View your shopping cart.

Poetry

DUINO ELEGIES: A NEW AND COMPLETE TRANSLATION

DUINO ELEGIES: A NEW AND COMPLETE TRANSLATION

By: Rilke, Rainer Maria
$12.95
More Info

Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies are one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century. Begun in 1912 while the poet was a guest at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea and completed in a final bout of feverish inspiration in 1922, the ten elegies survey the mysteries of consciousness, whether human or animal, earthly or divine. Poet and translator Alfred Corn brings us closer to Rilke's meaning than ever before and illuminates the elegies' celebration of life and love. Also included are a critical introduction exploring the nuances of the translation, several thematically linked lyrics, and two of the "Letters to a Young Poet" to complete the volume.

DVD MILLENNIAL HARVEST

DVD MILLENNIAL HARVEST

$15.00
More Info
DWELLING IN POSSIBILITY: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry

DWELLING IN POSSIBILITY: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry

$19.95
More Info
"Dwelling in Possibility" cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary question about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time. This imaginatively conceived book covers a range in terms of time, geography, and genre, considering poets from antiquity to the present and drawing on a variety of critical approaches. Of particular note are essays on the transformation of classical lyric through the figure of Sappho, and on the transformative use of biblical material in women's verse.
E. E. CUMMINGS: COMPLETE POEMS, 1904-1962

E. E. CUMMINGS: COMPLETE POEMS, 1904-1962

By: Cummings, E E
$50.00
More Info

Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, E. E. Cummings, together with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. Today Cummings is recognized as the author of some of the most sensuous lyric poems in the English language, as well as one of the most inventive American poets of his time. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, at once cubistic and figurative, Cummings's work expanded the boundaries of what language is and can do.

With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, this redesigned, newly corrected, and fully reset edition of Complete Poems collects and presents all the poems published or designated for publication by E. E. Cummings in his lifetime. It includes 36 poems that were first collected in the 1991 edition and 164 unpublished poems issued in 1983 under the title Etcetera. It spans his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up through his last valedictory sonnets.

In the words of Randall Jarrell, "No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and special reader."

product image

EAGLE NATION

By: Revard, Carter
$14.95
More Info
"We are given this world and some time with friends. How time dawned on mind and was beaded into language amazes me the way an orb-spider's web or a computer-chip does. . . ."

Carter Revard, Osage Indian poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, shares both this amazement and his amazing command of language in this first retrospective collection of 40 published and unpublished pieces written from 1970 to 1991.

EAT THE FLOWERS

$10.00
More Info
product image

EDUCATION OF DESIRE

By: Dickey, William
$11.95
More Info
The Education of Desire is quite simply William Dickey's finest book. Completed shortly before his death from AIDS- related illness in 1994, the book is a courageous confrontation with death and the particular questions it raises at the end of the 20th century -how we define humanity and our own humanness. It is equally about the various ways in which desire, social or private, is grown in us.
The book displays Dickey's extraordinary range from experimental monologues to blues chants. It embraces a lively array of symbolic figures, drawing as readily from Judeo-Christian theology, the "natural" world, and classical myths as from postmodern technologies and popular culture. Readers encounter Little Red Riding Hood, Ken and Barbie, David and Saul, a bungee cord salesman, God, the holy grail, the Virgin Mary, the Titanic, Tiresias, an avid member of the National Rifle Association, and many others. As W. D. Snodgrass says in his foreword, the poems are filled with a "wild prankiness, a giddy whirl of idea and vision, . . . [yet] love is the central theme of all the poems in this book and of all their problems of boundaries, of memory, of suffering."
EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia

EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia

By: Cummings, E E
$15.95
More Info
Unavailable for more than fifty years, EIMI finally returns. While sometimes termed a novel, it is better described as a novelistic travelogue, the diary of a trip to Russia in the 1930s during the rise of the Stalinist government. Despite some contempt for what he witnesses, Cummings's narrator has an effective, occasionally hilarious way of evoking feelings of accord and understanding. As Ezra Pound wrote, Cummings's Soviet Union is laid out there pellucidly on the page in all its Slavic unfinishedness, in all of its Dostoievskian slobberyness....Does any man wish to know about Russia? 'EIMI'!

A stylistic tour de force, EIMI is a mélange of styles and tones, the prose containing many abbreviations, grammatical and syntactical shifts, typographical devices, compounds, and word coinages. This is Cummings's invigorating and unique voice at its finest, and EIMI is without question one of his most substantial accomplishments.

