Framed by random celebrity encounters, the shocking ordinariness of rape culture as seen through the female gaze reveals just how deeply sexual violence on macro and micro scales can affect and infect women's lives. The speaker's voice evolves as she ages, yet retains throughout a "clarity of observation" via fast-paced reflective musings that offer as well the joy in moments where enmity between men and women is notably absent. Especially geared toward women who come from working class backgrounds, who might not have the means to escape difficult circumstances and must somehow find a way live through them, Queen's book transports us via hatchbacks and buses and even the KITT car through a life of hard-won confidence and strength. Far from a narrative of fame-chasing or conceit, however, the speaker says "right now I am laughing at myself" and that the age of "40 holds beauty as the accumulation of bliss & survival." Rather than centering the famous men named in the book, I'm So Fine places the lens squarely on what it means for a woman to come into her own power as she decides what she wants for herself "& mostly gets its every fineness."

    I needed a Viking. I needed someone who wasn't afraid of my strengths or of my needs. I chose wrong in the past...Beloved contemporary poet Alfa is back with a brand-new collection of more than 180 heartfelt poems on the theme of woman warriors and the masculine heroes they long for. In gorgeous, compelling, and intimate prose, I Needed a Viking takes us on an emotional journey of a woman searching for strength in the midst of a storm.

    The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

    Seeking their true selves amid the fallen cathedrals of America, they speak wryly of destructive love affairs, aesthetic obsession, and encroaching war, but refuse to abandon hope in the power of imagination.

    The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the ForewordThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965�2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965�1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize�winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America."mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days):all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

    So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart."This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.

    It was an unusual choice—even an unpopular one—for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague.     “Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted”: this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his “characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness.” Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard’s words, as nutcase.     In Berryman’s Sonnets, the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

    It’s not something they say. It’s something about their hands, the shape of their mouths, the way they look walking away from you."A collection that will beg you to be dogeared, coffee-stained, & shared.”—Amanda Lovelace, author of the princess saves herself in this oneHoneybee is an honest take on walking away and still feeling like you were walked away from. It’s about cutting love loose like a kite string and praying the wind has the decency to carry it away from you. It’s an ode to the back and forth, the process of letting something go but not knowing where to put it down. Honeybee is putting it down. It’s small town girls and plane tickets, a taste of tenderness and honey, the bandage on the bee sting. It’s a reminder that you are not defined by the people you walk away from or the people who walk away from you."A spine tingling, heart wrenching, goosebumps-across-your-skin experience."—Nikita Gill, author of Fierce FairytalesPerfect for fans of Caroline Kaufman, Atticus, Clementine von Radics, Nina LaCour, Adam Silvera, and Becky Albertalli; or anyone interested in bisexuality, heartbreak, running away from your problems, and coming out.Look for Trista Mateer's other book of poetry, Aphrodite Made Me Do It and her contribution to [Dis]Connected Volume 1: Poems & Stories of Connection and Otherwise.

    He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.

    For fans stirred by the cerebral lyrics of SOAD albums Hypnotize, Mesmerize, Steal This Album!, Toxicity, and their first, self-titled breakthrough—and for everyone enthusiastic about Serj’s solo album, Imperfect Harmonies—this essential, one-of-a-kind collection of Tankian’s innermost thoughts and feelings is a must-read. Unique illustrations punctuate nearly 70 poems—almost none of which have ever been published before. Glaring through Oblivion is an indispensable find for any true fan.

    . . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.

    Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly,deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization — a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality “saturated with being” in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.

    Undeniably celebratory and deeply troubling, this sharp-edged collection (of fiction, prose poetry, personal essay, photographs, and illustration) figures the un-hyphenated femme experience emerging in performance, betrayal, violence, humor and survival.Brazen Femme recognizes femme as an identity in flux and in motion, as constantly being reinvented. This mutability sets the stage for creative and thoughtful representation featuring critically acclaimed writers including Michelle Tea, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Amber Hollibaugh and Anurima Banerji. The collection includes the entertaining and challenging work of writers and artists whose stories are missing from existing explorations of femme that exclude experiences of men, transsexual women, and sex workers.Whether by choice or necessity, these frenzied femmes each explore their desires to make (and remake) femininity fit their own queer frames. Darlings, drag queens, whores and action heroes . . . a femme by any other name is spectacular.With writings by Debra Anderson, Anurima Banerji, T.J. Bryan, Anna Camilleri, Daniel Collins, Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Tara Hardy, Amber Hollibaugh, Suzann Kole, Heather Mc-Callister, Elaine Miller, Kathryn Payne, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, Elizabeth Ruth, Trish Salah, Abi Slone and Allyson Mitchell, Michelle Tea, Zoe Whittal and Karin Wolf.With photographs by Chloë Brushwood Rose, and Daniel Collins, and illustrations by comic artists Sandi Rapini, Suzy Malik and Allyson Mitchell.Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri have been collaborating in Toronto as curators, editors and art-makers for the past four years. Anna co-founded the interdisciplinary performance troupe Taste This, who collaborated on the acclaimed Boys Like Her.

    Ceremonies offers provocative commentary on highly charged topics such as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of African-American men, feminism among men, and AIDS in the black community.

    Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.