By combining the ancient mysteries of Sappho with the contemporary wizardry of one of our most fearless and original poets, If Not, Winter provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho's fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric - or, to use Sappho's words, as "thin fire . . . racing under skin." "Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in [this] gorgeous translation.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780375410673
|
Paperback
The Odyssey
By Homer,
The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy." So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780140268867
|
Paperback
Beowulf
By Heaney, Seamus
A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780374111199
|
Hardcover
The Divine Comedy
By Alighieri, Dante
An acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy Volume 1: Inferno that retains all the style, power and meaning of the original, this Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Italian with an introduction by Mark Musa. This vigorous translation of Inferno preserves Dante's simple, natural style, and captures the swift movement of the original Italian verse. Mark Musa's blank verse rendition of the poet's journey through the circles of hell recreates for the modern reader the rich meanings that Dante's poem had for his contemporaries. Musa's introduction and commentaries on each of the cantos brilliantly illuminate the text. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), scion of a Florentine family, mastered in the art of lyric poetry at an early age.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780142437223
|
Paperback
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
By Milton, John
These controversial epic poems demonstrate Milton's genius for fusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative and drama in profound explorations of the moral problems of God's justice-and what it truly means to be human.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780451531643
|
Mass Market Paperback
The Purity of Desire
By Ladinsky, Daniel
The first full-length volume of Rumis cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafizs mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islams most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desirethat universal emotionin verse inspired by Rumis love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islams most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language.
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display: none;
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The first full-length volume of Rumis cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafizs mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islams most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desirethat universal emotionin verse inspired by Rumis love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islams most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780143121619
|
Paperback
Basho
By Basho,
Basho stands today as Japans most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters.Yet despite his stature, Bashos complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now.To render the writers full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years of work. In Basho: The Complete Haiku, she accomplishes the feat with distinction. Dividing his creative output into seven periods of development, Reichhold frames each period with a decisive biographical sketch of the poets travels, creative influences and personal triumphs and defeats. Scrupulously annotated notes accompany each poem; and a glossary and two indexes fill out the volume. Reichhold notes that, Basho was a genius with words. He obsessively sought out the right word for each phrase of the succinct seventeen-syllable haiku, seeking the very essence of experience and expression. With equal dedication, Reichhold sought the ideal translations. As a result, Basho: The Complete Haiku is likely to become the essential work on this brilliant poet and will stand as the most authoritative book on the subject for many years to come. Original sumi-e ink drawings by artist Shiro Tsujimura complement the haiku throughout the book.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781568365374
|
Print book
Poetry for Young People
By Dickinson, Emily
See the beauty and magic of the everyday world through the eyes of Emily Dickinson, one of America's best-loved and most renowned poets. Flowers, birds, sunrises, sunsets, the moon, and even her own existence take on surprising meanings and colorful illustrations accompany more than thirty-five of her best-loved poems. An ideal way to introduce young readers to the marvels of prose, the Poetry for Young People series opens up the world of wonderful word images by pairing classic verses with beautiful illustrations, and by providing helpful definitions and commentary.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781402754739
|
Paperback
Leaves of Grass
By Whitman, Walt
"I am large, I contain multitudes" When Walt Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass in July 1855, he altered the course of literary history. One of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, it redefined the rules of poetry while describing the soul of the American character. Throughout his great career, Whitman continuously revised, expanded, and republished Leaves of Grass, but many critics believe that the book that matters most is the 1855 original. Penguin Classics proudly presents that text in its original and complete form, with an introductory essay by the writer and poet Malcolm Cowley. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780140421996
|
Paperback
Hughes
By Hughes, Langston
From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780375405518
|
Hardcover
A Raisin in the Sun
By Hansberry, Lorraine
This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicagos South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husbands insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780679755333
|
Paperback
Bright Dead Things
By Limón,
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limn has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limn's work is consistently generous and accessible - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781571314710
|
Print book
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
By Harjo, Joy
A long-awaited poetry collection by one of our most essential Native American voices.In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. ---
Publisher: n/a
|
9780393248500
|
Hardcover
Wade in the Water
By Smith, Tracy K
The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. -- from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice -- inquisitive, lyrical, and wry -- turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781555978136
|
Hardcover
Every Day We Get More Illegal
By Herrera, Juan Felipe
Included in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of 2020 and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year!A State of the Union from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope."Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed." - New York Times"Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be." - NPR"From Basho to Mandela, Every Day We Get More Illegal takes us on an international tour for a lesson in the history of resistance from a poet who declares, 'I had to learn .
