As we got closer, I continued to tell myself: I don’t love you. I held your hand, I cried when you cried, I smiled when you smiled; but still, I told myself: No, I don’t love you. I must not love you, for I may leave this world anytime. But, just now, someone told me something meaningful. I was taking a rest at the park when I saw an old man in his seventies. We chatted, and he said this to me, “In love, either you love, or you don’t.” It was then I remembered the day when I walked you home. A frail old woman, also in her seventies, chatted with me. Somehow, our conversation also ended with this sentence, “In love, either you love, or you don’t.” In love, either I love you, or I don’t. Joanna, I have been thinking. I have been trying not to love you, but the fact remains: I love you. I can try to forget you, I can try not to love you; but still, it eventually boils down to this single sentence: I love you. Who am I to fight love?

    "These poems manage to say everything about everything-each determining day, each shifting sense of inexhaustible person. Back of it all is an extraordinary ear for the way words find place, make a passage from here to there, blessedly keep on talking"-Robert Creely. "Few poets are strange and quick enough to capture the frenetic quality of contemporary life. Her poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts of humor, glamour, and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time"-Elaine Equi. THE LATEST WINTER is Nelson's follow-up to SHINER (also available from SPD). Nelson's work has appeared in many anthologies and journals including AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION, THE HAT, OPEN CITY, and SHINY.

    This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

    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.

    Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

    The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.

    The only thing dumber? Falling in love. The Prince needs a nanny… Cara isn’t anything like what he was expecting. The beautiful young blonde is fun-loving, impulsive, and unafraid to step on a few royal toes. Nico hasn’t been any of those things since a tragic accident in a country he’s vowed never to return to. Romance is the last thing on his mind, but the feisty American just might make him reconsider. The nanny needs a fresh start… What do you do when your dreams go up in flames? If you’re like Cara, you run off to a fairy-tale castle on the other side of the world. To her shock, her new boss is Prince Nico, the hard-partying playboy who was plastered over US tabloids for years. Nico’s different now. He’s as handsome as ever, but he’s almost as closed off as his children. It’ll take all of Cara’s enthusiasm and dedication to make a difference in this royal family’s life. In the face of nearly insurmountable odds, could she possibly go from servant to Cinderella? **Dashing is a full-length contemporary romance novel with steamy scenes, no cheating, and a very happy ending.**

    Awarded a coveted Churchill Fellowship, her work expresses the intricacies of love and loss. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a rollercoaster ride through an ill-fated love affair- from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights- through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.

    Highly recommended! High-class motor racing and reckless romance make for a fiery mix when a driver out to win meets a woman who doesn’t like to lose . . . Melanie Hunt’s job working for the Delta racing team means she is constantly rubbing shoulders with Formula One superstars in glamorous locations like Monte Carlo. But she has already learned that keeping a professional distance is crucial if she doesn’t want to get hurt. New Delta team driver Aiden Foster lives his life like he drives his cars – fast and hard. But, no matter how successful he is, it seems he always falls short of his championship-winning father’s legacy. If he could just stay focused, he could finally make that win. Resolve begins to slip as Melanie and Aiden find themselves drawn to each other –with nowhere to hide as racing season begins. But when a troubled young boy goes missing, everything is thrown into turmoil, including Aiden’s championship dream. What people are saying about Before You: A superb book! I have read a Kathryn Freeman novel before (Search For The Truth) so I knew that this novel would be excellent.....also it's a Choc Lit book so that means it's a winner, too! - I can really recommend it.' Amazon Reader. 'This was a very well written story showing life on a motor racing circuit from a very different view point. I enjoyed the book which moved along as fast as the cars! Warm hearted and engaging.' Amazon Reader. 'I can honestly say this book is amazing. What a page turner! For those of you who may be put off by Formula 1 ..... please don't be put off by this. It is a heart warming/finger biting experience. I can even see this being made in to a film. So any producers out there .... please read this. It would make a fantastic film!!' Amazon reader.

    Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised. These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily – hourly – basis.The book shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and ambivalent terrain of early motherhood – its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love – reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to raise children in peace and safety.Vertigo & Ghost is an important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk, and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power.

    John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

    Then open up Young Americans, seems obvious what Jordan Castro is doing is revolutionary, he expressing emotions through poetry that have never been done before. The style, the way the subject matter is portrayed, even the meter, are new." - Noah Cicero (author of The Human War, The Insurgent, and more)“If you are a person who doesn’t really know what they are doing and you would like to read about another person who doesn’t really know what they are doing either, I recommend reading this poetry book. I enjoyed reading these poems. Or something.” - Chris Killen (author of The Bird Room)“I read these poems three times in one night, then put the duvet over my head and held my knees for a while. It’s good when something makes sense. I really really liked these poems.” - Ben Brooks (author of Grow Up)

    A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler’s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and archaeology texts, these darkly imaginative poems probe what it means to be a sentient, temporary, flesh-and-blood beast, to be hopelessly, vividly creaturely.

    In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts--the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft--and sings them to life.

    A small pool of reflection in a forest of words is all it takes to escape the worries of the day. Join us for tea in the form of poetry, the wilds are waiting to heal you. A collection of poems to soothe your soul and set free your worry. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes sad, we all need a balance so we don't go mad. This collection of poems is brought to you by a heart that has been through the worst and bloomed again and again. A book full of hope and magic.