These poems comb through violence and love, fear and loss, exploring the common denominators in each. Against Which seeks the ways human beings might transform themselves from participants in a thoughtless and brutal world to laborers in a loving one.

    East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women"--Pam Brown

    In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse.Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

    Winner of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award, this expanded edition of The Book of Frank features additional "Frank" poems and an essay by Eileen Myles.Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a "voyeuresque surreal portrait," The Book of Frank is also, in the words of “candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape."

    This edition, which first appeared in 1977, was revised by the author: there are additions, deletions, and a change in sequence in the Dolphin section; the five poems in the title sequence from Near the Ocean are now uncut; and a new poem is added to the "Nineteen Thirties."

    In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early 'Grrrl.' Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year's Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. For longtime fans and those new to Piercy's early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America's best-known and best-selling poets.Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen novels and fifteen books of poetry, most recently The Art of Blessing the Day (Knopf, 1999) a selection of Piercy's Jewish-themed poems. What Are Big Girls Made Of?(Knopf, 1997) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and selected as one of their Most Notable Books of the Year by the American Library Association. In October, 1999, she will be a featured poet on the Bill Moyers' PBS-TV poetry specials "Fooling with Words" and "The Sounds of Poetry" and her newest novel, Three Women will be published by William Morrow.TABLE OF CONTENTSPreface, .xiFrom THE TWELVE SPOKED WHEEL FLASHINGThe meaningful exchange, 4 Five thousand miles, 5 The summer invasion, and the fall, 6 Nothing you can have, 9 Archipelago, 12 The first salad of March, 15 Exodus, 16 Ask me for anything else, 18 What is permitted, 20 A gift of light, 22 Short season, 27 Ghosts, 29 The new novel, 31 Women of letters, 32From LIVING IN THE OPENThe token woman, 37 The clearest joy, 39 Make me feel it, 40 Sage and rue, 42 River road, High Toss, 44 Paradise Hollow, 45

    A biography of writer Sylvia Plath that describes her era, her major works--the novel The bell jar and her poetry--her life, and the legacy of her writing.

    Every woman should know the feelings of being loved and radiating those feelings back to her mate. This is a beautiful expression of heartfelt emotion using short, gratifying sentiments. If there is a lover in you, you will not get enough of "Her."

    It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls the minor triumphs, the major failures of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can't get along, he writes in Self-portrait. These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in I Wish I Could Paint You; he is ready to live, he tells us, solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free. More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch's most significant book to date. The highway signs pointed to our happiness; the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops were the stations of our pilgrimage. Wasn't that us staggering past the riverboats, eating homemade fudge at the county fair and devouring each other's body? They come back to me now, delicious love, the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness. from The Sweetness

    Bestselling author Robert Bly selects his favorite works by the award-winning poet William Stafford.

    There are conquerors, slaves, and rebels from Caribbean history; the "Mayan astronomer" calmly smoking a cigarette in the middle of a New York tenement fire; a nun staging a White House vigil to protest her torture; a man on death row mourning the loss of his books; and even Carmen Miranda.

    & Ted Hughes, David Rosenberg, et al. A new printing of this large collection by the poet commonly regarded as Israel's most prominent and one of the major contemporary world poets. Born in Germany in 1924, Amichai left with his family for Israel in 1936.

    Photographs.

    The much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott Heron, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde.

    The poems follow an unlikely character named Miss Peach, an unpredictable, cartoonish shapeshifter, who emerges onto the page dragging the myth of the individual, various gender scripts, and the grand tradition of the poetic persona along with her. She becomes an outsider, a hero, an intruder, a rock star. The town around her, Gold River, is also always in flux—part center and part mirage. The Stranger Manual celebrates the fractious nature of self and society in poems that are fabulist, speculative, and alluring.