However there comes a time in every writer’s life when the need to have one’s work appreciated by others overcomes the reticence of their nature. With this book, I have reached the point where I can let you, the reader, enter. See me. Maybe some of the poems here will resonate with you, and that understanding, that secret “yes, I know what she means”, from a stranger, is what I seek.

    Oliver's poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.Dog Songs includes visits with old friends, like Oliver's beloved Percy, and introduces still others in poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver's life emerge as fellow travelers and guides, uniquely able to open our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.

    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

    S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

    Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.

    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.

    In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

    

    Here is Wordsworth wandering “lonely as a cloud”; Poe confiding “all I loved, I loved alone”; Yeats’s communion with “the deep heart’s core”; and Han Shan’s heart of a hermit, “clean as a white lotus.” From Sir Edward Dyer’s “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” to the spiritual searching of the Transcendentalists, to the meditative verse of Jorie Graham, some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet’s art. The poems collected here, whether reflecting on the soul or on nature, addressing an absent loved one, or honoring the self, form a book of respite and contemplation, and a beautiful tribute to the interior life.

    With The No You Never Listened To, she takes the personal and makes it universal. As a sexual assault survivor, Meggie is well-acquainted with trauma: the aftermath, the guilt, the anger. She has never shied away from taking Hemingway’s advice – write hard and clear about what hurts – and that strength has never been more of an asset than with this body of work.The No You Never Listened To is the book you will wish you’d had when trauma climbed into your bed. It is the book you will give to friends who are dragged from their “before” into a dark and terrifying “after”. And yes, it is the book you will wish didn’t exist.But it is also the one that will remind you, in your darkest moments, where the blame really belongs. It will remind you that your memory will not always be an enemy. And it will remind you that none of us have ever been alone in this.”– Claire BiggsTo Write Love on Her Arms Editor / Writer

    Some poems read as conversations, some as internal monologues, others as observations, but they all work together to tell one couple's love story.

    Following Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett's 2013's Collected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) Alone and Not Alone offers new poems that see the world in a clear and generous light.From "The World of Us":Don't go around all daythinking about life—doing so will raise a barrierbetween you and its instants.You need those instantsso you can be in them,and I need you to be in them with mefor I think the world of usand the mysterious barricadesthat make it possible.

    Filled with lyric wisdom, Taplin’s second book expands on the themes introduced in Bloom, offering insight and comfort.

    The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."