Poetry / poems by individual poets
WW Norton & Co On the Bus with Rosa Parks
Book SynopsisA dazzling new collection by the former Poet Laureate of the United States.
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Garbage
Book SynopsisWinner of the National Book Award.
£999.99
WW Norton & Co Alabanza
Book SynopsisAn astonishing collection of political poetry at its finest.The Progressive, Favorite Books of 2004Trade Review"A sword (Espada) going in, deeply inside." Eduardo Galeano "Neruda is dead, but if Alabanza is any clue, his ghost lives through a poet named Martin Espada." San Francisco Chronicle
£17.58
WW Norton & Co American Smooth
Book Synopsis"Rita Dove pulls the ultimate dance trick: she makes it look easy."--New York Times Book ReviewTrade Review"Rita Dove pulls the ultimate dance trick: she makes it look easy." The New York Times Book Review"
£14.25
WW Norton & Co Behind My Eyes
Book SynopsisLee's lyrics have a tidal sweep as he moves between the universe within and the world without. Booklist, starred reviewTrade Review"Accessible, enigmatic, melodic, humorous ... profound." "Luminous, deceptively simple poems." "The conversations in Behind My Eyes beautifully speak the mind's inquiring rhythms."
£999.99
WW Norton & Co Second Blush
Book SynopsisPeacock is in peak form in these seductive poems that swing and twirl . . . valiant, trenchant, funny, and on point.BooklistTrade Review"Peacock’s compact philosophical meditations . . . transcend their mundane origins with assured eloquence and an almost startling subtlety." -- Library Journal
£12.82
WW Norton & Co Sonata Mulattica
Book SynopsisDetailing the volatile relationship between the black violinist George Bridgetower and Beethoven, this is a masterful collection (Los Angeles Times).Trade Review"A virtuosic treatment of a virtuoso's life ... stuffed with historical and musical arcana." "Dove's richly imagined book has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel, but it's written with a poet's economy, an eye for the exact detail." -- Mark Doty
£12.34
WW Norton & Co I Was the Jukebox
Book Synopsis[Beasley's] lightness works best when it dapples her darknessand when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.Abigail Deutsch, PoetryTrade Review"Succeeds (to a tremendous level) at creating fascinating slices of reality and interesting characters." -- Adam Palumbo
£12.82
WW Norton & Co On the Nature of Things
Book SynopsisReissued to accompany Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: the epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever.
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Jam Tree Gully
Book Synopsis"One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."—Harold BloomTrade Review"One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English." Harold Bloom
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Selected Canterbury Tales
Book SynopsisA truly remarkable achievement. Barry UnsworthTrade Review"In setting the scene for an informed understanding of Chaucer and his background, Fisher shows herself a true professional." -- Peter Green - New Republic"Shelia Fisher's vibrant new verse translation captures in contemporary English the rhymes, the rhythms, the wit, the earnestness, and the game of the best-known Canterbury Tales." -- Warren Ginsberg, Knight Professor of the Humanities, Univeristy of Oregon
£14.24
WW Norton & Co Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Book Synopsis“Rich’s poetry itself is a mirror, reflecting the truths about humanity this discerning poet has come to understand.”—BooklistTrade Review"Tonight No Poetry Will Serve... pursues the kind of late style that asks us to know what came before - it has new and vivid ways to see the contest that has driven [Rich] all along: on the one hand, the hope for solidarity; on the other, the artist whose words must stand alone." Stephen Burt, London Review of Books "Adrienne Rich - was one of the most influential and political American poets of the last century." The Guardian "This new collection, of pieces written between 2007 and 2010, reveals a supremely confident writer at work." Tribune
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Sobbing Superpower
Book Synopsis"An anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be."—Edward HirschTrade Review"Striking . . . chilling. . . . [Rozewicz’s work] embodies that particular anxiety and familiar sense of diminishment we still associate with being ‘modern.’" -- The Nation"Rozewicz is that rare character—a skeptic as full of passion as of intelligence, of warmth as wariness." -- judges’ citation, Griffin Poetry Prize"Instead of answers, the poet offers only an examination. Like it or not, he says, this is all we have: a fragment, a glimpse, a rustle." -- New Republic
