The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

    We were made to sing and recite poetry in groups. The rhyming words somehow would bring a sense of enjoyment, and they won’t leave our mind even with the passing days. Poetry holds magic. A magic to change the moment and bring out the joyous hidden self. We all in some point or another had come across a poetry that either taught us the unlearned or brought back a memory or just a smile.Piece of poetry is an effort to share some thoughts through prose. Each poetry was written with a story in mind, willing to be talked about. The thoughts that didn’t need sophisticated words, but they were craving for rhythm.The idea was to point out some of the feelings and emotions that were desperate to be shared. Some untold words, a certain perspective that was always doubted by self and others. Piece of poetry is an honest attempt to format these feelings into a song, hoping that it would stick with everyone who decided to read it.

    Sophia Elaine Hanson is the author of the critically acclaimed chapbook hummingbird as well as the #1 bestselling young adult series the Vinyl Trilogy. She resides in New York City and loves pigeons and Star Wars.

    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

    . .Taking as its starting point the classic 'wheel of balance' life-coach model, this beautifully packaged collection of extracts and short poems gathers wisdom old and new in a perfect gift for anyone who needs comfort in this f**ked up world of ours.'This is not a poetry book as you know it, this is a life raft.' Emerald Street on Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

    But while the selected poems in this volume may focus upon loss and grief, they also reflect solace, respite, and joy.  A goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy, and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is rather than what it was. Goodbyes can be poignant, sorrowful, sometimes a relief, and—now and then—even an occasion for joy.  They are always transitions that, when embraced, can be the door to a new life both for ourselves and for others. In this inspiring and consoling volume, Housden encourages readers to embrace poetry as a way of enabling us to better see and appreciate the beauty of the world around and within us.

    

    She smiles like she is hiding a secret. She holds her head high, like she is wearing an invisible crown. The air Around her is charged with confidence, strength, and courage. Have you heard the whispers? She woke up different today. Yet it feels she has been like this always. Maybe it’s the story that has changed.About the Author‘Fragile but Unbreakable’ is how Reecha describes herself. She believes in miracles, takes life head on, and is passionate about weaving magic with her words. And now that she has found her calling, she desires to spend her entire life reading, travelling, and dwelling in her own little fictional and poetic worlds. An MBA from Loyola Institute of Business Administration, she is based out of New Delhi where she lives with her husband and two kids. She – Screw Silence is her third book.

    His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

    He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker."—Bill Knott"The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds."—apt The Truth Is We Are Perfect contains fifty-four lyrics exploring the loss of oneself through the loss of an other, and how we seek to recreate ourselves in that absence. Stucky journeys into nothingness and, consequently, into awareness. His meditative sensibilities and minimalist style create ritualized poems acting as spells—transcribed to be read aloud and performed in the service of realizing that which we seek to become: "Because I love a burning thing / I made my heart a field of fire."Janaka Stucky is the publisher of Black Ocean as well as the annual poetry journal Handsome. He is the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom, and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by the Huffington Post and the Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted "Boston's Best Poet" in the Boston Phoenix.

    

    In this new collection, human desire pulls with the force and rhythm of a sea tide, emerging from and receding into mysteries larger than any individual life. The book begins with the reverential title poem and concludes with four works that reflect the power of place to shape revelation; the way stone and sky and birdsong can point the way home. Whether tracing the sensual devotion of bodily presence or the painful heartbreak of impermanence, the poems keep faith with love's appearances and disappearances, and the promises we make and break on its behalf.

    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    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