You paint with words and that is beautiful." "Your words capture a truth some may feel but be unable to word." "Definitely a skilled tongue." Join over 10,000 people who follow and enjoy Andrea Michelle's poetry. Download now for free!

    Hicok gives readers unexpected conjunctions and oddly offbeat thoughts, most darkly whimsical, and has us embrace them wholeheartedly. If he can survive the scary carnival that is this world, we can, too. Highly recommended for a wide range of readers.”— Library Journal, starred review“Bob Hicok is one of my favorite poets. Partly, it’s the movement of his lines, which are both conversational and utterly unexpected, almost as if he (or we) are joining a conversation that extends beyond the framework of the poem…And then there’s his unrelenting vision, a sense of the world as both utterly real and utterly elusive, and heartbreaking because we have to die. Death is at the center of Hicok’s writing—not in a maudlin, self-pitying way, but rather as a vivid presence, infusing everything, even the deepest moments of connection, with a steely sense of loss.”—David Ulin, reviewing Elegy Owed in the Los Angeles Times“This gorgeous collection [Elegy Owed] spans the landscape of loss with unexpected leaps and ripples, as if someone has skipped stones across a lake. …Wordplay, subtle humor and unexpected moments of hope give these lush poems depth and dimension. Hicok’s work is memorable because of the new vistas it creates.” —The Washington Post"Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension, he cleaves to earth, skin, breath." –Donna Seaman, Booklist“Hicok’s poems [in Elegy Owed] are like boomerangs; they jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter.” —Publishers Weekly"Seamlessly, miraculously, [Hicok's] judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."—The New York Times Book ReviewWhen asked in an interview “What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?” he answered, “Bob Hicok.” Elegy Owed, Hicok’s eighth book, is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and “you can never step into the same not going home again twice.” His poems are the messenger at the door, the unwanted telegram—telling a joke, imparting a depth of longing, returning us finally to a different kind of normality where “the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call.” There is grief in these poems, though it is a grief large enough for odd awakenings and the unexpected, a grief enlarged by music, color, and joy as well as sober wisdom.“Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake’s sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a shy cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premier anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet.” —Mark DotyBob Hicok is one of the most active poets writing today, and his poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker and Poetry. His honors include the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and a "Notable Book of the Year" from Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

    We want to be recognized for our contributions while we can still hear the praise. Most of us fear the idea of being loved more after we die. Don’t Wait I Die To Love Me expressed our deepest fears and thoughts. Subjects of anxiety, appreciating who you are and what what you have, earth, love and dealing with life itself are discussed in this collection. DWTID2LM will take its reader through an emotional journey.

    The haunting memories and shared histories of these people—their rituals and traditions—animate this land, and are celebrated in Rash’s crystalline, intensely imagined verse.With an eye for the surprising and vivid detail, Ron Rash powerfully captures the sorrows and exaltations of this wondrous world he knows intimately. Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates his rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South.

    Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura. I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

    With over 100 songs, a Foreword by Tori herself, and original artwork by Herb Leonhard.

    Between 1926 and 1933 she collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. The remaining poems and verses from America's most renowned cynic make up this collection. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture. With an authoritative, immensely entertaining, and critically acclaimed introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun is an essential addition to the Dorothy Parker library and a welcome gift to her many admirers and devoted fans.

    Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

    Insightful and fun, this collection of poetry captures the essence of the African American experience for young people.

    Brown. Brown is the winner of the Texas Book of The Year Prize, 2013. The New York Times calls his work a rekindling of the faith in the shocking, weird and beautiful power of words. Brown finally sold the ship, The Sea Section, upon which he lived for years in the Long Beach harbor, after which he took to hunting for a city that was affordable and had a bustling writer s community. He landed in Austin, Texas and when the progress of that town got to be intense, he moved to the nearby countryside in Elgin, Texas, and from that pastoral setting came unfurling this new collection of his most personal work to date. Brown has been known as one of the most touring, well travelled living poets in America. He has based his whole writing career on changing peoples minds about poetry and he feels a quality, unforgettable live experience can achieve that. Brown told himself he needed a 10-year hiatus from writing poetry when he felt the well of creativity had dried up. 2 years ago, he wrote a one-hour long poetic play called Strange Light, commissioned by The Noord Nederlands Dans Group in Holland. The piece was performed by 14 dancers and accompanied by a live orchestra using music composed by fellow Americans, Emily Wells and Timmy Straw. While he was working on a new libretto for Wayne State University in Detroit, he was set up in a seemingly pastoral country setting, where, as Brown says, an incredible war broke out inside and out, such bright, massive storms, snakes, guns, howling wind, hard sun: all kinds of poems gushed forth. I gave in to the process and my best work to date was born, this will be my 5th book. Our Poison Horse touches on more autobiography than the romantic and fantastical that was so present in his past work. In Derrick Brown s words: I found a poetry in the real events that shaped or broke me. Every morning, I would quiet down, stare out into the field where we were watching our neighbors horse, a horse that was poisoned with pesticide by some local boys, a horse with massive scars all down its body from it s skin peeling from the poison sprayed upon it maliciously by some bastard kids. I watched the horse heal and finally come to me, and trust me and eat carrots. Something about that horse, Lacey, about it not trusting me and then warming up pulled something out of me that I didn t know I was ready for. There is a theme that in beautiful places, you will"

    It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

    Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification."The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume.Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father.Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother.In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

    In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

    Stardust is Rania Attafi's debut full length collection of poetry.Charged with themes of feminism, existentialism, love, loss and uncertainties, it will take you on a rollercoaster ride where you will glimpse lives of different people with each poem.Stardust is a book about a constellation of homo-sapiens written for all Booklovers regardless of their planet of origin.

    One day, I might perhaps become something so small and insignificant to you that you only think of me as often as you think of the little particles of dust that you can see floating around the window in the late afternoon sun.If I'm lucky enough, you'll think of me as often as never thinking of me again at all.