Book of Longing


Leonard Cohen - 2006
    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

Good Poems for Hard Times


Garrison KeillorE.E. Cummings - 2005
    Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Jennifer Michael Hecht, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been struck by bad news, who are burdened by stress, or who simply appreciate the power of good poetry.

Tanpopo Volume 1


Camilla d'Errico - 2009
    She is released from the machine that has been her only existence for the hope of finding happiness... Inspired by Goethe's Faust, a tragic play whose themes carry throughout this graphic novel. This edition has been reprinted in an extended version with additional pages and a new ending that continues and gives life to a new series of books. Color.

Instant Winner


Carrie Fountain - 2014
    Fountain’s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the “pure holiness in motherhood” with the “thuds the giant dumpsters make behind the strip mall when they’re tossed back to the pavement by the trash truck.” In these wise, accessible, deeply emotional poems, she captures a contemporary longing for spiritual meaning that’s wary of prepackaged wisdom—a longing answered most fully by attending to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Rotten Perfect Mouth


Eva H.D. - 2015
    These poems are loose enough for the reader to flop down inside and stay awhile. They are plangent, personal, confessional, noisy, nostalgic, and maybe a little bit broken. They often contain boats and travel and Toronto (street names and railroad tracks, dives and parks and kitchens) because those are the sorts of things Eva H.D. is drawn to. In Rotten Perfect Mouth, readers will discover a writer with her heart on her sleeve and her hand on her pen, capturing the world around her with vibrant immediacy.

I Wore My Blackest Hair


Carlina Duan - 2017
    With defiance and wild joy, Duan’s poems wrestle with and celebrate ancestry and history, racial consciousness, and the growing pains of girlhood. They explore difficult truths with grace and power. I Wore My Blackest Hair is an honest portrait of a woman in-between—identities, places, languages, and desires—and her quest to belong. The speaker is specific in her self-definition, discovering and reinventing what it means to be a bold woman, what it means to be Chinese American, and what it means to grow into adulthood. Duan moves seamlessly from the personal to the imaginative to the universal, heralding a brilliant new voice in contemporary poetry.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept


Elizabeth Smart - 1945
    In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife;the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.

Earlier Poems


Franz Wright - 2007
    The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books (The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes , Entry In An Unknown Hand , The Night World and the Word Night and Rorschach Test) of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.From the Trade Paperback edition.

How Beautiful the Beloved


Gregory Orr - 2009
    . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review, “Editor’s Choice”"Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems."—ForeWord"...magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless." —The Bloomsbury ReviewGregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the “beloved” with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project “gorgeous,” and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives—of our love and our loving."If to say it onceAnd once only, then stillTo say: Yes.And say it complete,Say it as if the wordFilled the whole momentWith its absolute saying.Later for “but,” Later for “if.”NowOnly the single syllableThat is the beloved.That is the world.Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

My Feelings: Poems


Nick Flynn - 2015
    . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it will come to me, if I can just get him to draw mea map, if I can find the tree, if I can find the shovel. And the house, the mansion hegrew up in, soon a lawyer will pass a key across a walnut desk, but even thislawyer will not be able to tell me where this mansion is. —from "Kafka"In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy—from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

The Gift of Everything


Lang Leav - 2021
    In addition, this beautifully conceived clothbound anthology includes 35 new poems as well as original and arresting illustrations by the author.Lang’s evocative words of love, loss, and self-empowerment have inspired millions across the globe to seek their own voice through the healing power of poetry. A definite must-have collection for all lovers of poetry and prose.   The Gift of Everything will thrill and delight fans of Lang Leav as well as those yet to discover the enchanting world of one the most celebrated poets in modern history.

One Good Hustle


Billie Livingston - 2012
    But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices. With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility. One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.

The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems


Billy Collins - 2005
    With his distinct voice and accessible language, America's two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.Like the present book's title, Collins's poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, "Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone"-but also with quiet observation, intense wonder, and a reverence for the everyday: "The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows. / They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth-the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, / the American poets gazing out / at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise."Through simple language, Collins shows that good poetry doesn't have to be obscure or incomprehensible, qualities that are perhaps the real trouble with most "serious" poetry: "By now, it should go without saying / that what the oven is to the baker / and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner / so the window is to the poet."In this dazzling new collection, his first in three years, Collins explores boyhood, jazz, love, the passage of time, and, of course, writing-themes familiar to Collins's fans but made new here. Gorgeous, funny, and deeply empathetic, Billy Collins's poetry is a window through which we see our lives as if for the first time.

How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons


Barbara Kingsolver - 2020
    She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins.Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.

Plume: Poems


Kathleen Flenniken - 2012
    But [Flenniken] also wrote them to honor the people she grew up with." " - Seattle Times"The poems in "Plume" are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity.