The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity—personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence—all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass’s poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem "Insomnia" concludes: "may something/ comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child’s birth, a kiss,/ or even me—in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on—thinking of you."Marketing Plans: • National advertising • National media campaign • Advance reader copies • Course adoption mailingAuthor Tour: • Berkeley • Boston • Minneapolis • San Francisco • Santa CruzEllen Bass is co-author (with Laura Davis) of the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 1994), which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Double Take, and Field. In 1980, Ms. Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati. Last year, she won Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, judged by Thomas Lux. She was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, where she has taught creative writing for 25 years. She has also taught writing workshops at many conferences nationally and in Mallorca, Spain.

    . . . [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel."—Publishers WeeklyFollowing Jamaal May's award-winning debut collection, Hum (2013), these new poems explore parallel landscapes of the poet's interior and an insidious American condition. Using dark humor that helps illuminate the pains of maturity and loss of imagination, May uncovers language like a skilled archaeologist—digging up bones of the past to expose what lies beneath the surface of the fragile human condition.From: "Ask Where I've Been":Ask about the tornado of fists.The blows landed. If you canwatch it all—the spit and blood frozenagainst snow, you can probably tellI am the too-narrow road winding outof a crooked city built of laughter,abandon, feathers and drums.Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow,bridges arc, and power lines sag,and still believe what matters mostis not where I bendbut where I am growing.Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. May has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.

    *Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2019*Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed.Dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.Tracing a line from New Cross to the ‘towers of blood’ of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism – both political and personal, witness and documentary – Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.

    . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart."—Tony HoaglandThe dark peoples with things:for keys, coins, pencilsand pens our pockets grieve.No street lights or signs,no liquor stores or bars,only a lighter for a flashlight,and the same-faced trees,similar-armed stonesand crooked bushesstaring back at me.There is no path in the woods for a boy from the city.I would have set fire to get off this wildernessbut Palomar is no El Camino in an empty lot,the plastic dripping from the dashand the paint bubbling like a toad's throat.If mountains were old pieces of furniture,I would have lit the fabric and danced.If mountains were abandoned crack houses,I would have opened their meanings with flame,if that would have let the wind and trees lead my eyesor shown me the moon's tiptoe on the moss—as you effect my hand,as we walk into the side of a Sunday night.David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

    With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history.From "The Winter's Wife":I want wild roots to prosperan invention of blooms, each unknownto every wise gardener. If I could bea color. If I could be a questionof tender regard. I know crabgrassand thistle. I know one algorithm:it has nothing to do with repetitionor rhythm. It is the route from numberto number (less to more, moreto less), a map drawn by proof not faith. Unlike twilight, I do notconclude with darkness. I conclude.

    From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

    Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

    Ms Smith’s new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautiful—and like the America she embodies and represents—dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines." —Sapphire"One of the best poets around and has been for a long time." —Terrance Hayes"Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome." —Gwendolyn BrooksIn her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl."Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.

    I am pureAppetite. You are a phantomIn that far-off city where daylightClimbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.--from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

    For the first time, the complete collection of Maya Angelou's published poems-including "On the Pulse of Morning"-in a permanent collectible, handsome hardcover edition.

    Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.

    I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

    Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.“In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: ‘the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven.’ Doubt and fear spiral into grace and beauty. Akbar’s mind, like his language, is perpetually in motion. His imagery—wounded and resplendent—is masterful and his syntax ensnares and releases music that’s both delicate and muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable and gorgeous poems.” —Eduardo C. Corral

    Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."