The Second Sex


Michael Robbins - 2014
    Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership.   Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.

Enchant: Beauty and the Beast Retold


Demelza Carlton - 2017
    An enchanting beauty. Only love can break the spell.Once upon a time...The wicked King Thorn forced the enchantress Zuleika to cast a terrible curse. She fled his court to travel the world, helping those who need her magic most. Until a search for her merchant father's lost ships leads her to an enchanted island, where Prince Vardan, the island's ruler, is afflicted by the most powerful curse Zuleika has ever encountered. She's not sure she can reverse the spell, but she's determined to try. After all, a prince who fights pirates can't be all bad...no matter how beastly his appearance.Together, can the enchanting beauty and the beastly prince break the spell?Romance a Medieval Fairytale series:Each book is a standalone, so they can be read in any order:(#1) Enchant: Beauty and the Beast Retold (#2) Dance: Cinderella Retold (#3) Fly: Goose Girl Retold (#4) Revel: Twelve Dancing Princesses Retold (#5) Silence: Little Mermaid Retold (#6) Awaken: Sleeping Beauty Retold (#7) Embellish: Brave Little Tailor Retold (#8) Appease: Princess and the Pea Retold (#9) Blow: Three Little Pigs Retold (#10) Return: Hansel and Gretel Retold (#11) Wish: Aladdin Retold (#12) Melt: Snow Queen Retold (#13) Spin: Rumpelstiltskin Retold (#14) Kiss: Frog Prince Retold (#15) Hunt: Red Riding Hood Retold(#16) Reflect: Snow White Retold (#17) Roar: Goldilocks Retold

The Mermaid


Christina Henry - 2018
    Barnum's American Museum as the real Fiji mermaid. However, leaving the museum may be harder than leaving the sea ever was.Once there was a mermaid who longed to know of more than her ocean home and her people. One day a fisherman trapped her in his net but couldn't bear to keep her. But his eyes were lonely and caught her more surely than the net, and so she evoked a magic that allowed her to walk upon the shore. The mermaid, Amelia, became his wife, and they lived on a cliff above the ocean for ever so many years, until one day the fisherman rowed out to sea and did not return.P. T. Barnum was looking for marvelous attractions for his American Museum, and he'd heard a rumor of a mermaid who lived on a cliff by the sea. He wanted to make his fortune, and an attraction like Amelia was just the ticket.Amelia agreed to play the mermaid for Barnum, and she believes she can leave any time she likes. But Barnum has never given up a money-making scheme in his life, and he's determined to hold on to his mermaid.

A Recipe for Sorcery


Vanessa Kisuule - 2017
    It is a recipe for womanhood that changes with the whim of the seasons and the political climate. It is a feverish fistful of musings, a comedy of errors, an instruction manual, a compass, an overheard conversation in the ladies' loo, whispered secrets over a (second) bottle of wine. It is a lamentation, an homage to fellow women, at once a celebration of things to come and a mourning of things lost. It is a redefinition of what it is to be magical and otherwordly. It exposes the complex and contradictory impulses of the human spirit, the ugly tangle of emotions we must deal with in ourselves and also as a wider society. With frankness, humour and a decided fuck-you to fear, Vanessa digs deeper than she ever has to find something resembling sorcery.

Anchors & Vacancies


Kat Savage - 2016
    It's all the things we all hold onto, all the things we let anchor onto us, and all the things that leave us vacant.

The Glimmering Room


Cynthia Cruz - 2012
    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

The Wendy


Erin Michelle Sky - 2018
    1789. More than anything in the world, Wendy Darling wants to be the captain of a ship, but women aren't allowed in the Royal Navy. When she learns the Home Office is accepting a handful of women into its ranks, she jumps at the chance, joining the fight against the most formidable threat England has ever faced. Magic.But the secret service isn't exactly what she hoped. Accompanied by a reimagined cast of the original Peter Pan, Wendy soon discovers that her dreams are as far away as ever, that choosing sides isn't as simple as she thought, and that the only man who isn't blinded by her gender might be the worst friend anyone could ask for.Anyone, that is, except Wendy Darling.

