This edition, which first appeared in 1977, was revised by the author: there are additions, deletions, and a change in sequence in the Dolphin section; the five poems in the title sequence from Near the Ocean are now uncut; and a new poem is added to the "Nineteen Thirties."

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    A. Powell since his remarkable trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness that easily falls among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind —from "no picnic" In these brilliant new poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, "blossom blast and dieback." Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.

    From the graveyards and battlefields of the Civil War to the ancient forests of Brazil, from desire to despair, landscapes both literal and emotional are traversed in this unforgettable collection of poems. Brimhall guides readers through ever-winding mazes of heartbreak and treachery, and the euphoric dreams of missionaries. The end of days, the intoxication of religion that at times borders on terror, and the post-evangelical experience intertwine with the haunting redemptions and metamorphoses found in violence. These tender yet ruthless poems, brimming with danger and longing, lure readers to “a place where everyone is transformed by suffering.”

    Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the New American poetry.

    . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it will come to me, if I can just get him to draw mea map, if I can find the tree, if I can find the shovel. And the house, the mansion hegrew up in, soon a lawyer will pass a key across a walnut desk, but even thislawyer will not be able to tell me where this mansion is. —from "Kafka"In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy—from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

    Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.

    The much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott Heron, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde.

    In his screenplays and short stories, Ethan Coen surprises and delights us with a rich brew of ideas, observations, and perceptions. In his first collection of poems he does much the same. The range of his poems is remarkable–funny, ribald, provocative, sometimes raw, and often touching and profound.In these poems Coen writes of his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments, his career in Hollywood, his physically demanding love affair with Mamie Eisenhower, and his decade-long battle with amphetamines that produced some of the lengthier poems in the collection. You will chuckle, nodding with recognition as you turn the pages, perhaps even stopping occasionally to read a poem. Handsomely and durably bound between hard covers, this is a book that will stand up to most readers’ attempts to destroy it.

    These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

    With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind??—??a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

    Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.Like fried potato chips—I believe so,utterly so—The hush-hush provingground was utterly proven as history—Hardly=History—I believe so, eerilyso—hush hush—Now watch thisperformance—Bull's-eye—An uncannyhuman understanding on target—Absolute=History—loaded withterrifying meaning—The Air Forcedoesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration— Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.

    Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.

    This striking new book continues Adnan’s meditative observation and inquiry into the experiences of her remarkable life.

    Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa delivers a powerful meditation on American, and particularly African American, life in the wake of Vietnam.Centering on the disorienting experiences of the returning soldier and drawing on multiple traditions, Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry is potent, live, and, like the strains of jazz running through it, an erudite and soulful music.