Rumi is one of the greatest poetical geniuses and spiritual masters in human history. His name stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. Today, Rumi is one of the most widely read poets in the west and has been described to be on par with Beethoven, Shakespeare and Mozart. During a 25 year period, Rumi composed over 70,000 verses of poetry focusing on diverse and varied topics. Rumi’s influence goes beyond nationalities and ethnicities with his work having been translated in numerous languages around the world. His work is mystical and intensely philosophical, with poems of fiery soulful expression, to passionate love verses filled with yearning and desire. Rumi describes the life of mystics as a “gathering of lovers, where there is no high or low, smart or ignorant, no proper schooling required.” He believed in a life journey following a love-based principle free of guilt, fear and shame. The bringing together of a wealthy nobleman and a poor wanderer serve as a reminder to us all that inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone can aid us in advancing our growth.

    One cannot categorize these poems simply as confessional, narrative, or lyrical. They are all these things at once. They move beyond usual explorations of childhood or family to blend themes and influences that range from Neruda to Coltrane, Fat Albert to Orpheus, John Shaft to Gershwin. This book gives us an almost Whitmanesque account of an America, and an African American, replete with grace and imperfection. Moreover, it gives us a voice that does not sacrifice truth for music or music for accessibility. At the end of a poem that includes Bill Strayhorn, Andrew Carnegie, and Dante, Hayes says, "I know one of the rings of hell is reserved for men who refuse to weep. So I let it come. And it does not move from me." These lines reflect what is always at the core of Hayes's poetry: a faithfulness, not to traditional forms or themes, but to heart and honesty. It is a core bounded by and cradled by a passion for the music in all things.

    Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.

    In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: "My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat." PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is a knife-sharp and nimble examination of migration, motherhood, and the malignant legacies of racism. In this collection, family forms both a unit of survival and a framework for history, agency, and recovery. Chang undertakes a visceral exploration of the historical and unfolding paths of lineage and what it means to haunt body and country. These poems traverse not only the circularity of trauma but the promise of regeneration—what grows from violence and hatches from healing—as Chang embodies each of her ghosts and invites the specter to speak. "Kristin Chang wields the line break like a sword cutting through dimensions of reality and language. Each break offers another surprise gut-punch or gutting grace on the other side as these fiercely sharp poems turn and turn, Chang never faltering to rise to the occasion of these blood-filled verses. Chang, quite simply, can write her ass off. I read these poems and I feel like I'm discovering poetry all over again. Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic. Kristin Chang is one of the best emerging writers out there, and this chapbook is one step into a career we will all be transformed by. PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES couldn't be a better way to be introduced to your new favorite poet. It's Kristin's world, thank God we're reading in it."—Danez Smith "Kristin Chang's PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is full of mouths swallowing food, language, home, memory, and bodily desires to finally arrive at explosive demonstrations of what happens when the unspeakable is uttered and shouted. Each poem shows the process of turning a painful reflection on history, sexuality, race, family, and nation into a prismatic object of beauty. We are lucky to witness Chang's use of silence as a productive narrative frame."—Emily Jungmin Yoon "In PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES, Kristin Chang's knotty examination into the complexities of intergenerational relationships, we come to understand the fraught nature of both the known and the unknown. These meditations on family, pain, and the ways we communicate untangle the threads of what it means to love those who have hurt us. Chang writes, 'Every language has different / words for the same want,' and the poems in this collection stunningly reveal those words and leave us wanting for more."—Eloisa Amezcua

    Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable verse--reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

    Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

    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.

