The Nightingale and the Rose


Oscar Wilde - 1888
    As with all of Wilde's short stories it embodies strong moral values and is told with an effervescence akin to that of the 1001 nights. It is the tale of a lovestruck student who must provide his lover with a red rose in order to win her heart. A nightingale overhearing his lament from a solitary oak tree is filled with sorrow and admiration all at once, and decides to help the poor young man.She journeys through the night seeking the perfect red rose and finally comes across a rambling rose bush but alas, the bush has no roses to offer her. However, there is a way to MAKE a red rose, but with grave consequences. This story can be found freely on many websites:http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-sto...http://www.literaturepage.com/read/th...http://www.oscarwildecollection.com/

The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems


David K. Kirby - 2007
    were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry. Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything--the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing."

Boss Cupid: Poems


Thom Gunn - 2000
    As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Echoes of Memory


John O'Donohue - 1994
    Just as To Bless the Space Between Us was being published, he died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. His powerfully wise and lyrical voice is profoundly missed, but his many readers are now given a special opportunity to revisit John in his first book, a collection of poetry.      O'Donohue's readers know him as both a spiritual guide and a poet. In the same spirit as his bestselling works, readers will be inspired yet again by John's depth of wisdom and artistry.

A Poetry Handbook


Mary Oliver - 1994
    With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind??—??a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

250 Poems: A Portable Anthology


Peter Schakel - 2002
    This well-chosen and comprehensive collection offers a compact and affordable alternative to larger and more expensive anthologies.

Selected Poems, 1963-1983


Charles Simic - 1985
    Simic is a master of the absurd and unexpected.

Lucky Fish


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2011
    With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves


Louise Erdrich - 2011
    

My Feelings: Poems


Nick Flynn - 2015
    . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it will come to me, if I can just get him to draw mea map, if I can find the tree, if I can find the shovel. And the house, the mansion hegrew up in, soon a lawyer will pass a key across a walnut desk, but even thislawyer will not be able to tell me where this mansion is. —from "Kafka"In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy—from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

The Maverick Room: Poems


Thomas Sayers Ellis - 2005
    A democracy. A savage liberty. And yet another anthem and yet another heavenand yet another party wants you. Wants you wants you wants you.—from "Groovallegiance"In one poem, Thomas Sayers Ellis prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant- gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call-and-response becomes Steinian echo becomes Post-Soul percussive pleasure becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out of a D.C. go-go club.

Half Pleasure Half Pain


Mohamed Ghazi - 2016
    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

Bright Dead Things


Ada Limon - 2015
    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

City Sticks


A.H. Sewell - 2015
    It was a sample (and not even the correct file - it was an old rough draft that was saved under a new title), and Goodreads will not take it down. The Amazon link directs to the correct, and full, edition. "She is lost, but the world is too. It is a perfect circle.For life is, but a dream /// is not."- "Seeing Ghosts/A Perfect Circle" excerptA. H. SewellCopyright 2015

Feel Free


Nick Laird - 2018
    Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them.Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.