What he witnessed there, with 10,000 participants, is shocking.In Blue Front, Collins describes the brutal lynching of a black man and, as an afterthought, a white man, both of them left to the mercilessness of the spectators. The poems patch together an arresting array of evidence—newspaper articles, census data, legal history, postcards, photographs, and Collins's speculationsabout her father's own experience. The resulting work, part lyric and part narrative, is a bold investigation into hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a country still haunted by its violently racist history.

    This small collection of poems explores how time influences loving another, loving yourself and loving the life you own. This quick but fulfilling read, explores these topics in three sections: the head, the heart and the lungs.

    These poems—set in a town that straddles Mexico and Arizona—are lyric adventures, crossing two and three boundaries as easily as one, between cultures, between languages, between senses. Drawing upon fable, parable, and family legend, Ríos utilizes the intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts: plastic lemons turning into baseballs, a grandmother’s long hair reaching up to save her life, the painted faith jumpers leaping to the earth and crowd below. This is magical realism at its shimmering best. The smallest muscle in the human body is in the ear. It is also the only muscle that does not have blood vessels; It has fluid instead. The reason for this is clear: The ear is so sensitive that the body, if it heard its own pulse, Would be devastated by the amplification of its own sound. In this knowledge I sense a great metaphor, But I do not want to be hasty in trying to capture or describe it. Words are our weakest hold on the world. —from "Some Extensions of the Sovereignty of Science" "Ríos is onto something new in his poetry—in the way that the real poets of any time always are."—American Book Review Alberto Ríos teaches at Arizona State and is the author of eight books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir about growing up on the Mexican border. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is included in over 175 national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.

    Besides George Meredith and his wife Mary Ellen, Swinburne and his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton are among those who also find a place in the three poem-sequences that comprise the book: "Arisbe," "The Leisure of the Theory Class," and "Rückenfigur." Howe's historical linkings, resonant with the sorrows of love and loss and the tragedies of war, create a compelling canvas of associations. "It's the blanks and gaps," she says, "that to me actually represent what poetry is-the connections between seemingly unconnected things-as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not."

    Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there’s only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back.

    He attended Harvard University where he published his first poems in magazines such as Harvard's Wake and Cid Corman's Origin. During the 1950s, after dropping out of Harvard, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was an editor of its innovative literary journal, the Black Mountain Review. He received his B.A. from Black Mountain College in 1955. Robert Creeley was one of the originators of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry, along with Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. In 1962, he received his first widespread recognition with For Love: Poems 1950-1960 and he went on to teach at several universities across the country. In 1978 he was named David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, and presently he is their Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities. Creeley has received many awards for his work including the Levinson prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Robert Frost Medal, both from the Poetry Society of America, and The American Awards for Echoes. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987 and received a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship to serve as the Bicentennial chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, for 1988-89, and another Fulbright for the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1995. He served as New York State Poet from 1989-1991. In 1995 he was a winner of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. His most recent poetry books are Memory Gardens (1986), Windows (1990), Echoes (1994), So There: Poems 1976-83 (1998), and Life & Death (1998), all published by New Directions.

    Utilizing medical terminology and iconography to work through loss and detachment, McHugh’s startling rhymes and rhythms—along with her sarcastic self-reflection and infectious laughter—serve as antidotes to the sufferings of the world. Being “upgraded to serious” from critical condition is a nod to the healing powers of poetry."Not to Be Dwelled On"Self-interest cropped up even there,the day I hoisted three insteadof the ceremonially called-for twospadefuls of loamonto the coffin of my friend.Why shovel more than anybody else?What did I think I’d prove? More love(mud in her eye)? More will to work?(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,what wouldn’t anybody giveto get that gesture back?She cannot die again; and Ido nothing but re-live.

    In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.

    Important, so inspiring... Please read this book" -Sonny Moore, Recording Artist "There are very few ways to get inside the mind of a lyricist. One way is through reading their diaries, the other through sleeping with them. Eric's book is the more entertaining of the options. It's a raw look inside the heart and mind of a rock 'n' roll spiritualist whose struggles with love (Chaplin) and versus the world (Keaton) are laid out bare like an exhibitionist on a double-dare." -Mike Shea, Founder, AP Magazine "Coma Therapy" is the sound of a powerful new voice in contemporary American literature. Victorino's brand of punchy prose often draws comparisons to the likes of Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson. This debut collection of poems and short stories draws a dangerously thin line between the heartwarming and the horrifying... Eric Victorino then mischievously walks that line all the way to the last page. Defiant, triumphant, hopeful and wise.

    Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of contemporary American culture, Simic matches meditations on spiritual concerns and the weight of history with a nimble wit, shifting effortlessly to moments of clear vision and intense poetic revelation. Chosen as one of the New York Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2003, The Voice at 3:00 A. M. was also nominated for a National Book Award. The recipient of many prizes, Simic most recently received Canada's Griffin Prize. The poems in this collection--spanning two decades of his work--present a rich and varied survey of a remarkable lyrical journey.In the StreetBeauty, dark goddess,We met and partedAs though we parted not.Like two stopped watchesIn a dusty store window,One golden morning of time.

    With titles such as “Stride Piano,” “Gutbucket,” and “Can-Can,” these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized songs and follow a classic blues trajectory: praising and professing undying devotion (“To watch you walk / cross the room in your black / corduroys is to see / civilization start”), only to end up lamenting the loss of love (“No use driving / like rain, past / where you at”). As Young conquers the sorrow left on his doorstep, the poems broaden to embrace not just the wisdom that comes with heartbreak but the bittersweet wonder of triumphing over adversity at all.Sexy and tart, playfully blending an African American idiom with traditional lyric diction, Young’s voice is pure American: joyous in its individualism and singing of the self at its strongest.From the Hardcover edition.

    Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

    Animals populate its pages—owl, groundhog, fox, each with its own inimitable survival skills—and the poet who so meticulously observes their behaviors has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of skills herself: she too has survived. The power of these extraordinary poems lies in their recognition that all our experience is ultimately useless—that human beings are at every moment beginners, facing the earth as if for the first time. "Don’t you think I’m doing better," asks the first poem. "You got sick you got well you got sick," says the last.Eschewing punctuation, forgoing every symmetry, the poems hurl themselves forward, driven by an urgent need to speak. Headwaters is a book of wisdom that refuses to be wise, a book of fresh beginnings by an American poet writing at the height of her powers.

    These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.From the Hardcover edition.

    Lying still in snow,not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willingnot to meet until heaven, but here and theretreading slubby kissing stops, our trackswobble across the snow their long scratch.So many things that happen here are really little more,if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths,are almost ready, already, to bandage the onewhom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how whenwe might lose each other, scratches scratches scratchesfrom this moment to that. Then I will go backto that silent evening, when the past just managedto overlap the future, if only by a trace,and the light doubles and caststhrough the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.