Lunch Poems


Frank O'Hara - 1964
    Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.

Spring and All


William Carlos Williams - 1923
    Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and Section XXII, where Williams wrote his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

The Captain Lands in Paradise


Sarah Manguso - 2002
    The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

Headwaters: Poems


Ellen Bryant Voigt - 2013
    Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless—that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don’t you think I’m doing better," asks the first poem. "You got sick you got well you got sick," says the last.Eschewing punctuation, forgoing every symmetry, the poems hurl themselves forward, driven by an urgent need to speak. Headwaters is a book of wisdom that refuses to be wise, a book of fresh beginnings by an American poet writing at the height of her powers.

The Afterlife


Larry Levis - 1977
    A reissuing of The Afterlife, poetry by Larry Levis.

Skies


Eileen Myles - 2001
    Although their work conjures the texture of wind and the broad spaces of the sky, these poems are not serenely pastoral. Rather, Myles' sparse blank verse is concerned with the diaphanous qualities of perception, as if her momentary experiences were as slippery and translucent as clouds. A sometimes brutal loneliness and urgent but stoic sensuality results, finding its expression in simple colors: orange, grey, yellow, white, rose.

Time and Materials


Robert Hass - 2007
    This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris­ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every­thing else, into his poetry."Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.

Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982


Jack Gilbert - 1982
    It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the American Book Award.

Poem For The Day Two


Retta Bowen - 2003
    There are 366 poems (one for each day of the year, and one for leap years), to delight, inspire and excite. Chosen for their magic and memorability, the poems in this anthology are an exultant mix of old and new from across the world, poems to learn by heart and take to heart.

The Painted Bed: Poems


Donald Hall - 2003
    Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

Selected Poems


Fanny Howe - 2000
    Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation. Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems. The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul: Zero built a nest in my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too— From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its own—from The Quietist

Sour Honey & Soul Food


Billy Chapata - 2017
    Sometimes life is spiced up through natural events, sometimes life feels bland and tasteless. Sour Honey and Soul Food, is a book which explores the beauty and intricacies of love, life and connections, through poetry. Billy Chapata's third book looks to touch on the variety of flavors we taste, on this beautiful journey we call life.

We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough


Mike Young - 2010
    From maple ice cream to Z-shaped fire escapes, these poems carry a flashlight you'll want to follow: unexpected as night swimming, entertaining as a music video in sign language.

Algedonic


R.H. Sin - 2017
    Sin, author of the Whiskey, Words, & a Shovel series, presents a poetry collection that illuminates the transformative power of emotional pain.Algedonic is an aesthetic outlook on pain and pleasure. Complex emotions simplified into poetic interludes as only r.h. Sin can express. With his trademark of giving simplicity to some of the hardest of emotions, Sin reminds us all that there are often two sides to an emotional story and sometimes the pain transforms into something beautiful, something less problematic and maybe something that reignites a feeling of pleasure.

The Future


Neil Hilborn - 2018
    Filled with nostalgia, love, heartbreak, and the author's signature wry examinations of mental health, this book helps explain what lives inside us, what we struggle to define. Written on the road over two years of touring, The Future is rugged, genuine, and relatable. Grabbing attention like gravity, Hilborn reminds readers that no matter how far away we get, we eventually all drift back together. These poems are fireworks for the numb. In the author's own words, The Future is a blue sky and a full tank of gas, and in it, we are alive.