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.

    

    Stafford's advice to beginning poets has become a favorite text in writing programs

    The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

    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.

    But how does the artist actually create his or her work? What is the source of an artist's inspiration? What is the force that impels the artist to set down a vision that becomes art? In this groundbreaking book, Edward Hirsch explores the concept of duende, that mysterious, highly potent power of creativity that results in a work of art. With examples ranging from Federico García Lorca's wrestling with darkness as he discovered the fountain of words within himself to Martha Graham's creation of her most emotional dances, from the canvases of Robert Motherwell to William Blake's celestial visions, Hirsch taps into the artistic imagination and explains, in terms illuminating and emotional, how different artists respond to the power and demonic energy of creative impulse.

    —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.

    It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects - from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.

    How often you find yourself looking for new and interesting recipes to prepare for your loved one? Wouldn't you like to have a cooking journal at hand that can provide some awesome and amazing recipes to make for your loved one?Well, you don't need to search anymore!The perfect cookbook is here! We've developed it just for you!Don't worry! It's not a regular cookbook! It's much more than that: it's an instant pot cookbook full of recipes just for you two!You have the best instant pot recipes ever adjusted for only 2 servings available for you at all time!The Cookbook includes recipes for:BreakfastMain DishesSide DishesSnacksDessertsAll recipes include:Nutrition FactsIngredient listCook/Prep TimeYou don't have to calculate your servings anymore when you want to make something tasty for you and your special someone!Now you only need this cookbook!Get it today!

    Each book investigates an element of the craft of fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry by discussing works by authors past and present. The books in the Art Of series are not strictly manuals, but serve readers and writers by illuminating aspects of the craft of writing that people think they already know but don't really know.Donald Revell argues passionately for the transformation that imaginative experience elicits through poetry. "The art of poetry is not about the acquisition of wiles or the deployment of strategies," Revell writes. "Beginning in the senses, imagination senses farther, senses more." Using examples from his own poetry and translations and from Blake and Thoreau to Ronald Johnson and John Ashbery, Revell's The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye takes the writer beyond the workshop and into the world of vision.

    They’re also bitter rivals. What happens when they fall for the same sexy reporter? Alicia This is her first big break as a journalist. Using all her assets, she lands the interview that no one else can get. She’s interviewing the famous Dylan Brakster and James Sledge…the famous rivals together in the same room at last. But now that she’s gotten what she wanted, can she resist their advances? After all, she’s never met anyone hotter than these two. Dylan She’s the hottest woman he’s ever seen, and he’s had his fair share of groupies. Dylan would be free to make his move, if only his arch rival, James Sledge, wasn’t sitting right next to him. The tension between them feels like it’s going to boil over and explode at any moment. It’s either fight or… James James knows he wants her the second he sees her. But he’s acutely aware Dylan wants her too. Things are getting complicated quickly—the three of them have a dangerous choice to make. The consequences could be terrible, but who’s thinking about that when the reward is so… screamingly hot? Rival Quarterbacks is an ultra steamy standalone bisexual romance with explicit MF, MM, and MMF scenes. Guaranteed HEA. Very high heat level!

    Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."—Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing—but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."—Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious—how thin that line is, how breakable—with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .There's voltagein your flowers—mulch skeins, armoryfor cunning loves. Your mouth pins every stickybody, swallowing iridescence, digestinglight. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer.

    Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

    It would require a complete team tear-down and turnover, a new farm system foundation of young talent which Epstein and Cubs GM Jed Hoyer gradually added to with gutsy trades and timely signings. After years of rebuilding, Epstein's crystalline vision has been unquestionably realized in the form of one of the most exciting and talented teams in baseball, led by heavyweights like Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant as well as visionaries like manager Joe Maddon. In The Plan, David Kaplan of CSN Chicago and ESPN Radio goes behind the scenes with the Cubs and their front office, walking the steps of their captivating rise to becoming 2016 World Series champions. Featuring exclusive interviews with Epstein, owner Tom Ricketts, and other team insiders, this is the definitive account of a new era on the North Side.

    Four servicemen. One super rich clan. Five stories. Isadora Montrose’s patriotic, honorable bearshifters adore their passionate BBW mates, but sometimes serving your country has to come before love. Will these hot Alpha Male bearshifters find that duty has eroded the bear-bonds they forged with their destined brides? Bear Fursuits Bundle: the first four books in Isadora Montrose’s Bear Fursuits Series plus a bonus short: Bear Necessities, Bear Possibilities, Bear Affinities, Bear Infinities. Bearcubs for Christmas, Book 4.5 in this series, is exclusive to this bundle. Marine Jack abandoned his curvy Hannah in order to complete his top-secret undercover mission in Uzbekistan. Can she forgive him for disappearing and lying to her in the service of his country? Navy Seal Will had to lead his Joint Forces team instead of pursuing his terrified mate. Four years on, can they sort out their mistakes and have a second chance at love? Col. Doug Enright isn’t looking for love. He and his wife married right out of West Point, but she died in Afghanistan leaving him grief-stricken. Beautiful, built-for-bear Madeline needs a protector. Can Maddie’s sophisticated wiles awaken this stoic shifter’s frozen libido? Air Force Pilot Roman has been lost — presumed dead — for three years. But his fiancée still feels their bond as strongly as the day they met. Can Gabriella locate amnesiac Roman in the deep woods? Will the feral shifter she tracks down love her or eat her for lunch?Bonus Short: Bearcubs for Christmas: Babies at Christmas! What could be cozier? Or more terrifying? When the bridge to town washes out, it will take Jack’s entire clan to make sure his Hannah is delivered safely of their premature triplets.Take note: Hard-bodied bears and insatiable BBW’s ahead Books 1-4 contain the racy details of bearshifters’ primal lusts. If earthy, spicy lovemaking doesn’t fulfill your desires, keep away.