The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

    Both honors made specific notes of his experimental style, his long influence, and his ongoing importance. Creeley's 1998 collection, Life Death, now available as a New Direction paperback, is the capstone of a career that has poignantly combined "linguistic abstraction with specificity of time and place." (R.D. Pohl, Buffalo News)

    The haunting memories and shared histories of these people—their rituals and traditions—animate this land, and are celebrated in Rash’s crystalline, intensely imagined verse.With an eye for the surprising and vivid detail, Ron Rash powerfully captures the sorrows and exaltations of this wondrous world he knows intimately. Illuminating and indelible, Poems demonstrates his rich talents and confirms his legacy as a standard-bearer for the literature of the American South.

    Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively school -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are trained in the broadest sense of the word.Gossips, the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In Early Lessons, the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.

    We find her awake in the middle of the night, contemplating love and heartbreak in all their exhilarating and anguished specifics. With astonishing openness, in language both passionate and enchanting, she offers us an intimate map of a troubled and far-flung heart: “Can you believe I thought that?” she asks, “That we would always go/roaming brave and dangerous/on wild unlit roads?”At once witty and tender, with Dorothy Parker–like turns of the knife and memorable partings from lovers in New York, London, Rome and beyond, these poems capture a restless movement through loves and locales, and charm us at every turn with their forthrightness.From the Hardcover edition.

    In the singular landscape of Matthew Rohrer's first book of poems, the weather, the food, even the household appliances come to life. "A few pages into this book," says the Minneapolis City Pages, "and you'll start glancing sideways at the terrain, which . . . looks suddenly vital." These quirky poems entertain and delicately point to truth. Rohrer illuminates a land of skewed realities where the impossible seems familiar, the sacher torte is afraid to be eaten, and it's always dusk in the forest.

    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

    Starting there, this extended poem—part art criticism, part history—considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.

    No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

    Truthful and tender, profoundly aware of the possibility of magic and the miraculous, these poems are beautiful, informed, and, even at their darkest moments, filled with courage and hope. Alongside old favorites, this edition will contain a selection of new, unpublished poems. This is a must for poetry lovers.

    The book and the dream are the poet’s primary objects of investigation here. Through deft, quietly authoritative lyrics, Fisher meditates on the problems and possibilities—the frail craft—of perception for the reader, the dreamer, maintaining that “if the eye can love—and it can, it does—then I held you and was held.” In her foreword to the book, Louise Glück writes that Fisher’s poetry is “haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plain-spoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the sense this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking.”

    The Weary Blues announced the arrival of a rare voice in American poetry. A literary descendant of Walt Whitman ("I, too, sing America," Hughes wrote), he chanted the joys and sorrows of black America in unprecedented language. A gifted lyricist, he offered rhythms and cadences that epitomized the particularities of African American creativity, especially jazz and the blues. His second volume, steeped in the blues and controversial because of its frankness, confirmed Hughes as a poet of uncompromising integrity. Then in the 1930s came Dear Lovely Death (1931) and the radical A New Song (1938). Poems such as "Good Morning Revolution" and "Let America Be America Again" made his pen one of the most forceful in America during the Great Depression.

    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.

    Poems to Read is a welcoming avenue into poetry for readers new to poetry, including high school and college students. It is also meant to be a fresh, valuable collection for readers already devoted to the art. This anthology concentrates on the actual pleasures of reading poems: hearing the poem in your voice, bringing it to other people, musing about it, taking excitement or comfort from it, wandering with it or—as in the Keats letter quoted in the Introduction—having it as a starting post. Many of these 200 poems are accompanied by comments from readers of various ages, regions, and backgrounds who participated in the Favorite Poem Project. Included are poems by John Donne, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Louise Glück, to name a few. The editors offer their own comments on some of the poems, which are arranged in thematic chapters.

    Gibson. The pages explore hurt, healing, love, forgiveness, self-discovery and the journey towards becoming a woman. Written in four chapters each piece encourages healing and the journeying of self.