The Poems of Octavio Paz


Octavio Paz - 2012
    Paz is a writer for the entire world to celebrate (Chicago Tribune), the poet-archer who goes straight to the heart and mind, where the center of being is one (Nadine Gordimer), the living conscience of his age (Mario Vargas Llosa), a poet-prophet, a genius (Harold Bloom). Here at last is the first retrospective collection of Paz s poetry to span his entire writing career, from the first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem; the whole is assiduously edited and translated by acclaimed essayist Eliot Weinberger who has been translating Paz for over forty years with additional translations by several poet-luminaries. This edition includes many poems that have never before been translated into English, new translations based on Paz s final revisions, and a brilliant capsule biography of Paz by Weinberger, as well as notes on the poems in Paz s own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his life.

Selected Poems of Thomas Merton


Thomas Merton - 1959
    

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter


Aja Monet - 2017
    Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.Praise for Aja Monet:“[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.”—Harry Belafonte“In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.”—Carrie Mae WeemsOf Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

Where a Nickel Costs a Dime


Willie Perdomo - 1996
    They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.

Prelude to Bruise


Saeed Jones - 2014
    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

Mad Honey Symposium


Sally Wen Mao - 2014
    Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."—Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing—but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."—Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious—how thin that line is, how breakable—with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There's voltagein your flowers—mulch skeins, armoryfor cunning loves. Your mouth pins every stickybody, swallowing iridescence, digestinglight. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer.

How to Cure a Ghost


Fariha Roisin - 2019
    Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities.

Citizen: An American Lyric


Claudia Rankine - 2014
    Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Debths


Susan Howe - 2017
    A collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory’s threads and galaxies, “the rule of remoteness,” and “the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.”Following the preface are four sections of poetry: “Titian Air Vent,” “Tom Tit Tot” (her newest collage poems), “Periscope,” and “Debths.”  As always with Howe, Debths brings “a not-being-in-the-no.”

Autopsy (Button Poetry)


Donte Collins - 2017
    As the book unfolds, the reader journeys alongside the author through grief and healing. Named the Most Promising Young Poet in the country by the Academy of American Poets, Collins's work has consistently wowed audiences. Autopsy propels that work onto the national stage. In the words of the author, the book is a spring thaw -- the new life alongside the old, the good cry and the release after.

As a Friend


Forrest Gander - 2008
    Set in a rural southern landscape as vivid as its indelible characters, As a Friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him (his friend Clay, his girlfriend Sarah) provokes intense self-examination and an atmosphere of dangerous eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style and powerfully unsettling.

The January Children


Safia Elhillo - 2017
    The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan’s history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani—an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.No longer content to accept manmade borders, Elhillo navigates a new and reimagined world. Maintaining a sense of wonder in multiple landscapes and mindscapes of perpetually shifting values, she leads the reader through a postcolonial narrative that is equally terrifying and tender, melancholy and defiant.

What Kind of Woman


Kate Baer - 2020
    In her poem “Deliverance” about her daughter’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?”Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. As easy to post on Instagram as they are to print out and frame, Kate’s words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.

Be Recorder: Poems


Carmen Gimenez Smith - 2019
    The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of our time’s most vital and vivacious poets.

A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems


Emily Jungmin Yoon - 2018
    “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.”Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims,Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.