    He decides to divide his land among his three daughters while he is alive, his intention not unlike that of King Lear, who hoped "That future strife/May be prevented now." But Lear made the fatal mistake of confusing flattery with love, and so does Ducksworth. Feeling snubbed by his youngest daughter, Ducksworth decides that only after he dies will she receive her portion of the land. In the meantime, he gives his two older daughters their portions, ironically setting in motion the very strife he hoped to prevent.Beautifully written in elegant prose, this is a novel about greed, resentment, jealousy, betrayal, and romantic love in the postcolonial world of the Caribbean, giving us a diverse cast of characters of African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian/Lebanese, and English ancestry."King Lear in the Caribbean--except in this novel, the flattery and deceit of Glynis (Goneril) and Rebecca (Regan) lose out to the principled, honest love of their younger sister, Corinne (Cordelia).Nunez's latest novel follows widower and Barbados retiree Peter Ducksworth, who tests the love and loyalty of his three daughters. Like Lear, things fall apart for Ducksworth when he fails to realize that his youngest daughter truly loves him while the older two are simply using flattery to obtain their inheritance. It all takes place on sumptuous white Caribbean beaches and lush gardens."-- New York Post "-- O, the Oprah Magazine , 10 Titles to Pick Up NowNamed a Must-Read Book by the New York Post "An epic tale of family betrayal and manipulation couched in superbly engaging prose and peopled with deftly drawn characters. In a story structure as rhythmic as the ebb and flow of the water surrounding Trinidad and Barbados, this revisiting of the classic story of King Lear becomes a subtle, organic exploration of politics, class, race, and privilege. A dazzling, epic triumph."-- Kirkus Reviews , Starred review"[Narrator] Émile remarks on parallels to King Lear repeatedly, but there is much more to unpack here. The issue of racism is woven throughout, as are regional problems such as access to Barbados's beaches and poverty in Jamaica's Tivoli Gardens. This is also a celebration of the arts, culture, and natural beauty of the islands. Shakespeare's work is a tragedy, but for Émile 'the future shimmers before [him] full of wondrous possibilities.' Nunez treats her source material with a deft touch, making this story impressive in its own right."-- Publishers Weekly "Nunez's textured and engaging novel explores familial discord, along with questions of kinship and self-identity....With a nod to King Lear, Nunez crafts an introspective tale as her vividly drawn characters navigate complications of heritage, race, and loyalty."-- Booklist "Even if you're not familiar with King Lear, William Shakespeare's great tragedy, you will still enjoy Even in Paradise by Elizabeth Nunez...The author's drama heads to a new place: the Caribbean. We meet Peter Ducksworth, a widower of English ancestry, who retires to beatific Barbados...Ducksworth’s plan to divide his land evenly among his three daughters goes horribly awry when he cuts off his youngest. Having been deceived by the older two, he sees his dreams of a heaven on earth turn hellish. Nunez inspires with this one."-- Essence Magazine "Nunez has written a Caribbean reimagining of King Lear that adds colonialism and racism to the story of three sisters, the men they love and their battle over the deed to their father's beloved property. Themes of greed, jealousy and resentment play out after their father confuses flattery with love and disowns his favorite daughter."-- Ms. Magazine "King Lear in the Caribbean.

    . .-from "Notes From"In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers."Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." --Chicago Tribune

    Now, in Spring Comes to Chicago, McGrath pushes deeper into the jungle of American culture, exposing and celebrating our native hungers and dreams. In the centerpiece of the book, "The Bob Hope Poem," McGrath confronts the paradoxes that energize and confound us--examining his own avid affection for People magazine and contemplating such diverse subjects as Wittgenstein, meat packers, money, and, of course, Bob Hope himself. Whether viewing this life with existential gravity or consumerist glee, McGarth creates poetry that is at once public and profoundly personal.

    The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.

    Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.

     Knots is a collection of poetry and prose about love and heartbreak, tragedy and grief, survival and loss. It's a journey through the numerous knots that we tie in life, and the ones we tangle and untangle with. It explores the realities of mental illness & suicide, social taboos & violence against women, pain & darkness, self love & healing in all its naked glory. The rhythm of Knots resonates directly with the poet's heart, conveying to the readers that there is a way to untangle every knot in life, but sometimes, some of these knots are what we are made of. Foreword by Dr. Santosh Bakaya

    It assures you that tomorrow will be a better day and encourages you to realise your potential and achieve your aspirations. Petit à Petit is centred on themes like self-love, self-confidence and taking life into your own hands.No matter how far-away and impossible your dreams seem, don't be afraid to reach for them.