£15.19
WW Norton & Co The Poems of Jesus Christ
Book SynopsisThe words of Jesus Christ are restored to their original poetic form in this extraordinary volume.Trade Review"The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way… with evocative simplicity." -- Robert Alter"Great and original… The writing in this form, as poetry, adds a new dimension to their beauty, conciseness, paradox, and mystery." -- Gerald Stern"Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whales, and the sonnets of Barnstone’s The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, and my daily corn flakes—that rough poetry of morning." -- Jorge Luis Borges"This recasting from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, presents Jesus’ words poetically and faithfully to their full power – that of poetry." -- Elliott Bay Book Company"Barnstone offers excerpts from The Restored New Testament, his innovative and much-praised 2009 translation." -- Library Journal"Like most early prophets, Jesus would have spoken in a form of poetry, albeit one based on patterns of sounds, repetition, and other devices of prosody quite different from the Greco-Roman forms. What Barnstone has now produced, he hopes, is a sequence of Jesus’s aphorisms." -- The Chronicle of Higher Education"A book landed on my desk with the curious title The Poems of Jesus Christ. ‘Somebody putting words in Jesus’ mouth?’ I wondered. Not at all. The poet and scholar Willis Barnstone has simply gone back to the biblical text, translating from the original, and shown how Jesus in the gospels speaks in pure poetry." -- Guideposts"In restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view." -- Barbara Berman - The Rumpus"Barnstone’s The Poems of Jesus Christ is indeed an impressive and inspiring book. It convincingly demonstrates how the teaching of Jesus, spoken in verse, was "imbued with joyful or sorrowful insight and inlight."" -- California Literary Review"When I read such verses aloud, it does not matter to me whether a poem or poetic saying comes from King James, Douay-Rheims, New Revised Standard, New Jerusalem Bible, Revised English Version, or any of the dozens of translations I’ve read and loved. But, once again, Prof. Barnstone took our idea to a new level… After the second full reading and the third and fourth randomly-done peeks, I continue to recommend this book highly." -- Mary Harwell Sayler - Rattle
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Cineaste
Book SynopsisFinds evocative new ways to connect us to a shared storytelling heritage.Entertainment WeeklyTrade Review"Ekphrastic poetry ... now includes not just fine arts but also films... [Jordan's] best book." "Rather than writing about films, Jordan remakes them-serving as audience, director, editor, he recasts characters, reshoots scenes, turns the cameras around." -- National Public Radio "The poetry elevates the film because every piece denotes feeling." "Brilliant... Every piece denotes feeling-and this is what moves us forward." -- Grace Cavalieri "The announcement of the birth of an entirely new poetics. A. Van Jordan brings the art of film and the art of poetry together in a virtuoso act of passion. This work goes beyond memorable speech into an articulation of the spirit, the hunger, the enchantment and terror of a nation and a time. In unforgettably resonant pieces this poetry creates a whole. This is one of our most important poets doing perhaps his own most important work of a lifetime." -- Laura Kasischke "For several books now, A. Van Jordan has been proving himself master of the dramatic monologue. His skill is especially dazzling in The Cineaste as he turns to cinema, that other realm of persona and projection. With an imagination illuminated by empathy, Jordan inhabits the eye of the camera, the eye of the actor, and the 'I' of a viewer tethered to image and history. These terrific poems give shape to lives made of light." -- Terrance Hayes
£12.34
WW Norton & Co In Beauty Bright
Book SynopsisThe work of an American master.World Literature TodayTrade Review"[Stern's] style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug." -- Frank Wilson "Vivid and imagistic ... brilliant." "Gerald Stern takes his place at the head of our table as our grand Mensch of poetry."
