These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.

    Most particularly if she writes poems about death and violence. Or at least that is the lesson that the posthumous careers of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath seen to teach us.Reading this new volume of Sexton's previously uncollected poems, one has to wonder what will happen when there are no more half-finished poems left to be published. Will her grocery lists be next?I'm sure that the editor of this volume, Sexton's daughter Linda Gray Sexton, acts out of the desire to complete her mother's oeuvre, and apparently Anne Secton did leave instructions for at least some of her work, the section called "Letters for Dr. Y," to be published after her death. And in all fairness to Linda Gray Sexton I should mention that she and her co-editor Lois Ames did an excellent job of annotating and editing Anne Sexton's collected letters, putting together in A Self-Portroit in Letters (1977) a picture of a remarkably courageous woman and talented artist who fought her madness for many years.The heart of Anne Sexton's work lies in her earliest books - To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Live or Die, All My Pretty Ones. Here searing images take one by surprise, and the poems combine virtuoso technical skill with highly personal material is a way no one dies had ever done before. Yet as she grow older, worn down by her recurring bouts with insanity , Sexton's work grew sloppier, more self-indulgent , repetitive and heavy-handed. Her obsession with death and violence became more and more a part of some personal psychotic heil, more and more distorted each time she wrote, like a drawing one can't quite get right and finally ruins by constant erasure. The poems and the three horror stories in Words for Dr. Y are no exception.I would like to remember Anne Sexton for what I consider to be those extraordinary poems written in the face of great odds - poems like "Music Swims Back to Me," "You, Dr. Martin," "Her Kind." But the continuing publication of her inferior work tends to obscure her real achievement. [susan wood]

    . . Assigned toAdventure said the motto on our buttons. The last thing we knewBefore we left with our satchels concerned how love withdrawsMoving backward taking with it everything, our names, this way.Dara Wier directs the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is her ninth book, and first new collection of poetry since 2006.

    West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities--to their portrayal in the media--and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http: //sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hidden textures are revealed by Collins's poetic eye. With clarity, precision, and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination. Nine Horses is a poetry collection to savor and to share.

    * 'Direct, unpretentious, humorous' SUNDAY TIMES

    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

    The ghazal form is well-known in Islamic culture, but only now finding its way into the literary culture of the West. Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. “God crouches at night over a single pistachio. / The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming / Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.”The ghazal’s compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite. My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly’s second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, and the leaps even more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, “Call and Answer”: “Tell me why it is we don¹t lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening.” The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of Flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit.Robert Bly is writing the best poems of his life, and this book reestablishes his position as one of the greatest poets of our era. After many years of free verse in American poetry, years which have been very fertile, the inventive ghazal helps the imagination to luxuriate in a form once more. We are seeing a poetry emerge that is recovering many of the great intensities that modern art and poetry has aimed at and achieved in earlier generations.

    This book contains the poem “Grace”, which the Poetry Society of America chose for their Poetry in Motion series to entertain public transit passengers in major metropolitan areas.

    . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it will come to me, if I can just get him to draw mea map, if I can find the tree, if I can find the shovel. And the house, the mansion hegrew up in, soon a lawyer will pass a key across a walnut desk, but even thislawyer will not be able to tell me where this mansion is. —from "Kafka"In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy—from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

    Myung Mi Kim's language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge" (Kathleen Fraser). In "Under Flag," winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized."

    A collection of Native American poetry.

    In these poems, Purdy ponders the remains of a Native village; encounters Fidel Castro in Revolutionary Square; curses a noisy cellmate in the drunk tank; and marvels at the "combination of ballet and murder" known as hockey, all in the author's inimitable man-on-the-street style.Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets is destined to become the standard Purdy poetry volume for many years to come.

    The Blizzard Voices is based on the actual reminiscences of the survivors as recorded in documents from the time and written reminiscences from years later. Here are the haunting voices of the men and women who were teaching school, working the land, and tending the house when the storm arrived and changed their lives forever.