Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems


Billy Collins - 2001
    These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

The Complete Poems 1927-1979


Elizabeth Bishop - 1980
     Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

Our Numbered Days


Neil Hilborn - 2015
    To date, it has been watched over 10 million times. Our Numbered Days is Neil’s debut full-length poetry collection, containing 45 of Neil’s poems including “OCD”, “Joey”, “Future Tense”, “Liminality”, “Moving Day”, and many, many never-before-seen poems.

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 Catcher in the Rye


J.D. Salinger - 1951
    Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.

The Complete Poems


Anne Sexton - 1981
    This book comprises Sexton's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems from her last years.

Still Life with Woodpecker


Tom Robbins - 1980
    It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.

The Dream Songs


John Berryman - 1969
    Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."The Dream Songs are eighteen-line poems in three stanzas. Each individual poem is lyric and organized around an emotion provoked by an everyday event. The tone of the poems is less surreal than associational or intoxicated. The principal character of the song cycle is Henry, who is both the narrator of the poems and referred to by the narrator in the poems.

Collected Poems


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1956
    Compiled by her sister after the poet's death and originally published in 1956, this is the definitive edition of Millay, right up through her last poem, Mine the Harvest.

The Crown Ain't Worth Much


Hanif Abdurraqib - 2016
    A regular columnist for MTV.com, Willis-Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Willis-Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.

Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories


Raymond Carver - 1988
    'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection, encompasses classic stories from 'Cathedral', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previosly unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

Stag's Leap: Poems


Sharon Olds - 2012
    In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip. Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and who now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable “Stag’s Leap,” “When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up.  Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.” Olds’s propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music—sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.

Catch-22


Joseph Heller - 1961
    In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.

Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992


Stephen Dobyns - 1994
    This volume brings together new poems and a generous selection of work from Dobyns's seven previously published collections.

The Dream of a Common Language


Adrienne Rich - 1978
    . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this."--Boston Evening Globe