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Poetry

HEAVENLY QUESTIONS: POEMS

HEAVENLY QUESTIONS: POEMS

By: Schnackenberg, Gjertrud
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Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimed The Throne of Labdacus, finds her at the height of her talents and showcases her continued growth as an artist. In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.

An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation--and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

HEAVY WORDS LIGHTLY THROWN

HEAVY WORDS LIGHTLY THROWN

By: Roberts, Chris, Etc
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Was Little Jack Horner a squatter? ?Baa Baa Black Sheep? a bleat about taxation? What did Jack and Jill do on that hill? Who was Mary? And why was she contrary?

This witty and ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of forty of the most innocuous- sounding nursery rhymes, uncovering a seething subtext of sexual innuendo, religious hatred, and political subversion. "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown" provides a fascinating history lesson, teases out some alarming Freudian interpretations, and makes astonishing connections to contemporary popular culture. Striking and spooky silhouettes of nursery rhyme characters accompany the rhymes.

You?ll never see Mother Goose in the same way again. BACKCOVER: Praise for "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: "
?What makes HWLT so much fun to read is not just the wacky stories Roberts tells, but the way Roberts tells them. He has a quick, chummy wit and moves easily between the past and the present, making connections between the way people acted then and the way we act now, and sending up both.?
?"Orlando Sentinel"
?Roberts employs a decidedly playful approach in analyzing the rhymes.?
?"Chicago Tribune"
?Roberts deploys an informal style of scholarship to a dazzling effect, transforming a catalogue of familiar nursery rhymes into a treasure trove of tantalizingly slippery archaisms, hidden etymological layers, arcane associations and buried meanings. This is better than history lite--it's history made delightful.?
?"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
?HWLT is obviously a labor of love, performed by a man obsessed with language, history, but intent on making the education of his readers a joyous experience.?
?"Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel"
?a loving, in-depth look at history, the human condition, and why words and the way they are used matters so much.?
?"Sunday Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News"
?a lighthearted, often hilarious look at the human condition and a fascinating exploration of how words can shape mythology and culture.?
?"Syracuse Post-Standard"
) ?A fascinating slice of history with quirky, unexpected and often scandalous tales.?
?"Providence Sunday Journal"
?An intriguing & informative historical trip through those odd little songs I sang as an odd little child. A must-have for anyone who has ever been younger than they are now.?
?Angus Oblong, creator of ?The Oblongs? animated series & author of "Creepy Susie: And 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children"
?James Finn Garner, author of "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories"

HECALE. HYMNS. EPIGRAMS

HECALE. HYMNS. EPIGRAMS

By: Callimachus
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Callimachus (ca. 303-ca. 235 BC), a proud and well-born native of Cyrene in Libya, came as a young man to the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, where he composed poetry for the royal family; helped establish the Library and Museum as a world center of literature, science, and scholarship; and wrote an estimated 800 volumes of poetry and prose on an astounding variety of subjects, including the Pinakes, a descriptive bibliography of the Library's holdings in 120 volumes. Callimachus' vast learning richly informs his poetry, which ranges broadly and reworks the language and generic properties of his predecessors in inventive, refined, and expressive ways. The "Callimachean" style, combining learning, elegance, and innovation and prizing brevity, clarity, lightness, and charm, served as an important model for later poets, not least at Rome for Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the elegists, among others.

This edition, which replaces the earlier Loeb editions by A. W. Mair (1921) and C. A. Trypanis (1954, 1958), presents all that currently survives of and about Callimachus and his works, including the ancient commentaries (Diegeseis) and scholia. Volume I contains Aetia, Iambi, and lyric poems; Volume II Hecale, Hymns, and Epigrams; and Volume III miscellaneous epics and elegies, other fragments, and testimonia, together with concordances and a general index. The Greek text is based mainly on Pfeiffer's but enriched by subsequently published papyri and the judgment of later editors, and its notes and annotation are fully informed by current scholarship.

HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU

HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU

By: Neruda, Pablo
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"The most important poet of the twentieth century--in any language."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"'The Heights of Macchu Picchu' is a poem of ascension. . . . In its final passages, Neruda's poetry jumps from a personal hope to a global one; from a poetry dealing with the poet's heart to a poetry centered on humanity's struggles."--BBC

"The Heights of Machu Picchu" has been called Pablo Neruda's greatest contribution to poetry--a search for the "indestructible, imperishable life" in all things. Inspired by his journey to the ancient ruins, Neruda calls the lost Incan civilization to "rise up and be born," and also empowers the people of his time. This new translation by poet Tomás Q. Morín includes an introduction by Morín and Neruda's Spanish original.

