North Morgan's third novel moves beyond the confines of fiction to examine how homosexuality's acceptance into society has created a new breed of demons for a generation of men born as outsiders yet living at the forefront of popular culture. Heartbreaking but never far from humour, Love Notes to Men Who Don't Read confirms Morgan's place as the leading interpreter of gay culture on either side of the Atlantic.

    It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends. In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as a makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

    As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, ‘revving on a wish’.

    – Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

    From falling in love to overcoming adversity, celebrating a new born or learning to live with dignity: here is a book to inspire and to thrill through life's most magical moments. From William Shakespeare to Carol Ann Duffy, our most popular and best loved poets and poems are gathered in one essential collection, alongside many lesser known treasures that are waiting to be discovered. These are poems that help you to see the miraculous in the commonplace and turn the everyday into the exceptional - to discover, in Kipling's words, that yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.

    Replacing the slim volume which introduced Stevie Smith to American readers, New Selected Poems is chronologically arranged and contains 165 poems along with many of the author's doodles.

    The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society. This collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

    He explores the boundaries of human fallibility both in candid personal poems, such as the title piece—a plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s wandering the hallway at night—and in his passionate encounters with classic poetic texts, as when Dante’s Inferno enters his bedroom:When you read Canto Five aloud last night in your naked, singsong, fractured Italian, my sweet compulsion, my carnal appetite, I suspected we shall never be forgiven for devouring each other body and soul . . . From the lighting of a Yahrzeit candle to the drawings by the children of Terezin, Hirsch longs for transcendence in art and in the troubled history of his faith. In “The Hades Sonnets,” the ravishing series that crowns the collection, the poet awakens full of grief in his wife’s arms, but here as throughout, there is a luminous forgiveness in his examination of our sorrows. Taken together, these poems offer a profound engagement with our need to capture what is passing (and past) in the incandescence of language.From the Hardcover edition.

     As usual, Maupin’s tone is both bittersweet and achingly funny in this tale of a post-catastrophic San Francisco and a young man’s resilient love for his mother. Cover Design by Darryl Vance

    It is a vulnerable cross section of his writing that moves from disarmingly human to sudden bursts of beast, able to seamlessly blend back into grounded stories of humor, heartache and identity using crisp, innovative and unforgettable metaphors. If you can only buy one Buddy Wakefield book, this collection is the most comprehensive of his most compelling works to date. His craft mimics the intrigue of propellers when they make themselves invisible. Buddy’s honest story is a one-man relay race to the light; that of a boy at gentleman practice who sometimes wants to blend in so badly he forgets his purpose has already arrived and there is no need to fight a war that’s long been over. The reader must be prepared for the recurring nightmares from which Buddy wakes up only to realize that whatever supposedly awful thing was stalking him was actually just trying to help.

    I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.

    Winner of the 2003 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, judged by Joe Wenderoth, who comments, in his introduction: There are many ways to hear 'it takes off the top of my head.' For me, the most important way to hear it is: it makes me suddenly and oddly aware that I am alive--aware that I am simultaneously at the end and the beginning of my power, which is simply to be there and to say so. Foust's poems do this for me; I feel akin to the mute struggler that lurks all around these poems that eludes so many attempts at saying that and where and how he is. The struggle is, in my view, dignified -- never self-congratulatory, never self-pitying -- and it has produced sounds for us to come back to--sounds for us to set out from--Joe Wenderoth, from the introduction.

    The city was a place of endless possibility, and he captured the pace and rhythms, the quandaries and exhilarations of city life. This selection of his work is edited by Mark Ford.