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    Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia refreshes our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” from Donne’s “The Flea” to Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” and from Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” to Plath’s “Daddy.” Paglia also introduces us to less-familiar works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut–and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn will excite even seasoned poetry lovers, and create a generation of new ones. Includes a new epilogue that details the selection process for choosing the 43 poems presented in this book and provides commentary on some of the pieces that didn't make the final cut.

    Poems consider women's roles in society, childhood, home, nature, language, communications, the past, and mortality.

    With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.

    Prayer, among other things, has become a private practice for those of us who don't congregate for spiritual purposes. Our language for connection to something greater than ourselves has become truncated to basic iterations and generalized affirmations. Perhaps this is so that no one will be offended by our approach, or so our spiritual personalities- who we are when we talk to and reach for God- can remain under a cloak of mystery and intrigue. Maybe it has something to do with our collective intolerance for vulnerability.Prayers of Honoring is an expression of creative, environmental, energetic and spiritual possibilities. When we're open to receive the heart's intelligence, we offer acceptance to ourselves and others and shift our patterns of isolation and loneliness. The challenge is to share ourselves and our words without fearing we're doing it wrong.Prayer is very much still a sullied concept. To some ears, the word "prayer" results in triggersome memories whether personal or cultural/collective. The bitter taste of yesterday's experiences of over-organized religions, forced practice, penance, rigid disciplines bearing harsh consequences, and heavy-handed authorities on the laws of God, leave little room for welcoming prayer back into the heart, home and psyche.Prayers of Honoring can help an individual overcome prayer trauma and begin to speak the words of spirit from the heart out loud again.

    

    These inspiring words by award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander celebrate all that has made America what it is today and challenge us—as individuals, as communities, as a nation—to continue working toward the dream of a better world for all.

    Drama. Elisa Gabbert's L'HEURE BLEUE, OR THE JUDY POEMS, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    The house backing on to theirs is sold and as she watches the old furniture being removed, she is taken back to a summer in the 1970's when she was almost sixteen and this small out-of-town estate was an enclave for women and children while the men are mysterious shadows who leave every day for the outside world.The women are isolated but keep their loneliness and frustrations hidden behind a veneer of suburban respectability. When an American divorcee and her daughter move into the estate this veneer begins to crack. The women learn how to socialise, how to drink martinis, how to care less about their wifely and maternal duties.While the women are distracted, Elaine and her friends find their own entry into the adult world. The result is a tragic event that will mark the rest of Elaine's life and be the cause of her long and guilt-ridden exile.Insightful and full of suspense, this is an uncompromising portrayal of the suburbs and the cruelties brought about by the demands of respectability.

    Winship Book AwardThis collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity.

    Both personal and philosophical, her work can be read as a spirit-guide for those mourning the loss of a loved one and as a series of fundamental ponderings on the inevitability of death and separation. At first refusing to let go, desperate to feel the presence of her friend, the poet seeks solace in a belief in the spirit world. But life, not death, becomes the issue when she begins to see physical existence as "an interruption" that preoccupies us with shapes and borders. "Shape makes life too small," she realizes. Comfort at last comes in the idea of "reverse seeing": that even if she cannot see forward into the spirit world, her friend can see "backward into this world" and be with her.Death Tractates is the companion volume to a philosophical poetic work entitles Bright Existence, which Hillman was in the midst of writing when her friend died. Published by Wesleyan University Press in 1993, it shares many of the same Gnostic themes and sources.

    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

    It is an invitation to my thoughts

    Containing a collection of poems by the author that, not only investigates the lighter side of love, but also dares to delve deeper, taking the reader on a journey into the darker aspects of love, such as indecision, rejection, fear, betrayal, loss and finally death. Inspired by his own love story, and subsequent bereavement, the author writes emotionally, and from the heart, often resulting in poems that bring a tear to the eye. For information on more chapbooks in Dark Love Poetry series, please visit the authors website located at www.darrenheart.com