I stare at the clothes and hands,
the carvings of water in a sonorous hollow,
the wall rubbed smooth by the touch of a face
that with my eyes gazed at the earthly lights,
that with my hands oiled the vanished
planks: because everything, clothes, skin, dishes,
words, wine, breads,
went away, fell to the earth.

Pablo Neruda (1904-73), one of the world's most beloved poets, was also a diplomat and member of the Chilean Senate. In 1970 he was appointed as Chile's ambassador to France; in 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tomás Q. Morín is a poet and translator and teaches at Texas State University.


HELLO, THE ROSES

HELLO, THE ROSES

By: Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei
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A poet of "epic perception" and "subtle music," Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual's relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization -- a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality "saturated with being" in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.
HER VOICE IS BLACKBERRIES

HER VOICE IS BLACKBERRIES

By: Wood, Joan Marie
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HISTORY OF HOME

By: Quintana, Leroy V
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Poetry. Each of these narrative poems in THE HISTORY OF HOME encapsulate the real world of childhood: they are gritty, but at the same time they reveal a kind of honest innocence. We meet the Sisters of Charity who belittle their students, a retarded neighbor who entertains children with his flexible joints, and boys who dream of the power of Spanish fly. In spite of the poverty and hardship that form the backdrop for most of these poems, the characters here do find joy - as when a group of boys discovers that with a nickel and a coat hanger they can play pinball all afternoon, a quiet girl beats Sister Ann at tetherball, and Kenny surreptitiously wears basketball knee pads to spare himself the discomfort of hours of kneeling during a retreat. It is in these moments that Quintana allows his characters to transcend their lives and experience flashes of true grace
HOLOCAUST

HOLOCAUST

By: Reznikoff, Charles
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In Holocaust poet Charles Reznikoff's subject is people's suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government's record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff's own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold--in history's own words.

HOME IS NOT A COUNTRY

HOME IS NOT A COUNTRY

By: Elhillo, Safia
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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

"Nothing short of magic." --Elizabeth Acevedo, New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X

From the acclaimed poet featured on Forbes Africa's "30 Under 30" list, this powerful novel-in-verse captures one girl, caught between cultures, on an unexpected journey to face the ephemeral girl she might have been. Woven through with moments of lyrical beauty, this is a tender meditation on family, belonging, and home.

my mother meant to name me for her favorite flower
its sweetness garlands made for pretty girls
i imagine her yasmeen bright & alive
& i ache to have been born her instead


Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn't feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn't feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is the only person with whom she can truly be herself. Until she can't, and suddenly her only refuge is gone.

As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen--the name her parents meant to give her at birth--Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might be more real than Nima knows. And the life Nima wishes were someone else's. . . is one she will need to fight for with a fierceness she never knew she possessed.

HOME PLACES CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AM

HOME PLACES CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AM

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Editors Larry Evers and Ofelia Zepeda have gathered the contributions of nineteen Native Americans in compiling this collection. Some are stories from oral traditions, others are autobiographical writings, and some are songs or poems. But all are contemporary, and all have as a unifying element a strong central theme in Native American writing: home places. Some of the contributors define the home place as a center of established values, while others speak of its cultural or physical geography. Healing powers are often found at home places. Home is a place to defend against those who would reduce it to insignificance, a place to reclaim, or a place reclaimed but not yet realized. One writer recalls a home that must be pulled from deep beneath the waters of the Columbia River. By listening to these stories of home places, the reader can gain a new appreciation of the contemporary verbal expressions of Native American communities. Home Places, note the editors, "asks you to listen to Native American singers, storytellers, and writers, and in this way to celebrate the wellsprings of creativity that continue to flow from the home places in Native America."
HONEYSUCKLE & THE HAZEL TREE MEDIE

HONEYSUCKLE & THE HAZEL TREE MEDIE

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Known for her fine translations of octosyllabic narrative verse, Patricia Terry presents translations of four major practitioners of this dominant literary form of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Her introduction discusses the varying views of women and love in the texts and their place in the courtly tradition.