ELEGIES

ELEGIES

By: Rukeyser, Muriel
$14.95
More Info

"Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest." -- Muriel Rukeyser, "Elegy in Joy"

First published by New Directions in 1949, Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies were written over a seven years period the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Both and homage to Rilke's Duino Elegies and a spiritual reckoning that is particularly resonant today, these poems present no angelic orders, only the difficulties of living in the modern world, the depths of shipwreck, and "Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all."

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: The Life and Loves of a Poet

By: Forster, Margaret
$13.95
More Info
This illuminating biography of the great Victorian poet is based on recent discoveries of hundreds of letters and personal papers. Contrary to her classic image, Browning was not an unhappy invalid; Forster reveals for the first time the truth of Browning's magnificent life.
ELOQUENCE & MERE LIFE: Essays on the Art of Poetry

ELOQUENCE & MERE LIFE: Essays on the Art of Poetry

By: Williamson, Alan
$13.95
More Info
Assesses past and future generations of poets and examines the standards by which they should be measured

EMBERS IN THE HOUSE OF NIGHT

By: Kocbek, Edvard
$15.00
More Info

NOW

When I spoke
they said I was mute;
when I wrote
they said I was blind;
when I left them
they said I was lame.
When they were calling me back
they found out I was deaf.
They turned my senses upside-down
and came to the conclusion I was crazy.
Now I am happy.

EMPATHY

EMPATHY

By: Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei
$16.95
More Info
Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, "I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition." In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire.
ENDS OF THE EARTH: Essays

ENDS OF THE EARTH: Essays

By: Merwin, W S
$15.00
More Info
Merwin has gathered eight essays--including a memoir of George Kirstein, publisher of The Nation, and one of Sydney Parkinson, explorer, naturalist and artist on Captain James Cook's Endeavour--that show the breadth of his imagination and sympathy.
ENHEDUANA

ENHEDUANA

By: Helle, Sophus
$30.00
More Info
The complete poems of the priestess Enheduana, the world's first known author, newly translated from the original Sumerian

Enheduana was a high priestess and royal princess who lived in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, about 2300 BCE. Not only does Enheduana have the distinction of being the first author whose name we know, but the poems attributed to her are hymns of great power. They are a rare flash of the female voice in the often male-dominated ancient world, treating themes that are as relevant today as they were four thousand years ago: exile, social disruption, the power of storytelling, gender-bending identities, the devastation of war, and the terrifying forces of nature.

This book is the first complete translation of her poems from the original Sumerian. Sophus Helle's translations replicate the intensity and imagery of the original hymns--literary time bombs that have lain buried for millennia. In addition to his translations, Helle provides background on the historical context in which Enheduana's poems were composed and circulated, the works' literary structure and themes, and their reception in both the ancient and the modern world.

Unjustly forgotten for millennia, Enheduana's poems are essential reading for anyone interested in the literary history of women, religion, the environment, gender, motherhood, authorship, and empire.

ENVELOPE POEMS

ENVELOPE POEMS

By: Dickinson, Emily
$14.95
More Info
Although a very prolific poet--and arguably America's greatest--Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson's later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy--addressed to no one and everyone at once.

Full-color facsimiles are accompanied by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin's pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes).

ESPACIOS ENTRE PALABRAS

$8.00
More Info
ESSENTIAL BUKOWSKI: POETRY

ESSENTIAL BUKOWSKI: POETRY

By: Bukowski, Charles
$16.99
More Info

Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of poems from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture.

Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of ordinary life as Charles Bukowski. Resonant with his powerful, perceptive voice, his visceral, hilarious, and transcendent poetry speaks to us as forcefully today as when it was written. Encompassing a wide range of subjects--from love to death and sex to writing--Bukowski's unvarnished and self-deprecating verse illuminates the deepest and most enduring concerns of the human condition while remaining sharply aware of the day to day.

With his acute eye for the ridiculous and the troubled, Bukowski speaks to the deepest longings and strangest predilections of the human experience. Gloomy yet hopeful, this is tough, unrelenting poetry touched by grace.

This is Essential Bukowski.

ESSENTIAL GWENDOLYN BROOKS

ESSENTIAL GWENDOLYN BROOKS

By: Brooks, Gwendolyn
$20.00
More Info
Discover the most enduring works of the legendary poet and first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize--now in one collectible volume

"If you wanted a poem," wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, "you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

"Her formal range," writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, "is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso." That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

ESSENTIAL NERUDA

ESSENTIAL NERUDA

By: Neruda, Pablo
$16.95
More Info

This bilingual collection of Neruda's most essential poems is indispensable.

Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes.

An impressive group of translators that includes Alistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems; and a handful of previously untranslated works are included as well.

This selection sets the standard for a general, high-quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre.

