With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind??—??a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

    His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words. Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination.

    Through brilliant readings of poems by Bishop, Frost, Kunitz, Lawrence, and others, Voigt examines the signature musical scoring writers deploy to orchestrate meaning. "This structure—this architecture—is the essential drama of the poem's composition," she argues. The Art of Syntax is an indispensable book on the writer's craft by one of America's best and most influential poets and teachers.

    It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

    Despite--or perhaps because of--this and other familial forces pushing on them, each has a personality and direction of life distinct from her cousins. Celie is the top saleswoman in an upscale dress shop; Cecily is a playwright; Cecilia is a poet; Celine finds her expression in the seduction of men; and Celeste died as an infant. Ceci, the eldest of the Slaughter grandchildren and daughter of the admired and envied family beauty, Rose, died as a young adult and she serves as narrator of the novel from the afterlife. Through reflection, and with the counsel of Lao Tzu, she gradually attains a greater understanding and acceptance of Earthly human weakness, even as the lives of her living cousins lead inexorably to a violent and tragic conclusion. Set in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, this unusual page turner utilizes poetry and a sense of theatrical staging to original and haunting effect, rending a family saga with both distance and intimacy.

    Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combination of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the first time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included. Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," William Carlos Williams's The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Kenneth Rexroth's "The Love Poems of Marichiko," both Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and his "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and both Adrienne Rich's "Shooting Script" and her "Twenty-One Love Poems" are all included in their entirety. Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most detailed annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works benefit from specially commissioned research that provides students with such help as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson's poetry, translation of all foreign language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is also the only American poetry anthology to present selected poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they first appeared. In addition, an accompanying website featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http: //www.english.uiuc.edu/maps. Ideal for courses in modern American poetry, modern American literature, modern or contemporary poetry, creative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic heritage in a uniquely rich and provocative format."

    Emphasizing both the coherence and the diversity of English metrical practice from Chaucer's time to ours, Timothy Steele explains how poets harmonize the fixed units of meter with the variable flow of idiomatic speech, and examines the ways in which poets have used meter, rhyme, and stanza to communicate and enhance meaning. Steele illuminates as well many practical, theoretical, and historical issues in English prosody, without ever losing sight of the fundamental pleasures, beauties, and insights that fine poems offer us. Written lucidly, with a generous selection of helpful scansions and explanations of the metrical effects of the great poets of the English language, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is not only a valuable handbook on technique; it is also a wide-ranging study of English verse and a mine of entertaining information for anyone wishing more fully to write, enjoy, understand, or teach poetry.

    —New York Times Book ReviewNo writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act—the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle’s work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that’s vital and welcome, that doesn’t make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon ReviewProfound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... —Publishers WeeklyThis is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. —Matthew DickmanThe accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... —San Francisco ExaminerOver the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.

    Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

    But Vinia is tragically already married to Dryden's employer, Joe, manager of the Black Prince coal pit. Joe's jealousy over the growing connection between his wife and Dryden, sends Dryden into the arms of the beautiful and fiery Roberta Grant. But can Dryden ever truly forget Vinia?

    B is known for her amazing ability to make readers feel like they are walking beside her with every page that they turn, and this book, the follow up to the notorious "Letters To My Ex," is another testament to that. Fresh out of an intense break-up, and with her three closest friends by her side, Cici brings you with her as she learns what it means to take back control of her life, and to be her own woman. Completely raw and unfiltered, as always, she doesn't hold back. This is a story for the modern day grown woman. It will make you smile, laugh out loud, hold your breath, bite your bottom lip, and most importantly... Blush.

    Bilel is the French right-hand man of the most dangerous militant in the world, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of Islamic State. He offers Mélodie a way to fill the boredom in her young life: he cares about her, offers beautiful things, spiritual purpose and, in less an idyllic life. Bilel’s seduction is honey-tongued and forceful – and all Mélodie must do is join him and ISIS in their Syrian jihad. Every day he gives more detail, telling her how he drives a jeep filled with guns and bottles of the chocolate milk he loves for hundreds of miles on murderous missions of execution. Every night he lures, seduces and manipulates this vulnerable young woman.A riveting page-turner In the Skin of a Jihadist is a shocking inquiry into how technology is spreading radicalism, the lure of ISIS propaganda, and the factors that motivate young people – including many British teenagers – to join extremist wars in Syria and elsewhere.

    Mohi symbolises ""the hurting"" and Kabir is all about ""the healing"" that comes after it. A book written and illustrated by author,which is for everyone. for those who believe in love and compassion and for those who don't. Those who have healed and those who are still in process. Those who aren't able to move on and those who have successfully done it. It is for feminists, the activists, the believers, the gender norm shatterers.It is a gift, a book on its journey to make difference in it's reader's life.

    

    A fascinating collection of six essays, written for the William Empson Lectures in Oxford, each exploring an aspect of writerly contemplation.