In the Clearing


Robert Frost - 1957
    Nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry and selected as an ALA Notable Book for that year, this classic includes "The Gift Outright," which Frost recited at JFK's inauguration on January 20, 1961.

After Ikkyu & Other Poems


Jim Harrison - 1996
    After Ikkyu is the first collection of Harrison's poems that are directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice.

Black Ops: American Jihad


William W. Johnstone - 2006
    A direct descendant of the legendary mountain man Smoke Jensen, he is destined to continue his ancestor's legacy of heroism. For the courage, strength, and honor of a man never dies... Into The Dark Lieutenant Colonel Art Jensen finds himself a soldier without an army after he is caught on tape killing an Iraqi terrorist in a Baghdad firefight--only to have the media make him out to be a murderer. A career spent serving his beloved country now seems to be over... Until Jensen receives a new set of orders--secret orders. He is promoted to brigadier general, and placed in charge of the Special Function Unit--a new, covert "black ops" team. A team of one. The terrorists are already here. Financed and trained by a billionaire Saudi prince determined to bring the infidel America to its knees, a number of sleeper cells within the U.S are being activated. Officially, the politically protected prince is untouchable, and his campaign of terror stands ready to begin. But Art Jensen is no longer a soldier bound by orders--he's a weapon, bound by duty and honor, and he has one mission: to destroy the enemy within.

The Late Parade: Poems


Adam Fitzgerald - 2013
    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).

The Bell and the Blackbird


David Whyte - 2018
    The sound / of a bell / still reverberating. Or a blackbird / calling / from a corner / of a / field. Asking you / to wake / into this life / or inviting you / deeper / to one that waits. Either way / takes courage, / either way wants you / to be nothing / but that self that / is no self at all.

The Palace of Illusions


Kim Addonizio - 2014
    In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father; and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts."Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making.

Left Out in the Rain: Poems


Gary Snyder - 1986
    This book is unique among Gary Snyder’s numerable works, and the poems contained here are as broad in style as the compilation is in timeframe. With a new introduction by the author, Left Out in the Rain captures the evolution of the poet and the man.Readers will travel with Snyder from the American West to the Far East. From Berkeley to Kyoto, his imagery provides insight into the natural world as well as the human experience. With the span of a few words, Snyder can reveal a universe and then two pages later deftly handle a villanelle. Sensual, sardonic, meditative, epigrammatic, formalist—whatever the tone or structure, these poems all bear the indelible stamp of a master. Always evocative, they remind us why Snyder is one of our most heralded and beloved contemporary poets.

The Pleasures of the Damned


Charles Bukowski - 2007
    A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw, street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers.Edited by John Martin, the legendary publisher of Black Sparrow Press and a close friend of Bukowski's, The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works from Bukowski's long poetic career, including the last of his never-before-collected poems. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary and surprising sensibility, and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a rich lifetime of experiences and speak to Bukowski's “immense intelligence, the caring heart that saw through the sham of our pretenses and had pity on our human condition” (New York Quarterly). The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both longtime fans and those just discovering this unique and legendary American voice.

Angle of Repose


Wallace Stegner - 1971
    But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical.

Gods Without Men


Hari Kunzru - 2011
    It is God without men.- Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830 Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed - but not unchanged - the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them. Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shapeshifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe.

Riding for the Brand: A Western Trio


Louis L'Amour - 2015
    Now, collected together for the first time in a single volume, are three of his finest tales of the West. The texts have been restored to their original appearances in magazines.In “The Lion Hunter and the Lady,” Cat Morgan is plying his trade—trying to bag a mountain lion alive in order to sell it to a circus or zoo. As he and Long John William try to lure the cat from a tree, they’re interrupted by a lynch posse, the leader of which accuses Cat and Long John of running off his horse herd—and they intend to hang them right where they stand!“The Trail to Peach Meadow Cañon” tells of Mike Bastian, who has been raised by an outlaw chief, Ben Curry, and trained in frontier skills by Curry’s most trusted associates.Jed Ashbury was stripped and forced to run the gauntlet by the Indians in “Riding for the Brand.” Able to outfit himself from the contents of a covered wagon that had been attacked and left behind, Jed also learns what the mission of those killed in the attack was and determines to push forward with it—regardless of the consequences.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction that takes place in the old West. Westerns—books about outlaws, sheriffs, chiefs and warriors, cowboys and Indians—are a genre in which we publish regularly. Our list includes international bestselling authors like Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, and many more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Poems 1962-2012


Louise Glück - 2012
    With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape—Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain—persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, while at the same time are shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.              From the outset (“Come here / Come here, little one”), Gluck’s voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we “do not see the intervening fathoms.”  From within the earth’sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.

The Portable Beat Reader


Ann Charters - 1992
    Featuring: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure, and more.

The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems 1967-2001


Norman Dubie - 2001
    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

The Solace of Open Spaces


Gretel Ehrlich - 1984
    A stunning collection of personal observations that uses images of the American West to probe larger concerns in lyrical, evocative prose that is a true celebration of the region.