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The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems


Pablo NerudaJohn Felstiner - 1979
    Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the United States, this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda’s various styles and themes. An impressive group of translators that includes Alaistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems. A bilingual edition, with English on one side of the page, the original Spanish on the other. This selection sets the standard for a general, high--quality introduction to Neruda’s complete oeuvre. Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

The Colossus and Other Poems


Sylvia Plath - 1960
    In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

Dear Jenny, We Are All Find


Jenny Zhang - 2012
    'Can't I be my own dream?' she asks. The answer is always yes and always no. With dizzying energy and intelligence, Zhang forages through familial, global, and even anatomical configurations vainly outlining an identity that manifests only to shift and move restlessly on. This book brings to mind a 21st century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological."—Elizabeth RobinsonAuthor City: BROOKLYN, NY USAJenny Zhang was born in Shanghai and raised in New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and The Iowa Writers' Workshop. DEAR JENNY, WE ARE ALL FIND is her first book.

Tunsiya-Amrikiya


Leila Chatti - 2018
    From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.“Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in thesecoming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.” —JOY HARJO“I marvel at Leila Chatti’s poems, their deceptive ease, their ‘calligraphy of smoke,’ their luminous concern with identity and self, love and family, her aesthetic command. ‘I orbited the town of my origin.’ She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. ‘What kind of world will we leave/ for our mothers?’ In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: ‘a Muslim girl who loved her father’; ‘ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.’ Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice.” —FADY JOUDAH“Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

The Selected Levis


Larry Levis - 2000
    JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.”  Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife (1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). “It is not an exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets (not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”—from the Afterword, by David St. John

Snowflake


Eileen Myles - 2012
    Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy.

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals


Patricia Lockwood - 2014
    The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

The Difficult Farm


Heather Christle - 2009
    When I read a poem by Heather Christle I’m awed. – Dara WierThis is serious. Heather Christle’s poems in The Difficult Farm are dancing with the mysteries surrounding our condition and enlivening our language in the process. Christle’s poems are magical but they’re too busy to tell you that. These poems run and jump and float over an ever-evolving landscape where what’s at work is the serious business of discovery. In this book you will make discoveries of all kinds. These poems will shoot you to the moon, but which moon? – James Tate

Sad Little Breathing Machine


Matthea Harvey - 2004
    These are the engines, like poetry, that propel both our comprehension and misunderstanding. "If you're lucky," Harvey writes, "after a number of / revolutions, you'll / feel something catch."

You Are Not Dead


Wendy Xu - 2013
    Asian American Studies. "In YOU ARE NOT DEAD Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book."--James Tate"There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible."--Dara Wier"That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. 'We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.' Wendy Xu's poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu's work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive."--D. A. Powell

Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities


Rosmarie Waldrop - 2006
    Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver


Mary Oliver - 2017
    Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

Coeur de Lion


Ariana Reines - 2008
    Coeur de Lionis an intensely personal, monologic meditation on longing, sex, and love between a speaker and the object of all her passions, which include thinking and writing.

Selected Poems


Anne Sexton - 1988
    ANNE SEXTON (1928–1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. A celebrated poet of mid- twentieth century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike. Her poetry explored the many paradoxes within human behavior and motivation.

Ordinary Sun


Matthew Henriksen - 2011
    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."