His unique poetry is now recognized as among Poland's finest. Largely self-taught, he left Poland at the age of 21, moving widely around Europe - befriended by Chopin among others - before travelling to America. Persistently dogged by financial crises, he was forced to return to Paris in 1854. There he spent the rest of his life, dying in a hostel for Polish insurrection veterans in Ivry in 1883. Norwid's work is introduced by Bogdan Czaykowski, the eminent Polish poet, who is also a noted scholar and critic. Adam Czerniawski, born in Warsaw in 1934, has translated widely from Polish (including Tadeusz Rózewicz's selected poetry, They Came to See a Poet', also from Anvil) as well as publishing poetry, stories, criticism and a memoir in his first language. He has lived in Palestine, Lebanon, Germany, England and Scotland, working in a variety of academic and literary posts.

    It is an epic journey not only affirming that “there is a difference between sadness and suffering;” but that Schomburg is one of the most unusual poets writing today, pushing his work beyond our familiarity. These poems have a thirst for blood, but they don't yet know exactly what to do with their hands. The Book of Joshua calls out in hunger and loneliness, “I didn’t feel like living in anything not shaped like me anymore.”

    Included in this anthology are 121 poems by such poets as Marge Piercy, Emily Dickenson, Jelaluddin Rumi, Nikki Giovanni, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Octavio Paz, Molly Peacock, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirshfield, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Galway Kinnell, and W.S. Merwin, as well as dozens of lesser-known and unpublished poets.

    And I’m still snatching wigs on these hoes left and right. Me and my boo Adrian are finally building our life together. And guess what? We bout to have us a lil crumb snatcher!The only problem is these birds out here can’t stand to see another sister on the come up. Well they asses can fall back and have a stadium full of seats if they think a bitch like me will back down.I got my man, my new home, and bout to have a new baby. That should let you know I won’t let nothing stand in the way of our happiness. Yeah… I got a few issues I need to deal with but in the words of Kevin Hart “They gon learn today!” Pebbles is NOT to be fucked with!ATTENTION: This is a short story 19,860 words

    Poems and selfies by Steve Roggenbuck

    She has since published many more books in multiple genres and for readers of all ages, but poetry remains at the heart of her work. Many-Storied House is her fifth collection. While teaching aspiring writers, Lyon asked her students to write a poem based on memories rooted in a house where they had lived. Working on the assignment herself, Lyon began a personal

    Just a soldier walking down a dusty road on his way into the small town he left fifteen months ago. On her way back from a candy convention in Tulsa, Sapphire Payton saw Master Sergeant Eric Dawson and gave him a ride into Paradise, Oklahoma. He had no one, and she felt an urge to take care of the sexy mechanic. He lifted her in arms that were powerful like steel and filled her thoughts with mind-blowing kisses, and he made her feel just as sweet as the candy confections she created.Eric was Special Recon in Afghanistan, and he came home a different man than who he was before. The war had broken parts of him that no one could see. And through the storm, Sapphire became his anchor. She held him through the nightmares, and their loved bloomed into something intense. But can love heal all wounds, and can they weather the storm of emotions when he makes the ultimate decision that could affect both their lives?

    A satiric edge, tempered by profound compassion, cuts through many of the poems in Lux’s book. While themes of intolerance, inhumanity, loss, and a deep sense of mortality mark these poems, a lighthearted grace instills even the somberest moments with unexpected sweetness. In the title poem Lux writes, “there’s no reason for God to feel guilt / I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore . . . / He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch . . . / to have a tiny piece of Him / though we are unqualified, / of even the crumb of a crumb.” Dark, humorous, and strikingly imaginative, this is Lux’s most compassionate work to date.

    Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    When the newspaper runs an article he finds offensive to African American men, he writes a rebuttal, which offends so many women it gets him fired. Michael then sets out to write a book that proves corporate women are just as scandalous, competitive, and insensitive as their male counterparts. But when he manipulates events to get hired into an office that is staffed by all women, events quickly spiral out of control. As romances sprout like weeds and Michael finds himself fighting for the women he works alongside, rather than against them, the question is whether he will be able to focus on his work, keep his flings a secret, and achieve the success he has always dreamed of. In turns hilarious, sobering, and eye-opening, The Office Girls tells the story of every woman who works in the corporate world and the challenges they face on a daily basis. The misogyny, sexual harassment, and gender inequality faced by these characters will ring true for all women who have experienced corporate America.

    A broken submissive. One shared love. When Colin Everett and Anthony Graves suspect the beautiful and shy Sydney Burke is in need of help and discover she’s interested in their alternative lifestyle, they take her under their wings and introduce her to a world she never knew. Through careful instruction, they open Sydney’s eyes to what love and friendship meanwhile helping her overcome the wounds of her past. Three hearts become one as scars and tortured pasts are exposed, but can the unconventional love between them survive the threats both from within and from the outside? Fragile, Belonging, and Us are the first three books in Everett Gaming Series and introduce you to the world of lust, love, and acceptance in the unique relationship between best friends and the woman who owns their hearts.

    Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership.   Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.

    The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.