Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations.

    A yellow-striped, green measuring worm opens Anterooms, a collection filled with poems that are classic Wilbur, that play with myth and form and examine the human condition through reflections on nature and love. Anterooms also features masterly translations from Mallarmé’s “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” a previously unpublished Verlaine poem, two poems by Joseph Brodsky, and thirty-seven of Symphosius’s clever Latin riddles. Whether he is considering a snow shovel and domestic life or playfully considering that “Inside homeowner is the word meow,” Wilbur’s new collection is sure to delight everyone from longtime devotees to casual poetry readers. Exploring the interplay between the everyday and the mythic, the sobering and the lighthearted, Anterooms is nothing less than an event in poetic history and a remarkable addition to a master’s oeuvre.

    This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North.Written and published in 1861 after Jacobs' harrowing escape from a vile and predatory master, the memoir delivers a powerful and unflinching portrayal of the abuses and hypocrisy of the master-slave relationship. Jacobs writes frankly of the horrors she suffered as a slave, her eventual escape after several unsuccessful attempts, and her seven years in self-imposed exile, hiding in a coffin-like "garret" attached to her grandmother's porch.A rare firsthand account of a courageous woman's determination and endurance, this inspirational story also represents a valuable historical record of the continuing battle for freedom and the preservation of family.

    Editor Terrance Hayes has selected more than 130 poems, spanning four decades, for this powerful gathering of Coleman's work that bestselling author Mary Karr has called, "words to crack you open and heal you where it counts."

    That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perceptions, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical.

    The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.

    While she knows racism is a problem (occasional brushes with the uglier side of people don't let her forget it), Naomi is, at heart, just like any other teenage girl. All of that changes when Joshua, Naomi's older brother, is killed in an accident on his way to a civil rights demonstration in Chicago. Racism becomes a personal issue, and Naomi decides that she needs to help bring about changes in the system. At college in Atlanta, she becomes immersed in politics, organizing protests and butting heads with school administrations as well as with her boyfriend, who isn't too friendly to the cause. Disillusioned by authority figures and betrayed by the man she loves, Naomi returns home, confused about the world and her place in it.

    His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.From the Hardcover edition.

    Clifton’s poems were widely celebrated during her lifetime, and she received wide acclaim for her work including the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems continue to inspire a new generation of readers and writers in the 21st century.In How to Carry Water, formidable younger poet Aracelis Girmay (winner of the Whiting Award, GLCA Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) introduces a selection of Clifton’s work that is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous social and political moment.

    Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a ghost in a garden. Coyotes cry out on the hill, and lovers find themselves kissing, “bee-stung, drunk” in the middle of road. Here, the dust is holy, as is the dark, unknown. These are poems that praise the impossible, wild world, finding beauty in its wake.  Excerpt from “Bonfire Opera”   In those days, there was a woman in our circle who was known, not only for her beauty, but also for taking off all her clothes and singing opera. And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea, and everyone had drunk a little wine, she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight, the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames.

    In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father's eyes and through their own.

    “Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charles Simic” (New York Times Book Review).

    Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

    It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable … Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself."So wrote the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose collection of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), is widely regarded as having launched the movement. But McKay's literary significance goes far beyond his fierce condemnations of racial bigotry and oppression, as is amply demonstrated by the universal appeal of his sonnet, "If We Must Die," recited by Winston Churchill in a speech against the Nazis in World War II.While in Jamaica, McKay produced two works of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, that were widely read on the island. In richly authentic dialect, the poet evoked the folksongs and peasant life of his native country. The present volume, meticulously edited and with an introduction by scholar Joan R. Sherman, includes a representative selection of this dialect verse, as well as uncollected poems, and a generous number in standard English from Harlem Shadows.

    A collection of poetic meditations by the National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist author of Leaving Saturn evaluates the solemn richness of everyday lives, from a grandfather who gardens in a tenement backyard to a teacher to renames her black students after French painters.