Sometimes life is spiced up through natural events, sometimes life feels bland and tasteless. Sour Honey and Soul Food, is a book which explores the beauty and intricacies of love, life and connections, through poetry. Billy Chapata's third book looks to touch on the variety of flavors we taste, on this beautiful journey we call life.

    In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.From “Scrapbook”:We believe in the one-ton roseand the displaced toilet equally. Our bluesassume you understandnot much, and try to be alive, just as we do,and that it may be helpful to hold the handof someone as lost as you.

    And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves – poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to music. This wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology combines the ancient and the modern, the hallowed and the profane, the famous and the little known, to speak to two of literature’s great themes that have proven so powerful in his music: love and death – plus everything in between.Here are poems by Yehuda Amichai, W.H. Auden, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Constantine Cavafy, Alison Croggon, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Fenton, Thomas Hardy, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Seamus Heaney, Philip Hodgins, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Ono No Komachi, Maxine Kumin, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Norman MacCaig, Paula Meehan, Czeslaw Milosz, Les Murray, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Ovid, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Porter, Rumi, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Izumi Shikibu, Warsan Shire, Kenneth Slessor, Wislawa Szymborska, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ko Un, Walt Whitman, Judith Wright, W.B. Yeats and many more.

    I hope that this book makes everyone feel what I felt while writing it, and that love is a universal thing, and my story is not unique. And I hope that this makes them see that there is a beyond and that they can come out happy and clean. And, that this makes them braver than they already are, and gives them that little extra push and strength that they probably need

    It is a meditation on the benefits of appreciating love, loss, relationships, and fleeting moments of kindness.

    Each chapter holds the symbol of a petal containing a multitude of thoughts crowned with passion, love, light, hope and kindness.

    A poetic call for mindfulness, creativity, and analog real-world connection in an increasingly disconnected world from singer-songwriter Valerie June.Maps for the Modern World is a collection of poems and original illustrations about cultivating community, awareness, and harmony with our surroundings as we move fearlessly toward our dreams. I love youLike a fall leaf dancingAnd twirling in the windSoftly landing,Returning to the warm earthRestMake newBegin Again-comfortably

    B. White in his essay on Don Marquis and his famous creations, and the undimmed enthusiasm of several generations of fans -- who every year buy thousands of copies of Marquis' earlier collections -- testifies to their appeal. A whimsical and sophisticated sage, archy the cockroach entertained readers with iconoclastic observations on pretensions, politics, and our place in the cosmos during Marquis' career as a New York newspaper columnist in the 1920s and 30s.Allegedly tapping out stories at night by leaping from key to key on Marquis' typewriter, archy couldn't quite manage the shift key for capital letters. Although his tales appeared in lower case, his views achieved a level grand enough to solidify Marquis' reputation as an American humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, and Ring Lardner. archyology brings together selected "lost" tales that were literally rescued from oblivion by Jeff Adams, who found them among papers stored in a steamer trunk since Marquis' death.And so archy emerges from his long silence. Whether reporting on characters like emmet the ghost, sailing to Paris to visit the insects of Europe, being trapped for days in a New York subway train, or hanging out in a Long Island orchard enjoying fermented cherries, archy is always both provocative and inimitable. With illustrations by Ed Frascino, a New Yorker regular, this collection reintroduces a delightful cast of characters who reconfirm archy's view of the world: "the only way to live with it is to laugh at it.

    From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history—Michelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in Blowout, Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.

    Ten years ago, I started writing this for you. I wrote it for you and only you. Since then, millions of other people have read it, but none have understood it the way you understand it. I set out to find you a long time ago and today, I'm so glad I finally have. Thank you for reading these words.***I Wrote This For You is a collaborative photography and prose project. (Almost) every day, the photographer sends the writer a new photograph from wherever he is in the world. The writer creates a poem or short piece of prose inspired by the photograph and focused on whoever might be reading the work, or "you." The writer and the photographer have never met.  I Wrote This For You: 2007-2017 is a collection of the best poetry and photography from the first 10 years of the best-selling project. It contains new work, old work, work that's never been seen before and a selection of fan-made work inspired by the project. With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, millions of interactions and spanning three existing books, I Wrote This For You has forged a remarkable relationship to its readers over the first 10 years.

    This bruising collection of poems puts a blade and a microscope to nostalgia, tradition, race, apology, and sexuality, in order to find beauty in a flawed world. His work has been described as an astounding testament to the power and necessity of confession.