Special Collections
Celebrate Poetry
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Sincerely
by F. S. Yousaf&“Sincerely is passionate. Honest. Charming. F. S. Yousaf has beautifully encapsulated in a book what it feels like to fall in love.&”—Madisen Kuhn, author of Almost HomeFans of top-selling Sincerely are saying "unexpected perfection", "not your basic poetry book", "breathtaking", "helped me appreciate my marriage". Searching for a profound way to propose to his love, F.S Yousaf reread the letters she had written him. In them he found his proposal, and inspiration to write his own prose and poetry. This is a compilation of letters and love poems that exemplifies the spirituality and the magnitude of how much one person can mean to another.It carries messages of positivity, hope, and most of all, true love.
Don't Call Us Dead
by Danez SmithAward-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power.
Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth.
Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive.
Where the Sidewalk Ends
by Shel SilversteinCome in . . . for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins. You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist. Shel Silverstein's masterful collection of poems and drawings is at once outrageously funny and profound.
Even This Page Is White
by Vivek ShrayaAs a writer, musician, performance artist, and filmmaker, Vivek Shraya has, over the course of the last few years, established herself as a tour de force artist of the highest order.
Vivek's body of work includes ten albums, four short films, and three books, including the YA book God Loves Hair (A Quill and Quire and Canadian Children's Book Centre Best Book of the Year) and the adult novel She of the Mountains (a Lambda Literary Award finalist).
Vivek's debut collection of poetry, even this page is white, is a bold, timely, and personal interrogation of skin―its origins, functions, and limitations.
Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized.
Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable.
Hard Child
by Natalie ShaperoThought-provoking and sardonically expressive, Shapero is a self-proclaimed "hard child"--unafraid of directly addressing bleakness as she continually asks what it means to be human and to bring new life into the world.Hard Child is musical and argumentative, deadly serious yet tinged with self-parody, evoking the spirit of Plath while remaining entirely its own.
Natalie Shapero has worked as a civil rights lawyer and is currently Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University. Her first poetry collection No Object was published in 2013, and her writing has appeared inThe Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, andThe Progressive. She lives in Massachusetts.
The Complete Poems
by Anne SextonThe collected works of Anne Sexton showcase the astonishing career of one of the twentieth century&’s most influential poets For Anne Sexton, writing served as both a means of expressing the inner turmoil she experienced for most of her life and as a therapeutic force through which she exorcised her demons. Some of the richest poetic descriptions of depression, anxiety, and desperate hope can be found within Sexton&’s work. The Complete Poems, which includes the eight collections published during her life, two posthumously published books, and other poems collected after her death, brings together her remarkable body of work with all of its range of emotion. With her first collection, the haunting To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Sexton stunned critics with her frank treatment of subjects like masturbation, incest, and abortion, blazing a trail for representations of the body, particularly the female body, in poetry. She documented four years of mental illness in her moving Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Live or Die, and reimagined classic fairy tales as macabre and sardonic poems in Transformations. The Awful Rowing Toward God, the last book finished in her lifetime, is an earnest and affecting meditation on the existence of God. As a whole, The Complete Poems reveals a brilliant yet tormented poet who bared her deepest urges, fears, and desires in order to create extraordinarily striking and enduring art.
Christina Rossetti
by Christina RossettiRossetti is unique among Victorian poets for the sheer range of her subject matter and the variety of her verse form. This collection brings together fantasy poems, such as Goblin Market, and terrifyingly vivid verses for children, love lyrics and sonnets, and the vast body of her devotional poetry. Rossetti's poems weave connections between love and death, triumph and loss, heavenly joys and earthly pleasures. The directness and clarity of her lyrics still have the power to startle us with their truth and beauty. Text edited by R. W. Crump, with notes and introduction by Betty S. Flowers
The Will to Change
by Adrienne Rich"The Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments." --David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review "The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."--David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review
Swimming Lessons
by Lili ReinhartInstant New York Times BestsellerThe debut collection of poetry from Lili Reinhart, the actress and outspoken advocate for mental health awareness and body positivity. I seem to be your new favorite novel.One that keeps you up at night,turning my pages.Fingers lingering on me so you don’t lose your place.Swimming Lessons explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion. Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-sized yet profound, Lili's poems reflect her trademark honesty and unique perspective. Accompanied by striking and evocative illustrations, Swimming Lessons reveals the depths of female experience, and is the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own.
Mouthful Of Forevers
by Clementine Von RadicsTitled after the poem that burned up on Tumblr and has inspired wedding vows, paintings, songs, YouTube videos, and even tattoos among its fans,Mouthful of Forevers brings the first substantial collection of this gifted young poet's work to the public.
Clementine von Radics writes of love, loss, and the uncertainties and beauties of life with a ravishing poetic voice and piercing bravura that speak directly not only to the sensibility of her generation, but to anyone who has ever been young.
Nature Poem
by Tommy PicoNature Poem follows Teebs--a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet--who can't bring himself to write a nature poem.
For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky.
He'd slap a tree across the face.
He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.
While he's adamant--bratty, even--about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature.
The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush.
But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter.
Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Pillow Thoughts
by Courtney PeppernellPillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions.
It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most.
Glass Float
by Jane MunroLines that attend to shore, air, water, sand, birds, other women; in their gathered particulars they bring us close to the concavities, the complex familiarity and mystery of conscious experience.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Paul Werstine and William Shakespeare and Barbara MowatA bestselling, beautifully designed edition of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, complete with valuable tools for educators. The authoritative edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes: -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on the facing page of each sonnet -A brief introduction to each sonnet, providing insight into its possible meaning -An index of first lines -Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the sonnets The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.
Plum
by Hollie McNishHollie McNish has thrilled and entranced audiences the length and breadth of the UK with her compelling and powerful performances.
Plum, her debut for Picador Poetry, is a wise, sometimes rude and piercingly candid account of her memories from childhood to attempted adulthood. This is a book about growing up, about guilt, flesh, fruit, friendships, work and play - and the urgent need to find a voice for the poems that will somehow do the whole glorious riot of it justice.
Throughout Plum, McNish allows her recent poems to be interrupted by earlier writing from her younger selves - voices that speak out from the past with disarming and often very funny results.
Plum is a celebration, a salute to a life in which we are always growing, tripping, changing and discovering new selves to add to our own messy stores. It will leave the reader in no doubt as to why McNish is considered one of the most important poets of the new generation.
The Dogs I Have Kissed
by Trista MateerWinner of the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award, The Dogs I Have Kissed is a collection of poetry about kissing the wrong people and sometimes just being the wrong person. It's a story about leaving until you learn how to stay. Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry.
Selected Poetry of Lord Byron
by Leslie A. MarchandPoet, celebrity, and revolutionary, Lord (George Gordon) Byron was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, his distinctive, deeply felt work comprising one of the enduring high points of Romantic literature. From “Manfred,” with its evocation of the figure that came to be called the “Byronic hero,” to the melancholy “Childe Harold,” to the satirical masterpiece “Don Juan” (presented here in judiciously selected form), this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes all of the essential Byron.
Chorus
by Saul Williams and Dufflyn Lammers and Aja MonetCHORUS is the anthem of a new generation of poets unified by the desire to transcend the identity politics of the day and begin to be seen as one. One hundred voices woven through testimony and new testament. It is the cry of the unheard. The occupation of the page itself. It embodies the "speak-up" spirit of the moment, the confidence propagated through hip-hop, and the defiant "WTF?" of the now. It is the voice that comes after the rebellious voice that once cried, "I want my MTV!" branded back to where punk was, slammed up and beyond it. A combination of trash, heart, and craft. An anthology in rant. CHORUS is what all modern-day losers chant.
Keats
by John KeatsThese Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Keats contains a full selection of Keats's work, including his lyric poems, narrative poems, letters, and an index of first lines.
The Absurd Man
by Major JacksonIn this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment. Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism. The arc of a man emerges; he bravely confronts his past, including his betrayals and his mistakes, and questions who he is as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a poet. With intense musicality and verve, The Absurd Man also faces outward, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination.
The Prophet
by Kahlil GibranKahlil Gibran's masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran's musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.Each essay reveals deep insights into the impulses of the human heart and mind. The Chicago Post said of The Prophet: "Cadenced and vibrant with feeling, the words of Kahlil Gibran bring to one's ears the majestic rhythm of Ecclesiastes . . . If there is a man or woman who can read this book without a quiet acceptance of a great man's philosophy and a singing in the heart as of music born within, that man or woman is indeed dead to life and truth."With twelve full-page drawings by Gibran, this beautiful work makes an incredible gift for anyone seeking enlightenment and inspiration.
New American Best Friend
by Olivia GatwoodOne of the most recognisable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend.
Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy.
And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.
The Road Not Taken and Other Poems
by David Orr and Robert FrostA deluxe edition of Frost's early poems, selected by poet David Orr for the centennial of "The Road Not Taken" For one hundred years, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" has enchanted and challenged readers with its deceptively simple premise--a person reaches a fork in the road, facing a choice full of doubt and possibility. The Road Not Taken and Other Poems presents Frost's best-loved poem along with other works from his brilliant early years, including such poems as "After Apple-Picking," "The Oven Bird," and "Mending Wall." Award-winning poet and critic David Orr's introduction discusses why Frost remains so central (if often misunderstood) in American culture and how the beautiful intricacy of his poetry keeps inviting generation after generation to search for meaning in his work.For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Dirty Pretty Things
by Michael FaudetDirty Pretty Things is the international bestseller by Michael Faudet. A finalist in the 2015 Goodreads Readers Choice Awards, his whimsical and often erotic writing has already captured the hearts and minds of literally thousands of readers from around the world.
He paints vivid pictures with intricate words and explores the compelling themes of love, loss, relationships, and sex. All beautifully captured in poetry, prose, quotes, and little short stories.
Michael lives in a house by the sea in New Zealand with his girlfriend, international bestselling author, Lang Leav.
Electric Arches
by Eve L. EwingElectric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.
Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances--blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects--hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook--as precious icons.
Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant--a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.