Publisher: n/a
|
9780872868281
|
Paperback
The Simple Truth
By Levine, Philip
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private) , family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780679765844
|
Paperback
The Hill We Climb
By Gorman, Amanda
On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet, at age twenty-two, to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Her inaugural poem, "The Hill We Climb," is now available to cherish in this special edition.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780593465271
|
Hardcover
Patriarchy Blues
By Priest, Rena
"Rena Priest addresses those who crave 'the meat of beasts with beets and leeks.' And while she insists that 'Nature makes you pay, ' her poems tell us that through a 'wistful song of sighs.' The world is not always comfortable, but her poems never 'lose touch with the fluidity of the spirit.' Patriarchy Blues is an amazing collection." --James Bertolino, author of Ravenous Bliss: New & Selected Love Poems
Publisher: n/a
|
9781936657278
|
Paperback
Cipota under the Moon
By Luna, Claudia Castro
In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781882688616
|
Paperback
What the Sky Lacks
By Caraway, Thom
With an unwavering ascendancy of the austere, Thom Caraway's What the Sky Lacks explores the negative capability of uncertainties and mysteries in a landscape of ruthless severity and elusive beauty, "a world built of unknown language." While witnessing the stark refuge of cottonwood shelterbelts on a field's ragged periphery, listening to the tender weight of empty freight cars rolling through the night, or recounting the dream of a wrecker wherein human warmth exists only in the transient sounds of strangers, a soul transforms into "an instrument of pure light, a circular machine of illumination." The spiritual discipline of recognizing beauty in a world of desolation emerges sheer, unadorned as the rugged territories in the northern badlands obliterated by merciless blizzards, unburnished yet dazzlingly beatific in wintry ruminations of a faith weathered out of wreckage.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780983151357
|
Paperback
Instructions for My Mothers Funeral
By Read, Laura
This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker's reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins
Publisher: n/a
|
9780822962151
|
Scarecrow Oracle
By Anderson, Mark L
Mark Anderson's Scarecrow Oracle opens by "Going Backwards to Where It Starts" and then takes us forward through the speaker's childhood into his early adulthood, traveling through time as he stays rooted in place-the Spokane Valley, The Empyrean Coffee Shop, the Rockford Fair. The question the speaker is always asking is how to live in a world steeped in loss. Early in the collection, the young speaker asks a dandelion this question, and in response, "it lets go of everything it has ever been." Towards the end, the older speaker, less stunned now by the dandelion's quick vanishing, tells us as he performs the ordinary act of making his bed, "I want to be ready to be a ghost or a nothing ... ./ And when the time comes I part the curtains / and let in the astonishing day.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780983151364
|
Paperback
Damn Good Cookie
By Cook, Chris
In the Spokane tradition of Vachel Lindsay, Chris Cook sings. Before you register the dark humor, the sharp satire, or the elegant constructions of the meter, you'll notice the music of these poems. Whether at the park, in memory, or elsewhere on the periphery, Cook writes large-hearted poems that remind us how poetry moves: from ear to mind to heart.
This item is Non-Returnable.
Read our blog post, "Ways to Connect with Poems & Celebrate National Poetry Month this April" to learn more.
If Not, Winter
By Sappho,
By combining the ancient mysteries of Sappho with the contemporary wizardry of one of our most fearless and original poets, If Not, Winter provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho's fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric - or, to use Sappho's words, as "thin fire . . . racing under skin." "Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in [this] gorgeous translation.
The Odyssey
By Homer,
The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy." So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life.
Beowulf
By Heaney, Seamus
A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate.Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.
The Divine Comedy
By Alighieri, Dante
An acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy Volume 1: Inferno that retains all the style, power and meaning of the original, this Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Italian with an introduction by Mark Musa. This vigorous translation of Inferno preserves Dante's simple, natural style, and captures the swift movement of the original Italian verse. Mark Musa's blank verse rendition of the poet's journey through the circles of hell recreates for the modern reader the rich meanings that Dante's poem had for his contemporaries. Musa's introduction and commentaries on each of the cantos brilliantly illuminate the text. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), scion of a Florentine family, mastered in the art of lyric poetry at an early age.
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
By Milton, John
These controversial epic poems demonstrate Milton's genius for fusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative and drama in profound explorations of the moral problems of God's justice-and what it truly means to be human.
The Purity of Desire
By Ladinsky, Daniel
The first full-length volume of Rumis cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafizs mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islams most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desirethat universal emotionin verse inspired by Rumis love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islams most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language. Show more Show less #outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } The first full-length volume of Rumis cherished verse by bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky Renowned for his poignant renderings of Hafizs mystical texts, Daniel Ladinsky captures the beauty, intimacy, and musicality of another of Islams most beloved poets and spiritual thinkers. In collaboration here with Nancy Owen Barton, and with learned insight and a delicate touch, they explore the nuances of desirethat universal emotionin verse inspired by Rumis love and admiration for his companion and spiritual teacher, Shams-e Tabriz. These poems thoughtfully capture the compelling wisdom of one of Islams most revered artistic and religious voices and one of the most widely read poets in the English language.
Basho
By Basho,
Basho stands today as Japans most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters.Yet despite his stature, Bashos complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now.To render the writers full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years of work. In Basho: The Complete Haiku, she accomplishes the feat with distinction. Dividing his creative output into seven periods of development, Reichhold frames each period with a decisive biographical sketch of the poets travels, creative influences and personal triumphs and defeats. Scrupulously annotated notes accompany each poem; and a glossary and two indexes fill out the volume. Reichhold notes that, Basho was a genius with words. He obsessively sought out the right word for each phrase of the succinct seventeen-syllable haiku, seeking the very essence of experience and expression. With equal dedication, Reichhold sought the ideal translations. As a result, Basho: The Complete Haiku is likely to become the essential work on this brilliant poet and will stand as the most authoritative book on the subject for many years to come. Original sumi-e ink drawings by artist Shiro Tsujimura complement the haiku throughout the book.