...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily. --The Austin Chronicle

This book is a must-have for any reader interested in a definitive sampling of the most essential poems by one whom many consider one of the best poets of the 20th century.--Mike Nobles, Tulsa World

A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again.--Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden

The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it.--The Bloomsbury Review

ESSENTIAL RUMI TR. BARKS

ESSENTIAL RUMI TR. BARKS

By: Barks, Coleman
$17.99
More Info
From the premier interpreter of Rumi comes the first definitive one-volume collection of the enduringly popular spiritual poetry by the extraordinary thirteenth-century Sufi mystic.
ESSENTIAL W.S. MERWIN

ESSENTIAL W.S. MERWIN

By: Merwin, W S
$18.00
More Info

"The Essential W.S. Merwin beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of America's most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years."--The Washington Post

"Merwin is one of the great poets of our age."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of all creations, an accomplished style."--Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

"It is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change."--The Nation



The Essential W.S. Merwin traces a poetic legacy that has changed the landscape of American letters: seven decades of audacity, rigor, and candor distilled into one definite volume curated to represent the very best works from a vast oeuvre, from his 1952 debut, A Mask for Janus, to 2016's Garden Time. The Essential W.S. Merwin includes favorite poems from two Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes; a selection of iconic translations; and lesser-known prose narratives. As the formalism of Merwin's early work loosens into the open, unpunctuated style he developed later in his career--when urgent times demanded innovative modes of expression--readers can trace the evolution of one voice's commitment to moral, spiritual, and aesthetic inquiry. Across the decades, beyond headlines, policies, and trends, W.S. Merwin's poems point to the lessons that hide in the shadows of sentience.

"Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time."--W.S. Merwin

Noah's Raven

Why should I have returned?

My knowledge would not fit into theirs.

I found untouched the desert of the unknown,

Big enough for my feet. It is my home.

It is always beyond them. The future

Splits the present with the echo of my voice.

Hoarse with fulfillment. I never made promises.



Since launching his career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award 1952, W. S. Merwin has authored dozens of books of poetry, prose, and translation. A beloved voice in American literature, Merwin is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Hawaii, within the palm forest where he wrote, "On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree."

ESTATE SALE

ESTATE SALE

$12.00
More Info
ET TU...RAZA?

ET TU...RAZA?

By: Alurista
$9.00
More Info
Poetry. A poet with a strong commitment to social problems, Alurista continues to explore racism and other forms of bigotry in ET TU.RAZA?, his newest collection of poetry. These poems are angry and full of energy; they call us to action. Like the poems of e.e. cummings, Alurista's work is at once simple and highly complex. He often begins a poem with a playful tone but then expands it to shed light on some of the most important issues of our time.
ETCETERA

ETCETERA

By: Cummings, E E
$15.95
More Info
The poems in Etcetera were discovered in three Cummings manuscript collections and selected from more than 350 unpublished pieces. Many of the poems are from his early years and all convey his freshness and youthful spirit, exhibiting his celebration of love and delight in common natural phenomena. Etcetera was first published by Liveright in 1983. This newly reissued edition is published in a uniform format with Is 5, Tulips & Chimneys, ViVa, XAIPE, and No Thanks.
ETERNITY'S SUNRISE: THE IMAGINATIVE WORLD OF WILLIAM BLAKE

ETERNITY'S SUNRISE: THE IMAGINATIVE WORLD OF WILLIAM BLAKE

By: Damrosch, Leo
$22.00
More Info
In this richly illustrated portrait, a prize-winning biographer surveys the entire sweep of William Blake's creative work while telling the story of his life

William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience--social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends.

Following Blake's life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake's poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author's goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake's imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.

EVIDENCE

EVIDENCE

By: Oliver, Mary
$16.00
More Info

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird's "embellishments," or the last hours of darkness.

EXTRACTING THE STONE OF MADNESS: POEMS 1962 - 1972

EXTRACTING THE STONE OF MADNESS: POEMS 1962 - 1972

By: Pizarnik, Alejandra
$18.95
More Info
Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont," as well as to the "unparalleled intensity" of Artaud's "physical and moral suffering."

FACE OF CREATION HUNGARIAN POETRY

$11.95
More Info
FACING HIGH WATER

FACING HIGH WATER

By: Brandi, John
$16.00
More Info

"These poems shine with a Taoist sensibility and the wisdom and simplicity of self. John Brandi, as a traveler throughout Asia and the Americas, gives us the artist's heightened sensitivity and clarity of detail; and poems of rare precision, charm and truth."--Joanne Kyger, author of About Now

From the Himalayas, Angkor Wat, the barrios of Old Havana, the highlands of Chiapas, and the streets of New York, John Brandi's poems lead us toward rapport with the natural world and our own inner landscapes.

John Brandi is a poet, writer, and artist. He is the author of thirty-eight books of poetry and nonfiction.