Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning


Alice Walker - 1979
    Vivid poems of “breakdown and spiritual disarray.” Writing these, Walker says, “led me eventually into a larger understanding of the psyche, and of the world.” What finally marks this volume is the strong sense of change and, ultimately, of forgiveness as a part of growth.

When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices: Selected Poems from Single to Mid-Life


Judith Viorst - 1987
    Bringing together all of Viorst's best-loved poetry, this collection includes many of the poet's previously out-of-print favorites.

Love & Misadventure


Lang Leav - 2013
    Awarded a coveted Churchill Fellowship, her work expresses the intricacies of love and loss. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a rollercoaster ride through an ill-fated love affair- from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights- through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.

The Citadel


A.J. Cronin - 1937
    Based on Cronin's own experiences as a physician, The Citadel boldly confronts traditional medical ethics, and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service.The Citadel has been adapted into several successful film, radio, and television productions around the world, including the Oscar-nominated 1938 film starring Ralph Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, and Rex Harrison.

250 Poems: A Portable Anthology


Peter Schakel - 2002
    This well-chosen and comprehensive collection offers a compact and affordable alternative to larger and more expensive anthologies.

Scabby Queen


Kirstin Innes - 2020
    And, as practical as she is, Ruth doesn't know what to do. Or how to feel. Because knowing and loving Clio Campbell was never straightforward.To Neil, she was his great unrequited love. He'd known it since their days on picket lines as teenagers. Now she's a sentence in his email inbox: Remember me well.The media had loved her as a sexy young starlet, but laughed her off as a ranting spinster as she aged. But with news of her suicide, Clio Campbell is transformed into a posthumous heroine for politically chaotic times.Stretching over five decades, taking in the miners' strikes to Brexit and beyond; hopping between a tiny Scottish island, a Brixton anarchist squat, the bloody Genoa G8 protests, the poll tax riots and Top of the Pops, Scabby Queen is a portrait of a woman who refuses to compromise, told by her friends and lovers, enemies and fans.As word spreads of what Clio has done, half a century of memories, of pain and of joy are wrenched to the surface. Those who loved her, those who hated her, and those that felt both ways at once, are forced to ask one question: Who was Clio Campbell?

H of H Playbook


Anne Carson - 2021
    In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous “Labors of Herakles”) to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.      “I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape,” said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

The Yellow on the Broom


Betsy Whyte - 1979
    Not only is it a fascinating insight into the life and customs of traveller people in the 1920s and 1930s, it is also a thought-provoking account of human strength and weakness, courage and cowardice, understanding and prejudice by a sensitive and entertaining writer.

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa


Robert Hass - 1994
    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.

A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton


Alfred Starr Hamilton - 2013
    Introduction by Geof Hewitt. Alfred Starr Hamilton (1914-2005) was an American poet from Montclair, New Jersey. Though Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the '60s, '70s and '80s; two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton's poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton's poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks."Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent in American English."—Ron Silliman"Alfred Starr Hamilton 'wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.' Consider this collection—assembled by two very dedicated allographers—an essential expansion on said letter. People who've encountered Hamilton's work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer."—Graham Foust"It is a hidden world, a hushabye place that Alfred Starr Hamilton occupies, a secluded place where he is free to summon daffodils and stars, chimes and angels, thread and old-fashioned spoons. There is Hungarian damage, blue revolutionary stars, a sedge hammer (which is not a typo). He is obsessively drawn to fine metals—bronze, silver and gold. He would be golden, but can never grasp the elusive sad: 'One cloud, one day / Came as a shadow in my life / And then left, and came back again; and stayed' like "Anything Remembered" which is the title of that poem. He is too removed to see things any other way but his own. It is a silver peepshow in the wonderbush, and there is always a moon to scrape from the bottom of his view."—C. D. Wright"We are living in the Badlands. Dorothy's ruby-slippers would get you across the Deadly Desert. So will these poems."—Jonathan Williams

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child


Anthony M. Esolen - 2010
    This practical, insightful book is essential reading for any parent.

Swan Song


Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott - 2018
    On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucatán beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never imagined he would betray them so absolutely.In the autumn of 1975, after two decades of intimate friendships, Truman Capote detonated a literary grenade, forever rupturing the elite circle he’d worked so hard to infiltrate. Why did he do it, knowing what he stood to lose? Was it to punish them? To make them pay for their manners, money and celebrated names? Or did he simply refuse to believe that they could ever stop loving him? Whatever the motive, one thing remains indisputable: nine years after achieving wild success with In Cold Blood, Capote committed an act of professional and social suicide with his most lethal of weapons . . . Words.A dazzling debut about the line between gossip and slander, self-creation and self-preservation, Swan Song is the tragic story of the literary icon of his age and the beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women he called his Swans.‘Writers write. And one can’t be surprised if they write what they know.’

The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952


Allen Ginsberg - 2006
    These first journals detail the inner thoughts of the awkward boy from Paterson, New Jersey, who would become the major poet and spokesperson of the literary phenomenon called the Beat Generation. The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice covers the most important and formative years of Ginsberg's storied life. It was during these years that he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, both of whom would become lifelong friends and significant literary figures. Ginsberg's journals--so candid he insisted they be published only after his death--also document his relationships with such notable figures of Beat lore as Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke. Conversations with Kerouac, his beloved muse Neal Cassady, and others have been transcribed from Ginsberg's memory, and information will be found here relating to the famous murder of David Kammerer by Carr--a startlingly violent chapter in Beat prehistory--which has been credited in New York magazine as "giving birth to the Beat Generation." It was also during this period that he began to recognize his homosexuality, and to think of himself as a poet. Illustrated with photos from Ginsberg's private archive and enhanced by an appendix of over 100 of Ginsberg's earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.

The Glimmering Room


Cynthia Cruz - 2012
    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

The Complete Poetry


Edgar Allan Poe - 1831
    But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost none of their power to enthrall in this unique Signet Classic edition.