Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.

    From the narratives of army life during World War Two to the domestic and familial scenes of his final book, this selection presents Jarrell's art at its best, comparable in power and variety to that of his contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

    G., I am a fool.What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. Caresses."--from "Dear Gonglya,"At once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else, Brenda Shaughnessy seeks outrageous avenues of access to the heart, "This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt."

    These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers' childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi's poems guide us through an 'underworld of longing and deliverance', making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again. Everything Begins Elsewhere was followed by her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, in 2018.

    His First Poems—its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his books: to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan, published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts, which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.From the Hardcover edition.

     Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering,           just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present.                                                           —from “Arriving” Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

    Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language: Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest. In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world. The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in Eight Plots, a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic !Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.

    Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.

    Often frightening and sometimes downright funny, the world of Cemetery Nights is haunted by regret, driven by desire and need, illuminated by daring make-believe -- the remarkable bridge between pure entertainment and deep psychological insight.

    The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

    Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, “the best American poet writing today.”

    “Pastan . . . expresses a full range of the possibilities and potencies of the human, feminine voice” (Boston Globe).from "In the Forest" The trees are lit from within like Sabbath candlesbefore they are snuffed out.Autumn is such a Jewish season,the whole minor key of it.Hear how the wind trembles through the branches, vibratoas notes of cello music.

    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

    You must first approach the subject with the proper sense of perception, with the ability to visualize the finished print before you commit a scene to pixels, but still be flexible and spontaneous. Master Fine Art photographer Vincent Versace has spent his career learning and teaching the art of perception and how to translate it into stunning images. In Welcome to Oz,  he delves into what it means to approach digital photography cinematically, to use your perception, your camera, and Photoshop to capture the movement of life in a still image. Features: Adapt your workflow to the image so you always know how best to use your tools Turn a seemingly impossible photographic scenario into a successful image Practice “image harvesting” to combine the best parts of  many captures to create an optimum final result Create black and white prints that have the look, feel and “richness” of traditional silver prints without ever leaving the RGB color space 224 pages.

    For readers devoted to poetry, it offers illuminating examples of the infinitely various ways a poem reaches a reader.In both the book and the videos on the accompanying DVD, poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, and Dickinson as well as contemporary poets are introduced by people from across the United States—a construction worker, a Supreme Court justice, a glassblower, a marine—each of whom speaks about his or her connection to the poem. Their comments are variously poignant, funny, heartening, tart, penetrating, and eccentric, showing some of the ways poetry is alive for American readers. An Invitation to Poetry will inspire a fresh experience of poetry's pleasure and insight.