Poetry for Young People
By Dickinson, Emily
See the beauty and magic of the everyday world through the eyes of Emily Dickinson, one of America's best-loved and most renowned poets. Flowers, birds, sunrises, sunsets, the moon, and even her own existence take on surprising meanings and colorful illustrations accompany more than thirty-five of her best-loved poems. An ideal way to introduce young readers to the marvels of prose, the Poetry for Young People series opens up the world of wonderful word images by pairing classic verses with beautiful illustrations, and by providing helpful definitions and commentary.
Leaves of Grass
By Whitman, Walt
"I am large, I contain multitudes" When Walt Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass in July 1855, he altered the course of literary history. One of the greatest masterpieces of American literature, it redefined the rules of poetry while describing the soul of the American character. Throughout his great career, Whitman continuously revised, expanded, and republished Leaves of Grass, but many critics believe that the book that matters most is the 1855 original. Penguin Classics proudly presents that text in its original and complete form, with an introductory essay by the writer and poet Malcolm Cowley. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.
Hughes
By Hughes, Langston
From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.
A Raisin in the Sun
By Hansberry, Lorraine
This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicagos South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husbands insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.
Bright Dead Things
By Limón,
Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact - tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limn has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limn's work is consistently generous and accessible - though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
By Harjo, Joy
A long-awaited poetry collection by one of our most essential Native American voices.In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. ---
Wade in the Water
By Smith, Tracy K
The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesEven the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not love's bladeSizing up the heart's familiar meat?We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze. -- from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice -- inquisitive, lyrical, and wry -- turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.
Every Day We Get More Illegal
By Herrera, Juan Felipe
Included in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of 2020 and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of the Year!A State of the Union from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope."Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed." - New York Times"Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be." - NPR"From Basho to Mandela, Every Day We Get More Illegal takes us on an international tour for a lesson in the history of resistance from a poet who declares, 'I had to learn .
The Simple Truth
By Levine, Philip
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private) , family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.
The Hill We Climb
By Gorman, Amanda
On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet, at age twenty-two, to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Her inaugural poem, "The Hill We Climb," is now available to cherish in this special edition.
Patriarchy Blues
By Priest, Rena
"Rena Priest addresses those who crave 'the meat of beasts with beets and leeks.' And while she insists that 'Nature makes you pay, ' her poems tell us that through a 'wistful song of sighs.' The world is not always comfortable, but her poems never 'lose touch with the fluidity of the spirit.' Patriarchy Blues is an amazing collection." --James Bertolino, author of Ravenous Bliss: New & Selected Love Poems
Cipota under the Moon
By Luna, Claudia Castro
In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.
What the Sky Lacks
By Caraway, Thom
With an unwavering ascendancy of the austere, Thom Caraway's What the Sky Lacks explores the negative capability of uncertainties and mysteries in a landscape of ruthless severity and elusive beauty, "a world built of unknown language." While witnessing the stark refuge of cottonwood shelterbelts on a field's ragged periphery, listening to the tender weight of empty freight cars rolling through the night, or recounting the dream of a wrecker wherein human warmth exists only in the transient sounds of strangers, a soul transforms into "an instrument of pure light, a circular machine of illumination." The spiritual discipline of recognizing beauty in a world of desolation emerges sheer, unadorned as the rugged territories in the northern badlands obliterated by merciless blizzards, unburnished yet dazzlingly beatific in wintry ruminations of a faith weathered out of wreckage.
Instructions for My Mothers Funeral
By Read, Laura
This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker's reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins
Scarecrow Oracle
By Anderson, Mark L
Mark Anderson's Scarecrow Oracle opens by "Going Backwards to Where It Starts" and then takes us forward through the speaker's childhood into his early adulthood, traveling through time as he stays rooted in place-the Spokane Valley, The Empyrean Coffee Shop, the Rockford Fair. The question the speaker is always asking is how to live in a world steeped in loss. Early in the collection, the young speaker asks a dandelion this question, and in response, "it lets go of everything it has ever been." Towards the end, the older speaker, less stunned now by the dandelion's quick vanishing, tells us as he performs the ordinary act of making his bed, "I want to be ready to be a ghost or a nothing ... ./ And when the time comes I part the curtains / and let in the astonishing day.
Damn Good Cookie
By Cook, Chris
In the Spokane tradition of Vachel Lindsay, Chris Cook sings. Before you register the dark humor, the sharp satire, or the elegant constructions of the meter, you'll notice the music of these poems. Whether at the park, in memory, or elsewhere on the periphery, Cook writes large-hearted poems that remind us how poetry moves: from ear to mind to heart. This item is Non-Returnable.