S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.

    Along the way they witness and partake in an American landscape filled with poverty, warm six-packs, roulette wheels, murder sites, and their own family.

    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.

     When Mildred’s girlfriend runs off with all the egg money, Mildred decides she has had enough of small town living. She leaves her chicken ranch behind and heads for the big city of Bon Chance, Texas. Once there, she gets a job as a gigolo girl—and pleasing sex-starved lesbians is the name of the game. She meets another gigolo girl, Desiree Hart, and falls madly in love. But it’s against company policy to date a fellow employee. Can Mildred and Desiree find true love with each other or will sex get in the way?

    It's for the seekers searching for a new home, for the wanderers leaving their old homes, for the lovers creating a home wherever they are. Sometimes you hold on to what is left, sometimes you just let go to start afresh.

    Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”