Poemland


Chelsey Minnis - 2009
    Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous.If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream . . .There is a floating sadness nearby . . .Chelsey Minnis is the author of three previous collections. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems


Pablo NerudaJohn Felstiner - 1979
    Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the United States, this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda’s various styles and themes. An impressive group of translators that includes Alaistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems. A bilingual edition, with English on one side of the page, the original Spanish on the other. This selection sets the standard for a general, high--quality introduction to Neruda’s complete oeuvre. Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Look: Poems


Solmaz Sharif - 2016
    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

Tender Buttons


Gertrude Stein - 1914
    Stein's strong influence on 20th-century literature is evident in this 1915 work of highly original prose rendered in thought-provoking experimental techniques.

Selected Poems


James Tate - 1974
    He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor.

Bright Dead Things


Ada Limon - 2015
    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

The Splinter Factory


Jeffrey McDaniel - 2002
    Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously, you won't know whether to laugh or cry, but you'll definitely keep reading.

Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar


Richard Brautigan - 1967
    Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways; In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate; and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.

The Highwayman


Alfred Noyes - 1906
    The vivid imagery of the writing is matched by Charles Keeping's haunting illustrations which won him the Kate Greenaway Medal. This new edition features rescanned artwork to capture the breath-taking detail of Keeping's illustrations and a striking new cover.

Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee


Megan Boyle - 2011
    Megan Boyle's debut poetry collection is at once confessional, sociological, emotional, detached, funny, sad, delightful, reckless, and meditative. Written in the naturally meticulous, defaultedly complex, always affecting voice of a person too imaginative and self-aware and intelligent to be fully consumed by depression and loneliness but too aware of the meaninglessness and ephemeral nature of existence (and too depressed and lonely) to write on any level but an existential, emotionally-driven, unsimplified one, Megan Boyle's debut poetry collection is the rare work of art that conveys troubling and scary information, undiluted, about humans and the universe but in a way, ultimately, that makes you excited to be alive, eager to be troubled and scared, grateful to simply be here....unbelievably engaging and mesmerizing. Boyle writes with such openness about living in a world that constantly mystifies you, the strange act of watching yourself do things you can't quite understand, making a mess of things and figuring out how to keep living [...] I can't think of another book quite like it, can't think of a voice as distinctive and strange as Boyle's.--Kevin Wilson, author of The Family FangJust reading this collection, [Megan Boyle] immediately became one of my favorite modern poets.--Benn Ray, WYPR's The Signal[O]ne of the funniest, most satisfying, most original, most satisfying books of poetry I've come across in years.--Rachel Whang, Atomic Books[A] blunt work that challenges the reader, dares the reader to find out what this woman has on her mind. Boyle exhibits a generous exhibitionist quality that leaves one wondering if she might be the next Laurie Anderson.--Nicolle Elizabeth, The Brooklyn Rail

The Collected Poems


Wallace Stevens - 1954
    This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- "Harmonium"- "Ideas of Order"- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"- "Parts of the World"- "Transport Summer"- "The Auroras of Autumn"- "The Rock"

The Dead and the Living


Sharon Olds - 1984
    The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.

soft magic.


Upile Chisala - 2015
    is the debut collection of prose and poetry by Malawian writer, Upile Chisala. This book explores the self, joy, blackness, gender, matters of the heart, the experience of Diaspora, spirituality and most of all, how we survive. soft magic. is a shared healing journey.

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke


Rainer Maria Rilke - 1948
    Rilke is unquestionably the most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation, of spiritual quest, that the twentieth century has known. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert a seemingly endless fascination for contemporary readers.In Stephen Mitchell’s versions, many readers feel that they have discovered an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of Rilke’s poetry more accurately and convincingly than has ever been done before.Mr. Mitchell is impeccable in his adherence to Rilke’s text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thoughts; at the same time, his work has authority and power as poetry in its own right. Few translators of any poet have arrived at the delicate balance of fidelity and originality that Mr. Mitchell has brought off with seeming effortlessness.Originally published: New York : Random House, 1982.

Helium


Rudy Francisco - 2017
    Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.