In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imaginedMedusa (beheaded by Perseus, 2000 BC), Anne Boleyn (beheaded at the behest of Henry VIII, 1536), a chicken (beheaded for Sunday dinner, Alabama, 1958), and the author (decapitated, on the job, 2008). Told with the intensity of a poet and the wit of a great storyteller, these final thoughts illuminate and crystallize more about the characters' own lives and the worlds they inhabit than many writers manage to convey in full-length biographies or novels. The stories, which have appeared in literary magazines across the country, are a delightful and intriguing creative feat from one of today's most inventive writers.

    A large and important collection by one of Eastern Europe's major contemporary poets.

    Broken up into four chapters, she holds your hand and takes you inward with her, from skin to flesh, to flesh to bones, from bones to all that lies within. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, The Anatomy of Being marks a very distinct time in a young girl's life, and aches and aches to be heard and devoured. 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards Poetry Finalist

    White's deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d'être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.

    The book teaches that a person's softness is their biggest strength and that having a big heart is not always a bad thing and that a glimmer of light can be found in the darkest places.A Handful of Stars is raw and unapologetic, soft and kind, reflective and inspirational all at the same time. Some of Ruby's most loved poems are shared within the pages of this book, in hope that they will have the same effect on readers the second time as they did the first.

    The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen—seeming to rise up through centuries—is their tutelary spirit.

    In this powerful collection of writing guru Natalie Goldberg's poetry and paintings, the celebrated author of Writing Down the Bones focuses her attention on the shifting rhythms of interior life in poems that bring a Zen-like insight into the wondrous simultaneity of all things past, present, and future. With the same uncompromising integrity and commitment of Natalie Goldberg's bestselling books on creativity and writing, full-color reproductions of the her brilliant original paintings, and the introductory essay "How Poetry Saved My Life," Top of My Lungs gives the reader complete access to a compelling vision, one that is both simple and complex, both withdrawn from and full of life.

    R. Ammons’s long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century’s greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.

    Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically-elongated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly: "When We Move Away From Here, You'll See A Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung," "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace," "The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation," "Children With Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads," and the inimitable "Killed With an Apple Corer, She Asks What Does That Make Me."

    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

    Direct, humorous and disquieting, Satellite further develops the unique sensibility of an important young poet.

    It also includes a crown of sonnets about e-bay, sestinas on the subjects of Sean Penn and the main characters of fairytales, a pantoum that riffs on a childhood riddle, and a villanelle inspired by bathroom grafitti.

    Valente's first full-length poetry collection, where freaks, emperors, bodhisattvas, beasts, witches, wicked stepmothers, Greek heroes, told seductively and wickedly in poem and prose, jostle and vie for supremacy . .

    she was gone!After months of fighting the court system to see five-year-old Adele, Martin Jenkins finally has his daughter back. It’s only for a week’s holiday, but he’ll take that to have her near him once more.Keeping three children under the age of eight amused is no mean feat. Whilst Martin’s girlfriend, Louise, is looking after her daughter and Adele, Martin is playing football with her son close by.Excitement fills the air at the local beauty spot in the beautiful Lake District until a chilling scream rocks Martin’s world.The police, Mountain Rescue and other volunteers are brought in to help with the search but Martin’s life is ripped to shreds that day.The day his daughter is declared missing.

    They celebrate the wonders of nature and explore the nature of love and friendship.