Selected Poems


R.S. Thomas - 1973
    He was a passionate Welsh patriot, but also an outspoken critic of his countrymen. His poems are an expression of his lifelong argument with himself, of his insistent search for God. In them he grapples with ideas of Welshness, with issues of technology, pollution, the decline of culture. He wrote too about love, about landscape, nature and birds. His is an urgent, prophetic and unique voice.

Imagine the Angels of Bread


Martín Espada - 1997
    The heart of the collection is a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, neighborhood, and work experiences-from bouncer to tenant lawyer. There are moments of revelation and political transcendence here, which culminate in an elegy for the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned for his advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.

The Daily Mirror


David Lehman - 2000
    During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

Invisible Strings


Jim Moore - 2011
                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother


Danielle Teller - 2018
    Or do we?As rumors about the cruel upbringing of beautiful newlywed Princess Cinderella roil the kingdom, her stepmother, Agnes, a woman who knows all too well about hardship, privately records the true story. But what unfolds is not the princess's history. The tale Agnes recounts is her own.A peasant born into serfdom, Agnes is separated from her family and forced into servitude as a laundress’s apprentice at Aviceford Manor when she is just ten years old. Alone, friendless, and burdened with a grueling workload, Agnes carves a place for herself in this cold place that is home to Sir Emont Vis-de-Loup, a melancholic and capricious drunkard. Using her wits and ingenuity, Agnes eventually escapes and makes her way toward a hopeful future, serving as a housemaid for the powerful Abbess Elfilda. But life once again holds unexpected, sometimes heartbreaking twists that lead Agnes back to Aviceford Manor, where she becomes nursemaid to Ella, Emont's sensitive, otherworldly daughter. Though she cares for Ella, Agnes struggles to love this child, who in time becomes her stepdaughter and, ultimately, the celebrated princess who embodies all our unattainable fantasies. Familiar yet fresh, tender as well as bittersweet, the story of Agnes and Ella's relationship reveals that beauty is not always desirable, that love may take on many guises, and that freedom is not always something we can choose.Danielle Teller's All the Ever Afters challenges our assumptions and forces us to reevaluate what we think we know. Exploring the hidden complexities that lie beneath classic tales of good and evil, this lyrically told, emotionally evocative, and brilliantly perceptive novel shows us that how we confront adversity reveals a more profound—and ultimately more precious—truth about our lives than the ideal of “happily ever after.”

Reverie


Erin Hanson - 2014
    Containing poems on a variety of different topics and themes.

Letting Go: A true story of murder, loss and survival by Rachel Nickell’s son


Alex Hanscombe - 2014
    A coming-of-age story that begins with a tragedy but ends in optimism, forgiveness and peace.On a beautiful July morning in 1992, just three weeks before his third birthday, Alex Hanscombe and his young mother, Rachel Nickell, went walking on Wimbledon Common. Life was never the same again. Shortly after ten o’clock that morning, Alex was discovered by the side of his mother’s body – she had been assaulted, stabbed forty-nine times in a frenzied attack, and left dead. Alex was the only witness to the attack.Letting Go is Alex’s heartbreaking account of that morning, the aftermath, and the devastating effect on his father, the extended family and the wider community. Alex tells the story of the resulting media storm, the legal cases following and the peace and understanding that he has now found, as a young man. In telling his story, and the truth, this is the last stage of Alex’s incredible journey to letting go.

Encyclopedia of a Broken Heart: Poems


Jon Lupin - 2019
    Organized in the format of an encyclopedia, each letter of the alphabet includes several poems on the theme of the word that begins with that letter. Emotional and inspiring, Encyclopedia of a Broken Heart will appeal to every modern poetry lover.