Helium


Rudy Francisco - 2017
    Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry


Halsey - 2020
    In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder.

Leaves of Grass


Walt Whitman - 1855
    A collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century.

Averno


Louise Glück - 2006
    That place gives its name to Louise Glück's tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013


Derek Walcott - 2014
    Here is his very earliest work—“In My Eighteenth Year,” published when he was eighteen; his first widely celebrated verses—“A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work—“The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces—the tenderness of “Sixty Years After” from the 2010 collection White Egrets.     Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one’s own memory. This collection, edited by the celebrated English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions and passions that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

Red Pill


Hari Kunzru - 2020
    Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.

Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems, 1979-2006


Wendy Cope - 2008
    This is an edition of the poems which identifies the references, verse-forms, contexts and occasions of her work, and which offers readers a new arrangement of the poetry as a whole. The notes also identify dates of composition, so that it is possible to observe the development of her work. As well as drawing on Wendy Cope's three published books, the selection also includes a significant number of poems collected or published for the first time.

Seeing Things: Poems


Seamus Heaney - 1991
    Seeing Things (1991), as Edward Hirsch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is a book of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels, of casting and gathering and the hushed, contrary air between water and sky, earth and heaven." Along with translations from the Aeneid and the Inferno, this book offers several poems about Heaney's late father.

Oceanic


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2018
    Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.

The World's Wife


Carol Ann Duffy - 1999
     It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

Golden Hill


Francis Spufford - 2016
    Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money.Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?As fast as a heist movie, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a novel about the 18th century, and itself a book cranked back to the novel's 18th century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, and usually did, and a hero was not a hero unless he ran the frequent risk of being hanged.This is Fielding's Tom Jones recast on Broadway - when Broadway was a tree-lined avenue two hundred yards long, with a fort at one end flying the Union Jack and a common at the other, grazed by cows.Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill has a plot that twists every chapter, and a puzzle at its heart that won't let go till the last paragraph of the last page.Set a generation before the American Revolution, it paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later self: but subtly shadowed by the great city to come, and already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love - and find a world of trouble.

soft thorns


bridgett devoue - 2017
    our darkest times are where we grow the most, so in this book, i share mine, and together, we learn how to heal.

ViVa


E.E. Cummings - 1931
    E. Cummings' most experimental poems as well as some of his most memorable. The volume includes such no-famous celebrations as "i sing of Olaf glad and big" and "if there are any heavens my mother will (all be herself) have," along with such favorites as "Space being (don't forget to remember) Curved," "a clown's smirk in the skull of a baboon," and "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond."

Asymmetry


Lisa Halliday - 2018
    The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

City on Fire


Garth Risk Hallberg - 2015
    Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter, Richard, and his idealistic neighbor, Jenny, - and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve.The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives with be changed forever.City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock 'n' roll, about what people need from each other in order to live... and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.