He has paid tribute to Woody Woodpecker and the West, to friends and collaborators, to language and cowslips, to beautiful women and chocolate milk, to paintings and small-time criminals. His poems have always imparted a contagious sense of joy.In these new poems, Padgett hasn’t forsaken his beloved Woody Woodpecker, but he has decided to heed the canary and sound the alarm. Here, he asks, “What makes us so mean?” And he really wants to know. Even as these poems cajole and question, as they call attention to what has been lost and what we still stand to lose, they continue to champion what makes sense and what has always been worth saving. “Humanity,” Padgett generously (and gently) reminds us, still “has to take it one step at a time.”Ron Padgett is a celebrated translator, memoirist, teacher, and, as Peter Gizzi says, “a thoroughly American poet, coming sideways out of Whitman, Williams, and New York Pop with a Tulsa twist.” His poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Visit his website at www.ronpadgett.com.

    "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare sensitivity. The images Lee finds, such as the rose and the apple, are repeated throughout the book, crossing over from his father's China to his own America. Every word becomes transformative, as even his father's blindness and death can become beautiful. There is a strong enough technique here to make these poems of interest to an academic audience and enough originality to stun readers who demand alternative style and subject matter. — Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

    Because let’s face it! We hoomans are obviously stupid and trust me unicorns are never wrong. Did you know? The horn of the unicorn symbolizes ultimate truth and it has the power to pierce the chest of anyone who tries to lie. Damn!‘Uuuuuuuunicornnnnnnnnnnnnn,’ I yawned, waking up, after being thrown back to our crap-shit called Earth.‘So fellow hoomans, let’s begin.’About the book:This book is a sarcastic and humorous take on various themes like love, life, humanity, healing, and heartbreak - expressed through 51 beautiful chapters of relatable quotes, musings and poems. It basically deals with what we humans go through on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, every chapter is accompanied by a unique and perfectly orchestrated author's rant or opinion focused on one single person; You.

    Gray. These are the words that arrive when you are made up of nothing but skin, bones, and too much love.

    We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacan waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up." — C.D. WrightJane Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We're drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.…This year I have disappearedfrom the harvest routine—the pickers throwing their traysunder the vines, grape hooksflying, the heavy bunches flying—pickers running to the running tractorswith trays held high above their headsand the arc of dark fruit falling heavily into the half-ton bins.The hornets swarming in the diesel-filled air.Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Money Money Money | Water Water Water (2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she's the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.

     Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering,           just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present.                                                           —from “Arriving” Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

    Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.

    An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets.Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist.

    Dunn's landscape at the end of the century embraces the spectrum of urgencies and obsessions that we live with and for. It's a landscape that we share with citizens and spies, revelers and mourners, women who weep, men who keep secrets, and especially with the poet himself.

    each poem is incredibly impactful and beautifully written. stories of love, heartbreak, suffering, and healing come alive on the page in an incredible way. let this book of poetry touch your soul and help you feel free. join trevor capiro on this journey towards healing.

    Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

    Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.

    In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

    Their town is under attack by a rogue shifter, and this time, their werewolf senses might not be enough to restore the peace. TROY The eldest Quinn might look thirty-five, but he’s walked the Tetons, Great Plains, and now Yellowstone for a century. Having served his country in three separate wars, shifting both aliases and appearances, alike—Troy can turn wolf by the light of a full moon and shift back in the blink of an eye—this towering and tatted alpha has inherited the Quinn throne, the clan of which has been operating hidden in Devil’s Fist since the first Native American took his last breath. But when a shy, bookish woman by the name of Reece Gladstone becomes a target after her co-worker is brutally murdered, Troy must untangle his complicated feelings for the librarian, feelings that have been percolating, unrepressed yet denied for years, and use every shifting trick in the book to keep her safe. KALEB Kaleb Quinn, the second eldest of the Quinn clan, likes his women like he likes his meat—raw and juicy. But recently, his playboy approach has been stilted and much to his chagrin, but not because the rumors have caught up to him. In his dreams, an ethereal woman with flowing blonde hair and a distinct darkness behind her twinkling eyes has been creeping in and overpowering his subconscious. Kaleb knows what it means, and who she is—his one true mate who he’s never met in the flesh. But as danger closes in, it seems that all of his dreams are quickly turning into a nightmare he can’t escape. Lucy Cooper has a reputation, as well, but it’s far from flattering. The slender diner waitress has seen the dark, rogue shifter up close and personal, but the Sheriff’s take on the matter, which the residents have also adopted, is that she’s on drugs and not to be trusted. Nothing could be further from the truth, but when a body turns up dead in her apartment, there’s only one man in town who believes her innocence—Kaleb Quinn. SHANE The war might have ended overseas, but Shane Quinn never came back from it. Not mentally. A loner to the bone, with battle scars peppered across his ripped physique, Shane walks the streets like dry ice wafting over cold steel. A smile hasn’t cracked his hardened exterior in all the years his brothers have known him, the running joke being that he was born angry and ready to annihilate. But when the Sheriff’s daughter, Whitney Abernathy storms into his life, Shane finds himself disarmed by her fiery spirit. Given the bodyguard’s fighting nature, this poses a serious problem. CONOR Conor Quinn knows that everlasting immortality for any werewolf hinges upon their eternal union with their one true mate. Three of his four brothers have found safety in having bonded to their destined mates, now functioning with fearless presence and power. Conor finds himself compelled, on a mission to connect with his own. But just because the determined, former marine and secret werewolf has chosen Rachel Clancy to be his one true mate, doesn’t mean that’s their destiny. Or does it? DEAN The youngest of the Quinn clan, Dean puts his love of Devil’s Fist before all else. Rugged and handsome, the tall, brooding werewolf is heavily tatted and deeply scarred and there’s nothing he hates more than a spoiled rich girl.

    Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, Door in the Mountain.Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects—love, and death, and the soul. Her images—strange, canny visions of the unknown self—clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.