New European Poets


Kevin Prufer - 2008
    In compiling this landmark anthology, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select 270 poets whose writing was first published after 1970. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English and in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico García Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.The poetry in New European Poets is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with history and politics. The range of styles is exhilarating—from the lyric intimacy of Portuguese poet Rosa Alice Branco to the profane prose poems of Romanian poet Radu Andriescu, from the surrealist bravado of Czech poet SylvaFischerová to the survivor's cry of Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry translated from more than thirty languages is represented, including French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and more regional languages such as Basque, Irish Gaelic, and Sámi.In its scope and ambition, New European Poets is destined to be a seminal anthology, an important vehicle for American readers to discover the extraordinary poetry being written across the Atlantic.

Selected Poems


Stevie Smith - 1978
    Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

Seven Notebooks: Poems


Campbell McGrath - 2008
    Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

My Century


Aleksander Wat - 1977
    Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in which Wat was a major participant-- that followed the end of World War I: an explosion of talent and ideas which, he argues, in some ways helped to open the door to the destruction that the Nazis and Bolsheviks soon visited upon the world. But Wat's book is at heart a story of spiritual struggle and conversion. He tells of his separation during World War II from his wife and young son, of his confinement in the Soviet prison system, of the night when the sound of far-off laughter brought on a vision of "the devil in history." "It was then," Wat writes, "that I began to be a believer."

The Latest Winter


Maggie Nelson - 2003
    "These poems manage to say everything about everything-each determining day, each shifting sense of inexhaustible person. Back of it all is an extraordinary ear for the way words find place, make a passage from here to there, blessedly keep on talking"-Robert Creely. "Few poets are strange and quick enough to capture the frenetic quality of contemporary life. Her poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts of humor, glamour, and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time"-Elaine Equi. THE LATEST WINTER is Nelson's follow-up to SHINER (also available from SPD). Nelson's work has appeared in many anthologies and journals including AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION, THE HAT, OPEN CITY, and SHINY.

Sweet Ruin


Tony Hoagland - 1992
    Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction reveal that defeat is a natural prelude to grace and loss a kind of threshold to freedom.“A remarkable book.  Without any rhetorical straining, with a disarming witty directness, these poems manage to transform every subject they touch, from love to politics, reaching out from the local and the personal to place the largest issues in the context of feeling.  It’s hard to think of a recent book that succeeds with equal grace in fusing the truth-telling and the lyric impulse, clarity and song, in a way that produces such consistent pleasure and surprise.”—Carl Dennis“This is wonderful poetry:  exuberant, self-assured, instinct with wisdom and passion.”—Carolyn Kizer “There is a fine strong sense in these poems of real lives being lived in a real world.  This is something I greatly prize.  And it is all colored, sometimes brightly, by the poet’s own highly romantic vision of things, so that what we may think we already know ends up seeming rich and strange.”—Donald Justice“In Sweet Ruin, we’re banging along the Baja of our little American lives, spritzing truth from our lapels, elbowing our compadres, the Seven Deadly Sins.  Maybe we’re unhappy in a less than tragic way, but our ruin requires of us a love and understanding and loyalty just as deep and sweet as any tragic hero’s.  And it’s all the more poignant in a sad and funny way because the purpose of this forced spiritual march, Hoagland seems to be saying, is to leave ourselves behind.  Undoubtedly, you will recognize among the body count many of your selves.”—Jack Myers

The Xenophobe's Guide to the Poles


Ewa Lipniacka - 1994
    Frank, irreverent, funny--almost guaranteed to cure Xenophobia.

The War Poems


Wilfred Owen - 1994
    Taken from the definitive edition of Owen’s work, and containing material unavailable to other editions, this selection has been edited by Professor Jon Stallworthy, who has written an illuminating and authoritative introduction.

Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture


Seamus Heaney - 1996
    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

Hourglass Museum


Kelli Russell Agodon - 2010
    Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn CooperKelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

Red Sugar


Jan Beatty - 2008
    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia


Wojciech Tochman - 2002
    But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial, and mourning could begin. Here we travel through the ravaged postwar landscape in the company of a few survivors (mostly women) as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where victims' clothing is displayed; an underground cave littered with pale jumbles of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; a funeral service where a family can finally say goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, a feat of powerful reportage told from the viewpoint of people who have lost nearly everything. With the sensibility of Philip Gourevitch or Ryszard Kapuscinski, Tochman captures a painful moment in history, as an entire community comes to terms with its raw and recent past.

The Clerk's Prologue and Tale


Geoffrey Chaucer - 1966
    Texts are in the original Middle English, and each has an introduction, detailed notes and a glossary. Selected titles are also available as CD recordings.

Dirty Tricks: Box Set


Ryan Ramsay - 2020
    And now, to my surprise, it's where I go too, thanks to surprise tuition the celebrity father I just found out I have sent me after my mother died. I thought dealing with grief was enough to nearly kill me. But now I also have to deal with the most popular and elite students who make up Brentmoor's infamous "Council" relentlessly bullying me because they don't think a poor girl like me belongs here, no matter who my father is.But three of the Council guys are hot, and I swear they have a crush on me. Scruffy but studly Sebastian is a rebel from old money, nerdy-cool Braxton didn't even need his billionaire dad to get him in because his grades were so stellar on their own, and handsome Harrison is the musical bad boy son of a rock and roll star.These three guys might look down their noses at me, but I can't help noticing that they're staring at my curves while they do it. And even though they kind of take part in the cruel jokes, it seems to be in a teasing way. Or is it that they're even trying to help me?It's hard to know what's really going on since Brentmoor and its elite lifestyle are like a whole new world to me and I'm not part of these guys' inner circle. But it starts to become abundantly clear that they want to be in my, um... inner circle... all three of them, at once, in fact.I decide to use one of them to get back at the rest of the members of the Council, especially the mercilessly catty female students. But it's hard to decide which one of the three guys to choose, and from the way they're all fawning over me together, I'm starting to wonder if I even have to. Am I doomed to live alone in the hell that is Brentmoor forever?Or can I get revenge, pleasure and maybe even love, with 3 bad boy bullies at once? This box set contains the complete Bullies of Brentmoor series: Dirty Deeds, Dirty Secrets, Dirty Lies and Dirty Love. Note: These books are about three damaged alpha males and the feisty, curvy female student who stands up to them until they're all on their knees begging to please her! The set contains mature language and scenes, including high heat steam, and potential triggers related to bullying. Although there are some cliffhangers in the individual books, everything is resolved by the end of this complete series collection, for your binge-reading pleasure.

Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journal


Renia Spiegel - 2016
    In the summer of 1939, Renia and her sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were visiting their grandparents in Przemysl, right before the Germans invaded Poland.Like Anne Frank, Renia recorded her days in her beloved diary. She also filled it with beautiful original poetry. Her diary records how she grew up, fell in love, and was rounded up by the invading Nazis and forced to move to the ghetto in Przemsyl with all the other Jews. By luck, Renia's boyfriend Zygmund was able to find a tenement for Renia to hide in with his parents and took her out of the ghetto. This is all described in the Diary, as well as the tragedies that befell her family and her ultimate fate in 1942, as written in by Zygmund on the Diary's final page.Renia's Diary is a significant historical and psychological document. The raw, yet beautiful account depicts Renia's angst over the horrors going on around her. It has been translated from the original Polish, with notes included by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak.