The Moon Is Always Female: Poems


Marge Piercy - 1980
    Hand Games, poems of the first section, is the daily bread of my past two years or so. They are the artifacts of loving in a personal way, of struggles in a wide and a narrower frame, of planting and harvesting in the earth and on paper, of building new friendships and mourning the death of friends. They speak of zucchini and oaks and cats, of jogging and writing, of nuclear power plants and suicide, of fat and of street hassling. ”The Lunar Cycle forms the second part. I first heard of the lunar calendar in my childhood, when I asked why Passover falls on a different date every year and was answered that it falls on Nisan 14, the fourteenth day of the lunar month of Nisan. The next time I came across the moon-month was in reading Robert Graves in search of the old goddess religions. But the lunar calendar has really only been an intimate part of my life since I moved near the ocean and the bay and had to become conscious of the tides; for one thing, to get the sweet Wellfleet oysters. For more precise understanding I owe a lot to Nancy F. W.Passmore of the Luna Press, who every year produces The Lunar Calendar with thirteen months, their old Celtic names, associations from around the world, time of moon rise and set and all the phases. It tells me at a glance when my period will come and when I can expect to ovulate, and it is the most beautiful calendar I have ever seen, with the months in the form of spirals rather than grids.”Not being constrained by commerce to produce a calendar to sell by January first, Roman time, I begin when my year opens, in the spring; with Nisan, the first month of the Jewish religious year – although I have used the Celtic names, as does The Lunar Calendar, in homage to that labor of love. Rediscovering the lunar calendar has been a part of rediscovering women’s past, but it has also meant for me a series of doorways to some of the non-rational aspects of being a living woman: Thus The Lunar Cycle, explorations of my last two years.”

Ten Poems to Change Your Life


Roger Housden - 2001
    It dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind. It opens us to pain and joy and delight. It amazes, startles, pierces, and transforms us. It can lead to communion and grace.Through the voices of ten inspiring poets and his own reflections, the author of Sacred America shows how poetry illuminates the eternal feelings and desires that stir the human heart and soul. These poems explore such universal themes as the awakening of wonder, the longing for love, the wisdom of dreams, and the courage required to live an authentic life. In thoughtful commentary on each work, Housden offers glimpses into his personal spiritual journey and invites readers to contemplate the significance of the poet's message in their own lives.In Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Roger Housden shows how these astonishing poems can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones but never had the words for.The Journey by Mary Oliver Last Night as I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado Song of Myself by Walt Whitman Zero Circle by Rumi The Time Before Death by Kabir Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda Last Gods by Galway Kinnell For the Anniversary of My Death by W. S. Merwin Love After Love by Derek Walcott The Dark Night by St. John of the Cross

Depression & Other Magic Tricks


Sabrina Benaim - 2017
    Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living. Benaim's wit, empathy, and gift for language produce a work of endless wonder.

Uncaged Wallflower


Jennae Cecelia - 2016
    For the people who need an extra dose of positivity in their day. This is not a poetry book for you to read and relate to in a sorrow filled way. It is for you to read and say yes, I can be better, and I will.

Her Favorite Color Was Yellow


Edgar Holmes - 2017
    It is an ode to his muse, his all-consuming love, his everything- how it feels to find love, lose it, and get it back. Pour yourself some coffee and curl up with this book to let yourself feel something beautiful and true.

Selected Poems


Walt Whitman - 1892
    His most famous work, Leaves of Grass, was a long-term project that the poet compared to the building of a cathedral or the slow growth of a tree. During his lifetime, from 1819 to 1892, it went through nine editions. Today it is regarded as a landmark of American literature.This volume contains 24 poems from Leaves of Grass, offering a generous sampling of Whitman's best and most representative verses. Featured works include "I Hear America Singing," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Song of the Open Road," "Out of Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and "O Captain! My Captain!" — all reprinted from an authoritative text.

Poetry as Insurgent Art


Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 2007
    In over five decades City Lights, the bookstore and publisher, has become a Mecca for millions. Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (ND, 1958) is a number one best-selling volume of poetry by any living American poet. Now, New Directions is proud to publish his manifesto in a paperback edition.

Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass


Lana Del Rey - 2020
    Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” (Lana Del Rey) Lana Del Rey brings her breathtaking poetry to life in an unprecedented audiobook. In this stunning spoken word performance, Lana Del Rey reads 14 poems from her debut book Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff. Lana’s debut book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). This audiobook features Lana reading select poems from the book, including "LA Who Am I to Love You?", "The Land of 1,000 Fires", "Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving", "Never to Heaven", "Tessa DiPietro", "Happy", and several others. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.

Two and Two


Denise Duhamel - 2005
    Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two Möbius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects.At the book's center is "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted," a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of "Mille et un sentiments," modeled on the lists of Hervé Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with "Carbó Frescos," written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century.Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies--to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.

Poems to Fix a F**ked Up World


Various Poets - 2019
    . .Taking as its starting point the classic 'wheel of balance' life-coach model, this beautifully packaged collection of extracts and short poems gathers wisdom old and new in a perfect gift for anyone who needs comfort in this f**ked up world of ours.'This is not a poetry book as you know it, this is a life raft.' Emerald Street on Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

The Road Not Taken and Other Poems


Robert Frost - 1916
    Drawing upon everyday incidents, common situations and rural imagery, Frost fashioned poetry of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism. Originally published in 1916 under the title Mountain Interval.

Trouble in Mind: Poems


Lucie Brock-Broido - 2004
    There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues.Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.From the Hardcover edition.

Meteoric Flowers


Elizabeth Willis - 2006
    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep


Mary Elizabeth Frye - 1996
    This special edition, sensitively illustrated with delicate drawings by Paul Saunders, is intended as a lasting keepsake for those mourning a loved one.

The Phoenix and the Turtle


William Shakespeare - 1601
    It is widely considered to be one of his most obscure works and has led to many conflicting interpretations. It has also been called "the first great published metaphysical poem".The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As published, the poem was untitled. The "turtle" is the Turtledove, not the shelled reptile.