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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.
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.
We Inherit What the Fires Left
by William EvansWilliam Evans, the award-winning poet and cofounder of the popular culture website Black Nerd Problems, offers an emotionally vulnerable poetry collection exploring the themes of inheritances, dreams, and injuries that are passed down from one generation to the next and delving into the lived experience of a black man in the American suburbs today.In We Inherit What the Fires Left, award-winning poet William Evans embarks on a powerful new collection that explores the lived experience of race in the American suburbs and what dreams and injuries are passed from generation to generation. Fall under the spell of Evans&’s boldly intimate, wise, and emotionally candid voice in these urgent, electrifying poems. This eloquent collection explores not only what these inheritances are composed of, but what price the bearer must pay for such legacies, and the costly tolls exacted on both body and spirit. Evans writes searingly from the perspective of the marginalized, delivering an unflinching examination of what it is like to be a black man raising a daughter in predominantly white spaces, and the struggle to build a home and a future while carrying the weight of the past. However, in beautiful and quiet scenes of domesticity with his daughter or in thoughtful reflection within himself, Evans offers words of hope to readers, proving that resilience can ultimately bloom even in the face of prejudice. Readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hanif Abdurraqib will find a brilliant, fresh new talent to add to their lists in William Evans.
Postcolonial Love Poem
by Natalie DiazPostcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
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.
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.
The Boss
by Victoria ChangWritten in “a breathless kind of fury,” the poems in award-winning poet Victoria Chang’s virtuosic third collection The Boss dance across the page with the brutal power and incandescent beauty of spring lightning.
Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.
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.
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.
The Tradition
by Jericho BrownThe Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive.
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie
by Maya AngelouAnother remarkable collection of poetry from one of America's masters of the medium. The first part gathers together poems of love and nostalgic memory, while Part II portrays confrontations inherent in a racist society.
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.
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
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
Stuff I've Been Feeling Lately
by Alicia CookStructured like an old-school mix-tape, Stuff I've Been Feeling Lately is Alicia Cook's lyric message to anyone who has dealt with addiction.
"Side A" touches on all aspects of the human condition: life, death, love, trauma, and growth.
"Side B" contains haunting black-out remixes of those poems.
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.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
by T. S. EliotCats! Some are sane, some are mad and some are good and some are bad. Meet magical Mr Mistoffelees, sleepy Old Deuteronomy and curious Rum Tum Tugger. But youll be lucky to meet Macavity because Macavitys not there!In 1925 T. S. Eliot became co-director of Faber and Faber, who remain his publishers to this day. Throughout the 1930s he composed the now famous poems about Macavity, Old Deuteronomy, Mr Mistoffelees and many other cats, under the name of 'Old Possum'. In 1981 Eliot's poems were set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber as Cats which went on to become the longest-running Broadway musical in history. This new edition, published on the 70th anniversary of the book and on the 80th anniversary of Faber and Faber, contains original colour illustrations by the award-winning illustrator of The Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler.
The Road Not Taken and Other Poems
by Robert Frost and David OrrA 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.
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.
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.
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.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
by William Shakespeare and Paul Werstine 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.
The Collected Poems Of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson and Rachel WetzsteonThe Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, Dickinson began life as an energetic, outgoing young woman who excelled as a student. However, in her mid-twenties she began to grow reclusive, and eventually she rarely descended from her room in her father’s house. She spent most of her time working on her poetry, largely without encouragement or real interest from her family and peers, and died at age fifty-five. Only a handful of her 1,775 poems had been published during her lifetime. When her poems finally appeared after her death, readers immediately recognized an artist whose immense depth and stylistic complexities would one day make her the most widely recognized female poet to write in the English language. Dickinson’s poetry is remarkable for its tightly controlled emotional and intellectual energy. The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors--techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America’s true poetic geniuses.
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.
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.