality. Within this momentous collection, poets representing every Latin American country grapple with identity, place, and belonging, resisting easy definitions to render a nuanced and complex portrait of language in rebellion.Included in English translation alongside their original language, the fifty-four poems in Resistencia are a testament to the art of translation as much as the act of resistance. An all-star team of translators, including former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera along with young, emerging talent, have made many of the poems available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Urgent, timely, and absolutely essential, these poems inspire us all to embrace our most fearless selves and unite against all forms of tyranny and oppression.Original languages include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Kaqchikel, Mapudungun, Miskito, and Quechua.

Splay Anthem


Nathaniel Mackey - 2006
    Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub")—Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu" (though "Mu no more itself / than Andoumboulou").In the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa, the Andoumboulou are progenitor spirits, and the song of the Andoumboulou is a song addressed to the spirits, a funeral song, a song of rebirth. "Mu," too, splays with meaning: muni bird, Greek muthos, a Sun Ra tune, a continent once thought to have existed in the Pacific. With the vibrancy of a Mira painting, Mackey's poems trace the lost tribe of "we" through waking and dreamtime, through a multitude of geographies, cultures, histories, and musical traditions, as poetry here serves as the intersection of everything, myth's music, spirit lift.

And Short the Season


Maxine Kumin - 2014
    In And Short the Season she muses on mortality: her own and that of the earth. Always deeply personal, always political, these poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind.

able is she


R.H. Sin - 2019
    Moods for strong women who are weary from heartache.

Notes from the Field


Anna Deavere Smith - 2019
    Now a full-length HBO feature. An Anchor Original.Notes from the Field—originally performed as a one-person play—portrays a host of real-life figures who have witnessed, experienced, and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith put it in a recent interview: "Stuff that for middle-class kids or rich kids, it'd be considered mischief; for poor kids, it's really that road to prison.") We are introduced to these figures one by one: Sherrilyn Iffil, president of the NAACP; Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who spoke at the funeral of Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who was arrested for defending a classmate against a teacher's overzealous discipline; Bree Newsome, the activist who made headlines when she removed the Confederate flag from the state house grounds of South Carolina; and many others. Taken together, these voices bear powerful witness to a great injustice of our time—and inspire us with their accounts of perseverance, resistance, and progress.

Intimations


Zadie Smith - 2020
    This is not any of those—the year isn’t half-way done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me, in those scraps of time the year itself has allowed. These are above all personal essays: small by definition, short by necessity.”Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans, and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love—an essential book in extraordinary times.

Dear Ghosts,


Tess Gallagher - 2006
    In these new poems, the ghosts of the past are conjured as part of the present day: the deceased beloved, the father long dead, the ailing mother, the victims of holocaust and war. With these spirits beside her, Gallagher confronts her own illness and mortality, and celebrates love and friendship in these spare lyrics and muscular narratives, each punctuated by her resilience and grace. Here is the new work by one of America's most accomplished poets.

Tremble


C.D. Wright - 1961
    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.