THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is Dana Ward's first full-length collection of poetry. Although some of this writing may look like prose, everything here is written both AS, and under the sign of, "poetry." THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is an infinite frame-dissolve between art and life engined by the thoughts and feelings associated with the relationship between mortality and politics. These things, working together and against one another, constitute the funeral fun-house physics which delimit the (temporary) reality in which the book operates. Following Notley and Kerouac, Ward's poetics is a generative problematics of voice in which "the counter-poised figures of porousness, multiplicity, & instability are first principals."

    In this beautifully told novel that crosses borders, cultures, and generations, a young man returns home to care for his aging mother, who suffers from dementia. In his efforts to help her and by turn make amends for their past estrangement from one another, he is compelled to re-imagine his mother’s stories for her before they slip completely into darkness. In delicate, heartbreaking tones, the names for everyday things fade while at the same time a beautiful, haunted life, stained by grief, is slowly revealed.

    Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all. that bare branch that branch made black by the rain the silver raindrop hanging from the black branch Boss I like that black branch I like that shiny raindrop Boss tell me if I’m wrong but it makes me think you’re looking right at me now isn’t that a lark for me to think you look that way upside down like a tree frog Boss I’m not surprised at all I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute you’re always up to something I’ll say one thing you’re all right all right you are even when you’re hanging Boss

    They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure - William Wordsworth, from the Advertisment prefacing the original 1798 edition. When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to what had been voiced before. For Wordsworth, as he so clearly stated in his celebrated preface to the 1800 edition (also reproduced here), the important thing was the emotion aroused by the poem, and not the poem itself. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original contexts as they appeared to Coleridge's and Wordsworth's contemporaries, and includes some of their most famous poems, including Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.

    It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry -- the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature."

    Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas. The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

    Dorothy Porter's posthumous book of poems, written over the last five years of her life.

    Part 1, Life and Times, traces Larkin’s early years and follows his development, within his career as a university librarian, into one of the most important and popular voices in twentieth-century poetry. Part 2, Artistic Strategies, explores a range of methodologies and aesthetic influences by which Larkin was able to create poetry at once both accessible and profound. Part 3, Reading Larkin, provides detailed critical commentary on many of the poems from his three major collections, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Part 4, Reception, outlines the history of Larkin’s reputation from the mid-1950s to the present, examining the debates and ideological confrontations to which his poetry has given rise.BEWARE FAKE REVIEWS ON AMAZON.COM. ****Five Star Reviews on Amazon UK*****Insightful Assessment of a still under-rated Poet. I found this book gripped me from the start. Confirming some things I though I knew, illuminating areas I knew little about and flatly contradicting some misconceptions, the book is insightful, sympathetic and, of course, literate. Here is the real Larkin - a poet I admired more than liked, revealed to be more interesting and accomplished than I knew. By RoyAn Excellent Larkin Teacher provides a great insight into the Poet and his Times. This book reflects great scholarship. Mr Gilroy is a dedicated and insightful reader of Larkin and I recommend this book simply because it has made Larkin one of my favorite poets. By Alexandros Alexandropoulos

    Includes "The Spell of the Yukon," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "While the Bannock Bakes," and "The Squaw Man."

    When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures. Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. In these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

    The time before sleep acts as an invitation to reflect on the world's quieter movements—from gardens heavy after a first storm to the moon slipping into darkness in an eclipse—as well as on the subtle but relentless passage of time. Insomnia embodies Linda Pastan's graceful and iconic voice, both lucid and haunting.

    "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon": the African slaves who brought their music to Puerto Rico; a prison inmate provoking brawls so he could write poetry in solitary confinement; a janitor and his solitary strike; Espada's own father, who was jailed in Mississippi for refusing to go to the back of the bus. The poet bears witness to death and rebirth at the ruins of a famine village in Ireland, a town plaza in México welcoming a march of Zapatista rebels, and the courtroom where he worked as a tenant lawyer. The title poem pays homage to the immigrant food-service workers who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center. From the earliest out-of-print work to the seventeen new poems included here, Espada celebrates the American political imagination and the resilience of human dignity. Alabanza is the epic vision of a writer who, in the words of Russell Banks, "is one of the handful of American poets who are forging a new American language, one that tells the unwritten history of the continent, speaks truth to power, and sings songs of selves we can no longer silence." An American Library Association Notable Book of 2003 and a 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember."To read this work is to be struck breathless, and surely, to come away changed."—Barbara Kingsolver "Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors. If it was up to me, I'd select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States."—Sandra Cisneros "With these new and selected poems, you can grasp how powerful a poet Espada is—his range, his compassion, his astonishing images, his sense of history, his knowledge of the lives on the underbelly of cities, his bright anger, his tenderness, his humor. "—Marge Piercy "Espada's poems are not just clarion calls to the heart and conscience, but also wonderfully crafted gems."—Julia Alvarez "A passionate, readable poetry that makes [Espada] arguably the most important 'minority' U.S. poet since Langston Hughes."—Booklist"Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martín Espada."—San Francisco Chronicle

    Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.

    They ask us to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. They are both nostalgic for, and exhausted by, the pursuit of an endless summer.‘The intricate politics woven into Tibble’s poetry give her writing strength and purpose.’ —Winnie Siulolovao Dunn, Cordite Poetry Review‘Tibble speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality.’ —Hinemoana Baker‘The poetry is utterly agile on the beam of its making. There is brightness, daring and sure-footedness.’ —Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf‘It demonstrates the power of all paradigm-shifting books – which is to fold up previously knotty stumbling blocks like they are furniture left out in the rain, and then replace it with an enlarged space.’ —John Freeman, LitHubTayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington. Her first book, Poūkahangatus, won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award in 2019.

    Gray. These are the words that arrive when you are made up of nothing but skin, bones, and too much love.