Kids love him and his poetry...and so do adults, a combination of approbation that is unusual in today's world.

    

    The poem recounts Venus' attempts to woo Adonis, their passionate coupling, and Adonis' rejection of the goddess, to which she responds with jealousy, with tragic results.

    It reprints, on facing pages, the version of "The Prelude" was was completed in 1805, together with the much-revised work published after the poet's death in 1850. In addition the editors include the two-part version of the poem, composed 1798-99. Each of these poems has its distinctive qualities and values; to read them together provides an imcomparable chance to observe a great poet composing and recomposing, through a long life, his major work.

    Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia refreshes our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” from Donne’s “The Flea” to Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” and from Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” to Plath’s “Daddy.” Paglia also introduces us to less-familiar works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut–and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn will excite even seasoned poetry lovers, and create a generation of new ones. Includes a new epilogue that details the selection process for choosing the 43 poems presented in this book and provides commentary on some of the pieces that didn't make the final cut.

    Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.

    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.

    Sin's first book of poetry.

    I enjoyed the attention so much, that I became Ed’s real girlfriend for a few weeks that summer. I put all that foolishness behind me until my senior year in high school, when due to an accident, the school became one cheerleader short. My sister Diane was a star cheerleader at the school back in her day. Since I used to help her practice, the cheerleader coach thought I was the best choice for an emergency one night substitute. My fake boyfriend is starting to feel less fake. Being a girl just seems to come naturally to me. What am I? A boy or a girl? I’m not sure anymore…

    Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, and Wallace Steven's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated up to a third of its works from her subsequent collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book, first published in 1924, has been unavailable to the general reader for nearly a century.Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers. Edited and with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding on Upside Down- The Life and Works of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on difference and individuality make her work uniquely suited to our times.

    During Weldon Kees’s life, his poems appeared in all the most prestigious magazines of the day—Poetry (Chicago), the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, and the Nation.

    The Americans were outsiders to the sport, the underdogs of the event, a 500-to-1 long shot. But they were also proud and loyal men -- to one another, to their communities, and certainly to their country. Facing almost no time to prepare, opponents with superior training, and skepticism from the rest of the world, this ragtag group of unknowns was inspired to a stunning victory over England and one of the most thrilling upsets in the history of sports.Written by critically acclaimed author Geoffrey Douglas, and now a film directed by David Anspaugh (Hoosiers), The Game of Their Lives takes us back to a time before million-dollar contracts and commercial endorsements, and introduces us to the athletes -- the Americans -- who showed the world just how far a long shot could really go.

    In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife;the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.

    Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

    Most particularly if she writes poems about death and violence. Or at least that is the lesson that the posthumous careers of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath seen to teach us.Reading this new volume of Sexton's previously uncollected poems, one has to wonder what will happen when there are no more half-finished poems left to be published. Will her grocery lists be next?I'm sure that the editor of this volume, Sexton's daughter Linda Gray Sexton, acts out of the desire to complete her mother's oeuvre, and apparently Anne Secton did leave instructions for at least some of her work, the section called "Letters for Dr. Y," to be published after her death. And in all fairness to Linda Gray Sexton I should mention that she and her co-editor Lois Ames did an excellent job of annotating and editing Anne Sexton's collected letters, putting together in A Self-Portroit in Letters (1977) a picture of a remarkably courageous woman and talented artist who fought her madness for many years.The heart of Anne Sexton's work lies in her earliest books - To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Live or Die, All My Pretty Ones. Here searing images take one by surprise, and the poems combine virtuoso technical skill with highly personal material is a way no one dies had ever done before. Yet as she grow older, worn down by her recurring bouts with insanity , Sexton's work grew sloppier, more self-indulgent , repetitive and heavy-handed. Her obsession with death and violence became more and more a part of some personal psychotic heil, more and more distorted each time she wrote, like a drawing one can't quite get right and finally ruins by constant erasure. The poems and the three horror stories in Words for Dr. Y are no exception.I would like to remember Anne Sexton for what I consider to be those extraordinary poems written in the face of great odds - poems like "Music Swims Back to Me," "You, Dr. Martin," "Her Kind." But the continuing publication of her inferior work tends to obscure her real achievement. [susan wood]