From Chrétien de Troyes Terry includes an early work, Philomena, here translated into verse for the first time. The other great writer of this period was Marie de France, the first woman in the European narrative tradition. Lanval is newly translated for this edition, which also features four of Marie's other poems. The collection further includes The Reflection by Jean Renart, known for his realistic settings; and the anonymous Chatelaine of Vergi, a fatalistic and perhaps more modern depiction of love.
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HOUSE MADE OF WATER

By: Lin, Michelle
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A House Made of Water is a lyrical examination of daughterhood, womanhood, and Asian American identity. Elusive, but tactile, the collection wrestles beautifully with trauma and our inherited stories, seeking transformation throughout. What I love most is the intimacy of detail: the difficult weight of memory, the exquisite relief of disclosure. Michelle Lin's debut is a document of deep feeling, in the vein of Li-Young Lee and Sylvia Plath, but told in a voice entirely her own.

- CATHY LINH CHE, author of Split

HOW TO PAINT SUNLIGHT

HOW TO PAINT SUNLIGHT

By: Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
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This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, "One of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) and his voice is well-known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the 2001 Celebration of UNESCO's World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle.
HUGE DREAMS

HUGE DREAMS

By: McClure, Michael
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Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement: The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world: the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.

The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a dark night of the soul brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.

HUMAN CHAIN

HUMAN CHAIN

By: Heaney, Seamus
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A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011
Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present--the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other hermit songs that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled Route 101 plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead--friends, neighbors, family--that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular.

Human Chain also includes a poetic herbal adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic--lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included

HUNGER MOON: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1980-2010

HUNGER MOON: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1980-2010

By: Piercy, Marge
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Now in paperback: the superb selection from Marge Piercy's nine most recent books, the heart of her mature poems.

This gathering of Piercy's poems is the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. These poems chart the milestone events and fierce passions of the poet's middle years: her Judaism, her deep connection with nature, her marriage, her cats, her politics, and in the face of the loss of time and people, her own legacy.

I AM IN THE HUB OF FIERY FORCE

I AM IN THE HUB OF FIERY FORCE

By: Norse, Harold
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An acolyte of Whitman and Hart Crane, and companion and correspondent of W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, and James Baldwin, Norse has never received his due as one of America's most innovative yet accessible poets. William Carlos Williams called Norse "the best poet of your generation" and pushed Norse toward his groundbreaking work in "the American idiom." Norse was also of the generation that challenged taboo subject matter in American poetry; his poems of gay love have been recognized as among the first and best of their kind. Norse's novella Beat Hotel described life with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso in a run-down Parisian hotel. This retrospective, I Am In the Hub of the Fiery Force, is a collection of almost seventy years of his poetry, much of it previously unpublished, all of it unavailable. It will be recognized as the culmination of one of America's most vital lives in modern poetry.

I AM WIND, YOU ARE FIRE: The Life and Work of Rumi

By: Schimmel, Annemarie
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First published in 1992, this text is a portrait of the life and work of Rumi. Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), a provincial religious teacher, became an ecstatic mystic at the age of 37 after meeting the wandering dervish, Shams Tabriz.
I HEARD GOD LAUGHING

I HEARD GOD LAUGHING

By: Ladinsky, Daniel
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From bestselling poet Daniel Ladinsky, a rich collection that brings the great Sufi poet Hafiz to Western readers

To Persians, the poems of Hafiz are not "classical literature" from a remote past but cherished wisdom from a dear and intimate friend that continues to be quoted in daily life. With uncanny insight, Hafiz captures the many forms and stages of love. His poetry outlines the stages of the mystic's "path of love"--a journey in which love dissolves personal boundaries and limitations to join larger processes of growth and transformation.

With this stunning collection, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in capturing the essence of one of Islam's greatest poetic and spiritual voices.

"If you haven't yet had the delight of dining with Daniel Ladinsky's sweet, playful renderings of the musings of the great saints, I Heard God Laughing is a perfect appetizer. . . . This newly released edition of his first playful foray into Hafiz's divinely inspired poetry is essential reading. . . . Ladinsky is a master who will be remembered for finally bringing Hafiz alive in the West." --Alexandra Marks, The Christian Science Monitor

I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

By: Myles, Eileen
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A collection of thrilling verse, including both new poems and beloved favorites, from the celebrated poet, modern cult icon, and author of Chelsea Girls.

