Between The Lines: Volumes of Words Unspoken


Céline Zabad - 2018
     Written with incredible honesty and self-knowledge, Between the Lines is a stunning collection of poems from Céline Zabad. Ranging in length from a single line to full pages, her poems mimic at once the brevity and vastness of feeling. Her verse is at times as free as a cloud, other times as solid as stone. Her words are philosophies and feelings in their own rights, on love, loss, loyalty, betrayal, hope, and disappointment—on life. Zabad encapsulates the thrill of love’s first blush and the freezing burn of heartbreak. Her feelings flow freely throughout the collection, lending her poetry uncommon authenticity and power. Nature thrives between the lines of her verse, reminding the reader that tears are as natural as raindrops. Whether you’re looking for new ways to think about your own feelings or are simply passionate about poetry, you’ll find plenty to love in this collection. To better understand the complexities of emotion in yourself and others, you must read Between the Lines.

The Country Between Us


Carolyn Forché - 1981
    This is a major new voice.” — Margaret AtwoodThe Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. Forché's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

Late Wife


Claudia Emerson - 2005
    Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses.The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

Native American Songs and Poems: An Anthology


Brian Swann - 1996
    In this carefully chosen collection, encompassing traditional songs and contemporary Native American poetry, readers will find a treasury of lyrics verse composed by Seminole, Hopi, Navajo, Pima, Havasupai, Arapaho, Paiute, Nootka, and other Indian writers and poets.Selections range from the beautiful, traditional Seminole "Song for Bringing a Child into the World" to the cynical, knowing "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel." Permeated by the Indian's deep awareness and appreciation of nature's beauty and rhythms, these poems deal with themes of tradition and continuity, the Indians' place in contemporary society, love, loss, memory, alienation, and many other topics.Taken together, these poems offer an intimate, revealing record of the Native American response to the world, from time-honored chants and songs to the musings of urban Indian poets coming to grips with twentieth-century America.

The Selected Poetry


Vicente Huidobro - 1982
    Huidobro is considered one of the most significant poets of our century and is recognized as one of the seminal figures in modern Spanish-language poetry.

The Portable Romantic Poets, Blake to Poe


W.H. Auden - 1950
    Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image—and miraculously succeeding.

City of a Hundred Fires


Richard Blanco - 1998
    This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents—the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.

Carolina Ghost Woods


Judy Jordan - 2000
    Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death are the features of this collection of poetry, set amid the landscape of the South.

Of Gravity and Angels


Jane Hirshfield - 1988
    Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized.' - Theodore Weiss

Begin Again: Collected Poems


Grace Paley - 1997
    Combining her two previous collections with unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of a direct, attentive, and always unpredictable poet. Whether describing the vicissitudes of life in New York City or the hard beauty of rural Vermont, whether celebrating the blessings of friendship or protesting against social injustice, her poems brim with compassion and tough good humor.

Half-Hazard: Poems


Kristen Tracy - 2018
    As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, "Dangers here. Perils there. It'll go how it goes." The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy's knack for noticing what's so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.

The Vixen


W.S. Merwin - 1996
    "Merwin writes, " J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."

View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems


Wisława Szymborska - 1995
    With acute irony tempered by a generous curiousity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

Local Visitations


Stephen Dunn - 2003
    Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of his all-too-human hero, as well as the abrasions of ambivalence and choice, finally concluding that "here / and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible / with struggle or luck."In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevsky in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" (New York Times Book Review).

Can't and Won't


Lydia Davis - 2014
    The stories may appear in the form of letters of complaint; they may be extracted from Flaubert’s correspondence; or they may be inspired by the author’s own dreams, or the dreams of friends.What does not vary throughout Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis’s fifth collection of stories, is the power of her finely honed prose. Davis is sharply observant; she is wry or witty or poignant. Above all, she is refreshing. Davis writes with bracing candor and sly humor about the quotidian, revealing the mysterious, the foreign, the alienating, and the pleasurable within the predictable patterns of daily life.