Distance from Loved Ones


James Tate - 1990
    "Mr. Tate is an elegant and anarchic clown. A lord of poetic misrule with a serious, subversive purpose."-John Ash, New York Times Book Review "Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. [Tate's poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that is may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that refuse to lend themselves to instant analysis."-David Lehman, Washington Post Book World

Eye Level: Poems


Jenny Xie - 2018
    Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here―colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes―bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen. As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception―both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”

The Ordering of Love


Madeleine L'Engle - 2005
    L’Engle is unfailing in her willingness to see through–not around–human suffering, and in so doing announces no final severing of spirit and flesh but an enduring vision of resurrection in that crux, in the cross, in the One in Whom all things meet, continuing.” –Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim and Philokalia: New and Selected Poems“I love L’Engle’s poetry for the way it incarnates not only the great Truths of the faith, but all the little truths of our ordinary existence–our working and playing and loving and fighting and dreaming and idling and all the rest of it–and for the way it shows us that those big and little truths should not, cannot, be separated.”–Carolyn Arends, recording artist and author“Why is L’Engle one of the defining poets of our time? Because when life hurts, she does not shrink from the wounds. She clarifies the murk with hope as we feel the lift of grace.”–Calvin Miller, Beeson Divinity SchoolBirmingham, Alabama“We are, all of us, the richer for this carefully crafted and prayerfully rendered collection.”–Phyllis Tickle, Author, The Divine Hours“Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.”–Madeleine L’EngleMadeleine L’Engle’s writing has always translated the invisible and intricate qualities of love into the patterns and rhythms of visible life. Now, with compelling language and open-hearted vulnerability, The Ordering of Love brings together the exhaustive collection of L’Engle’s poetry for the first time.This volume collects nearly 200 of L’Engle’s original poems, including eighteen that have never before been published. Reflecting on themes of love, loss, faith, and beauty, The Ordering of Love gives vivid and compelling insight into the language of the heart.

shades of lovers


Catarine Hancock - 2019
    it is not only something to enjoy, but something to learn from. here are the things i did right, and the many things i did wrong. i give them to you, so that when love comes knocking, you will have a sense of what to do when you open the door.

The Wild Iris


Louise Glück - 1992
    Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureFrom Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, a stunningly beautiful collection of poems that encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realmsBound together by the universal themes of time and mortality and with clarity and sureness of craft, Louise Glück's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.

Collected Poems


Philip Larkin - 1988
    Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

The Waste Land And Other Poems


John Beer - 2010
    Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.

Salt Water


Brianna Wiest - 2017
    Gracefully touching on the issues of self-awareness, wholeness and what it takes to reconcile with yourself, her prose artfully illustrates how healing helps us to actualize our latent potential and bring us into a greater awe for the universe that we are so irrevocably connected to.

SISTER


Nickole Brown - 2007
    It is a voice thick with the humidity and whirring cicadas of Kentucky, but the poems are dangerous, smelling of the crisp cucumber scent of a copperhead about to strike. Epistolary in nature, and with a novel's arc, Sister is a story that begins with a teen giving birth to a baby girl--the narrator--during a tornado, and in some ways, that tornado never ends. In the hands of a lesser poet, this debut collection would be a standard-issue confession, a melodramatic exercise in anger and self-pity. But melodrama requires simple villains and victims, and there is neither in this richly complex portrait. Ultimately, Sister is more about the narrator's transgressions and failures, more about her relationships to her sister and their mother than about that which divided them. With equal parts sass and sorrow, these poems etch out survival won not with tender-hearted reflections but by smoking cigarettes through fly-specked screens, by using cans of aerosol hair spray as a makeshift flamethrowers, and, most cruelly, by leaving home and trying to forget her sister entirely. From there, each poem is a letter of explanation and apology to that younger sister she never knew.Sister recounts a return to a place that Brown never truly left. It is a book of forgiveness, of seeking what is beyond mere survival, of finding your way out of a place of poverty and abuse only to realize that you must go back again, all the way back to where everything began--that warm, dark nest of mother.

Where Hope Comes From: Poems of Resilience, Healing and Light


Nikita Gill - 2021
    Sharing a number of poems that she wrote when the world went into lockdown, this collection will include the phenomenal Love in the Time of Coronavirus which was shared across social media over 20,000 times, as well as her poems of strength and hope How to Be Strong and Silver Linings. This collection will be fully illustrated by Nikita with beautiful line-drawings, and moves her into an exciting new space in the market as she tackles themes such as mental health and loneliness.

The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems


Diane Wakoski - 1971
    Her poetry probes the difficulties that the individual encounters in relationships with others, with the natural world, and with cultural and popular ideas. - -britanica

Every Word You Cannot Say


Iain S. Thomas - 2019
    May they find every word they were looking for.***I know you don’t want to talk sometimes. Sometimes because it hurts and sometimes because you’re just not supposed to talk about what you want to talk about. Sometimes it can be hard to say, “this is beautiful,” when no one else can see what you see. Or, “Here, this is where the pain is.” But some part of you knows, the truth about the words you cannot say is that they only hurt until you say them. They only hurt until the person who needs to hear them, hears them.  Because we are human, and the closest we’ve ever come to showing each other who we really are, and how we love, is with words.So I’m going to try to say to you here, what I wish you’d say to me too. Please.Listen. We can change things. Here.

Useless Magic


Florence Welch - 2018
    Or a prediction comes true and I couldn't do anything to stop it, so it seems like a kind of useless magic."

Beast Meridian


Vanessa Angélica Villarreal - 2017
    Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, she survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinos in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.

The Black Automaton


Douglas Kearney - 2009
    . . These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."—Terrance Hayes