Eileen Myles' work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. Her work opens readers to astonishing new considerations of familiar places, like the East Village in her iconic Chelsea Girls, and invites them into lush--and sometimes horrid--dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

I Must Be Living Twice brings together selections from the poet's previous work with a set of bold new poems that reflect her sardonic, unapologetic, and fiercely intellectual literary voice. Steeped in the culture of New York City, Myles' milieu, I Must Be Living Twice is a prism refracting a radical world and a compelling life.

IDYLLS TR MILLS

IDYLLS TR MILLS

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These thirty Idylls, written by the Sicilian Theokritos in the third century B.C., present the charms of rustic life in learned, polished verse aimed at a sophisticated audience. A bucolic paradise is seen through the eyes of city men going to the harvest festival for a holiday, to rest their bodies and minds for awhile in nature's beauty and bounty-not unprovided with well-aged wine. In this handsome volume, which won the Best Poetry Award at the 1963 Indiana Author's Day, Professor Mills translates them into modern English verse that preserves the pastoral quality of the original but emphasizes those qualities of Theokritos that speak most directly to the modern reader.
ILIAD

ILIAD

By: Homer
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When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other great epic--the most revered war poem of all time.

The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world--the fierce beauty of nature and the gods' grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson's hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem's deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even "complicated," characters--both human and divine.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity's most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson's Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

ILLUMINATIONS

ILLUMINATIONS

By: Rimbaud, Arthur
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The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought.
IN THE DARK

IN THE DARK

By: Stone, Ruth
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"An aging poet's failing eyesight informs this collection . . . some of which recall the spirit of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Dark but not hopeless, they spring from Stone's lucid inner vision, which is straightforward, musical, and defiant."--Utne


Now available in paperback, In the Dark, winner of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, is Ruth Stone's follow-up to her National Book Award--winning In the Next Galaxy. Personal issues of memory, aging, and loss are balanced against profound political and cultural change. Stone has been called a "people's poet" whose work is "profoundly rewarding," and she writes a poetry of everyday life that recasts the mundane as indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age, Stone, then eighty-nine, replied: "There's no question."
From "What is a Poem?"


Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.

IN THE LATENESS OF THE WORLD: POEMS

IN THE LATENESS OF THE WORLD: POEMS

By: Forché, Carolyn
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FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

"An undisputed literary event." --NPR

"History--with its construction and its destruction--is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave--a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories." --Hilton Als, The New Yorker


Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, SECOND EDITION: A POET'S PORTABLE WORKSHOP

IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, SECOND EDITION: A POET'S PORTABLE WORKSHOP

By: Kowit, Steve
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*Over 90,000 copies sold*

Long an anchor text for college and junior college writing classes, this illuminating and invaluable guide has become a favorite for beginning poets and an ever-valuable reference for more advanced students who want to sharpen their craft, expand their technical skills, and engage their deepest memories and concerns.This edition adds Steve Kowit's famous essay on poetics "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem," in which he argues stirringly and forcefully that a poem need not be obscure to be great.

IN THESE MOUNTAINS

By: Sacks, Peter M
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IN WHAT DISAPPEARS

IN WHAT DISAPPEARS

By: Brandi, John
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Spanning the years since the 1995 publication of Heart's Geography: New & Selected Poems, these poems traverse distant lands, as well as the continent of the heart. In travels that take him through North America, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Vietnam, India and Mexico, Brandi engages the world with open eyes, ears and heart. Like Jack Kerouac, he seeks source and renewal in new geographies and in the act of travel with its inevitable encounters and mysteries. He gets inside and outside things. Nothing passes him by. He's a seer, a person who looks, who retains an abiding curiosity and sympathy with special people and places.--David Meltzer

INVISIBLE LISTENERS: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashberry

INVISIBLE LISTENERS: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashberry

By: Vendler, Helen
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When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.

Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.

By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

IRON HARP

By: Fitzsimmons, Thomas
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Thomas Fitzsimmons went into World War II as an underage merchant seaman just after Pearl Harbor and was discharged from the USAAF just after Hiroshima. Iron Harp is a book about the memories, hard and sweet, which linger throughout a lifetime. One man's century--from a depressed New England mill-town in the 1920s, through the spirit-splintering insanities of World War II, to renewal in love, and on to glimpses of grace in Japan, along the Mediterranean, and in the high desert of New Mexico. Many of these poems are poignant evocations of battle and its emotional aftermath and leave the reader shuddering as to the undeniable folly of war.