The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes. These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."

    Deliver us from distraction.Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.  --from “Prophecy” Pity the Beautiful is Dana Gioia's first new poetry book in over a decade. Its emotional revelations and careful construction are hard won, inventive, and resilient. These new poems show Gioia's craftsmanship at its finest, its most mature, as they make music, crack wise, remember the dead, and in a long, central poem even tell ghost stories.

    Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combination of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the first time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included. Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," William Carlos Williams's The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Kenneth Rexroth's "The Love Poems of Marichiko," both Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and his "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and both Adrienne Rich's "Shooting Script" and her "Twenty-One Love Poems" are all included in their entirety. Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most detailed annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works benefit from specially commissioned research that provides students with such help as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson's poetry, translation of all foreign language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is also the only American poetry anthology to present selected poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they first appeared. In addition, an accompanying website featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http: //www.english.uiuc.edu/maps. Ideal for courses in modern American poetry, modern American literature, modern or contemporary poetry, creative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic heritage in a uniquely rich and provocative format."

    Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace."[BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." —Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree"This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other.”—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFrom "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries:How else can I quench this thirst? My lipstravel down your spine, drink the smoothnessof your skin. I am searching for the core:What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the lawsof nature be defied? Your body tells me: comeclose. But beauty distances even as it drawsme near. What does my body want from yours?My twisted legs around your neck. You bendme back. Even though you can't give the bonesat birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside.You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, youexpose my missing bones. And my heart, longbefore you came, just as broken. I don't know whoto blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my bodydoesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. Ifinnocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful.Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship.Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school.Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

    How it works: Ten poets choose a poem of their own and a poem by another poet, who then does the same, and so on unto the fifth generation. Thus D. C. Berman leads to Charles Simic by way of James Tate, and other chains run through Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, Michael Ondaatje, John Ashbery, Mark Doty, C. K. Wright, Dean Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and dozens more.

    In her new collection, Medicine, she deploys a variety of dramatic voices, spoken by such disparate characters as Cinderella's wicked sisters, the wife of a nineteenth-century naturalist, a homicide detective, and a woman who is happily married to a bear. Their elusive collectivity suggests, but never quite defines, the floating authorial presence that haunts them. Gerstler's abiding interests--in love and mourning, in science and pseudo-science, in the idea of an afterlife--are strongly evident in these new poems, which are full of strong emotion, language play, surprising twists, and a wicked sense of black humor.

    Featuring brand new stories and some old favorites, many of these tell-all, gritty tales were originally published on the blog Make It MAD between 2010 and 2012, and have been rereleased in their originality for this special print and digital anthology.

    The poems negotiate the colossal movement of hearts figuring and being figured by history. This is a voice that knows the intelligence of passion, that moves through and inside the questioning of who we are in the structures of things we give the power to name us until a song sends us out to question the territory. The poet moves with the exactness of math or physics, with the fearful knowledge of careful imbalances that would have us believe in equilibrium, and with the assuredness of art that knows all is change, that the semblance of order is creation, something we are given the gift of imitating in some small way. The poems in this collection summon the largeness, the volume of a voice that disembodies itself in order to search for the love that made it whole.

    For brides and grooms who want to give their weddings new depth and meaning, two acclaimed poet-translators have gathered a stunning collection of poems and prose that will add a unique and personal dimension to the ceremony.

    In this chapbook you’ll find the first results of this project—nine poems from her new manuscript, all focusing on the experience of creatures in a world shaped (and increasingly destroyed) by us. These pieces—some of them long sequences that operate like lean, lyric essays—have their sight set upon the natural world. But these are not poems of privilege that gaze out the window from a place of comfortable remove. No, these are not the kind of pastorals that always made Brown (and most of the working-class folks from her Kentucky childhood) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it; instead they speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving.

    Raw is a collection of poetry written to unveil thoughts on concepts such as self-love, forgiveness, survival and cultural-identity.

    With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they've inspired, Answering Back promises to be a truly unique and insightful anthology.

    – Shubhangi Swarup (Latitudes of Longing)

    W. Norton proudly announces the Seagull Readers, a new collection of the most frequently taught poems. Ideal for genre or introductory literature courses, the Seagull Readers offer a compact and affordable alternative to larger anthologies. Each volume includes a wide selection of both classic and contemporary works, as well as a thorough introduction to each genre and biographies of the authors. An inexpensive and portable alternative to bulky anthologies, The Seagull Reader: Poems offers 154 poems, from time-honored classics such as T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" to contemporary classics by Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, and Li-Young Lee, among others. The Seagull Reader: Poems is lightly supplemented by editorial apparatus, including an introduction to the major concepts of the genre, brief headnotes, annotations where necessary, a glossary of terms, and biographical sketches of each author.

    He is, arguably, America’s most distinguished writer of prose poems. Here are contorted Darwinian narratives of apes and monkeys exhibiting absurdly human behavior, along with his usual menagerie of elephants, horses, chickens, roosters, dogs, mermaids and mice. Along with his trademark humor, The Rooster’s Wife finds Edson contemplating age, mortality and immortality as well.Of Memory and DistanceIt’s a scientific fact that anyone entering the distance will grow smaller as he proceeds. Eventually becoming so small he might only be found with a microscope, if indeed he is found at all. But there is a vanishing point, where anyone having entered the distance must disappear entirely without hope of his ever returning, leaving only the memory of his ever having been. But then there is fiction, so that one can never really be sure if one is remembering someone who vanished into the distance, or simply who had been made of paper and ink . . .Russell Edson has been called a surrealist comic genius, a magician of metaphor and imagination. He is all of these, and a philosophical poet whose zany expeditions into the twisted labyrinths of logic resemble Lewis Carroll’s adventures through the wonderlands of paradox and illusion. Perhaps that is why even people who do not read significant amounts of contemporary poetry can immediately appreciate the playful accessibility of Russell Edson’s writing. What he pulls out of the hat of the subconscious is always unpredictable, immediate and surprising.Russell Edson’s books include The Very Thing That Happens (1964); The Childhood of an Equestrian (1973); The Tunnel: Selected Poems (1994); and The House of Sara Loo (Rain Taxi Chapbook Series, 2002). He lives in Darien, Connecticut.