That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

    The pieces evoke the feelings of enchantment, uncertainty, pain, and ultimately healing that come with your first love and heartbreak. The author was 19 when the first edition was published, in 2021.

    Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”But if Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place―full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.”Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros.

    Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

    As its title suggests, For the Living and the Dead works to bridge the space between those real and unreal elements of life, suggesting that a surprising, redemptive cohesion can exist within a universe of opposing forces.Transtromer has referred to his poems as "meeting places," with "their intent to make a sudden connection between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart. Large and small details of the landscape meet, divided cultures and people flow together in a work of art. . ." People and objects alike are given a certain weightiness, their presence filled with a potential carefully measured by the poet's eye and quietly attested to by his language. In "Vermeer," "The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. /It is like a prayer to what is empty./ And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whispers/ 'I am not empty, I am open.'"This volume combines Transtromer's recent poetry with a prose memoir of his childhood in Sweden, written in the same careful, unsentimental voice for which he is so beloved. Through this memoir the author reveals himself as a curious, sensitive child, interested in archeology and insects, terrified of school and his authoritarian teachers.Characterized by the insight and integrity we have come to expect from his work, For the Living and the Dead confirms Tomas Transtromer as one of the most significant living poets writing in any language.

    Nearly fourteen years ago Sirowitz began turning his mother's advice into poetry--never showing her exactly what came of her ranting and raving about a ketchup jar: Deformed FingerDon't stick your finger in the ketchup bottle, Mother said. It might get stuck, &then you'll have to wait for your father to get home to pull it out. Hewon't be happy to find a dirty fingernailsquirming in the ketchup that he's going to useon his hamburger.He'll yank it out so hardthat for the rest of your life you won'tbe able to wear a ring on that finger.And if you ever get a girlfriend, & you hold hands, she's bound to ask youwhy one of your fingers is deformed, & you'll be obligated to tell her how you didn't listen to your mother, & insisted on playing with the ketchup bottle, & she'll get to thinking, he probably won'tlisten to me either, & she'll push your hand away. Since then Sirowitz has become a regular in New York City's downtown poetry scene, was awarded a residency at the MacDowell artists colony, performed live on MTV's "The Spoken Word: Unplugged," appeared on Public Television's "United States of Poetry" series, and received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to continue writing about his mother.No one, not even Estelle Sirowitz, could have predicted the incredibleallure and success of his dead-pan delivery and dead-on depictions of a mother's words of doom: from A Bum's LifeYou're going to be a bum, Mother said, if you're not one already, but you'llsoon find out that even a bumhas to work hard convincing peoplethat he's really poor. When it rainsyou can't stand out there holdingan umbrella, & ask for money, butyou have to get wet, because the moreyou drip, the more sympathy you'll get.... Like nursery rhymes for adults, the poems included in Mother Said are addictive. Read them once and you'll have to read them twice.Hear Sirowitz read them, and you'll find yourself reciting them to your friends--mimicking as best you can his Queens accent and his dry delivery. Who knows, you may even find yourself reciting them to your own mother."

    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.

    Wonder at Medusa's potent venom, Circe's fierce sorcery and Athena rising up over Olympus, as Nikita Gill majestically explores the untold stories of the life bringers, warriors, creators, survivors and destroyers that shook the world - the great Greek Goddesses.Vividly re-imagined and beautifully illustrated, step into an ancient world transformed by modern feminist magic.'I watch Girl become Goddessand the metamorphosis is moremagnificent than anythingI have ever known.'

    In short prose passages, we follow the course of their passionate first love. A confident debut written in a surprising form, which gives the story intelligence and depth. Morris feels like Betty can see everything he's thinking. Betty believes Morris understands her like no one ever before. She tells him everything, even about the dried-up worm that she saw on the sidewalk on the way to school. But sometimes the darkness closes in on Morris. His father is manic-depressive and his mother is always talking about dreams and poetry and her new boyfriend. Morris begins to wonder if crazy people are drawn to each other. Betty points out that he is like his father. As their love grows, it almost consumes them. Soon it's as if they are always trying to escape themselves until they ask, "How do you know when it's over?"

    Kirli has a keen eye for observation, humour and big themes that surround Love/Connection/Loss in an engaging style, complemented by evocative and poignant imagery. It talks to identity, culture, community and the role of Earth as healer. Kindred has the ability to grab hold of the personal in the universal and reflect this back to the reader.

    It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

    Poems written out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by the poet watching her own children trying to read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot.--

    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

     It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

      I want you to know that even if no one else does, even if you are a ghost in this bookshop, or just the static floating across the screen of your computer, wherever you’re reading this, I see you. I see you in the dark and I see you in the grey. I see you as a story, as words I have spoken or may yet speak. Maybe only in a memory or a dream. I see your hands and your arms and your body and your legs and your face and I see what you have been and what you will be. I see you and in looking at you, I want you to know that whoever you’ve had to be to survive all this, I will not look away. I want you to know that there’s a space inside this book for you. So if you have the time and the inclination, you can sit here with me, just for a while. And perhaps between us, we can see everything that matters. -pleasefindthis