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard Poems
Book SynopsisPoems about sex, marriage, and the desire for a child from a “scary-cool and edgy-smart” poet (J. D. McClatchy).Trade Review"Lush ... glittering... The reader [is] struck with appreciative awe." "Framed with sharp immediacy ... distilled to the core." "Among the finest young poets working in the Southland today." "Goodyear uses clipped lines and short stanzas to produce quick specters of breath ... each instance gauzy and glazed over, as if refracted through frosted glass."
£11.99
WW Norton & Co River Inside the River Three Lyric Sequences
Book SynopsisFrom an acclaimed poet come three gorgeous poetic sequences.Trade Review"Starred review. As erudite, as full of allusion and citation, as the work of any other poet full of the history of his craft, these poems are as straightforward in expression, as plain in vocabulary as any strict literary modernist could wish... Exquisite." "Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache." "[River Inside the River is] a striking meditation on art's free-standing place in the natural world and of the feeling of rightness, of restitution, even resurrection-not of bodies, but of the sense of having been justified and hence forgiven by the thing that we do, this art." -- David Rigsbee "For four decades, Gregory Orr has been among a small handful of poets who make me proud to be among their generation of writers. Orr's new book is a wonder, exploring such weighty themes as the sources of love, the sources of mourning, the working of redemption and memory, the ways in which these give rise to poetic utterance ... all in language as light as airborne thistledown. For such powerful lyric importance to come from such small deft breaths requires both mastery and magic; both are plentiful here, on every page." -- Albert Goldbarth "This is a book that is both reflective and ecstatic. It embraces an extended meditation but casts a spell through lyric impulse. It is incendiary, inventive, incantatory. It is erotic. It is, indeed, irresistible." -- Ilya Kaminsky "Gregory Orr's poems have always had the stunning ability to place mindfulness almost instantly back inside the mind. Once again, a river inhabits its true banks, and a soul, its boundless person." -- Naomi Shihab Nye "Orr's writing feels transcendent. Language shines, shimmers, delights, and rises as high as it can." -- Elizabeth Lund "Orr ranks as a great seer, casting a mythic spell over the reader with his technically attuned verse." -- Arlice Davenport
£12.34
WW Norton & Co An Individual History
Book SynopsisA cycle of pathbreaking poems about the history of a family set against the backdrop of the last century.Trade Review"Lovely... moving... funny." -- The Washington Post
£11.99
WW Norton & Co Lines of Defense
Book SynopsisShowcases this Pulitzer prize-winning poet writing at the height of his powers.Trade Review"Stephen Dunn's fresh batch of poems teaches us that 'to tell' is just as good as 'to show' if you have something worth telling. These are smart, forceful, meticulously spoken poems that tell us some vital truths about how to conduct our lives." -- Billy Collins "Stephen Dunn's newest poems-retrospective, elegiac, comic, quotidian, tactful, and transcendent-true the self's comprehensions of its own stories as a sawyer's jig, file, and hammer true a saw, yet without ever sacrificing tenderness for sharpness (or the reverse). Lines of Defense reconfirms Dunn's long-held place as one of our most necessary American poets: if he did not exist, we would have to invent him. But-what luck- exist he does." -- Jane Hirshfield "Over a lifetime richly invested in poetry, Dunn has mastered his signature take on an artfully colloquial voice that, in the guise of plainspeaking, slyly lampoons our daily pretensions, tenderly empathizes with our daily disappointments, and reminds us that the day-to-day can serve as the gateway to otherness. Lines of Defense is an admirable addition to that life-work, its difficult honesties and wrestlings with conscience lurking under beckoningly, entertainingly casual surfaces." -- Albert Goldbarth
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Wherewithal
Book SynopsisGripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history. Elie WieselTrade Review"The Wherewithal is a horrifying and eloquent book." -- The Independent"Schultz’s book is full of magnificent language and trenchant philosophical juxtapositions..." -- The Jewish Chronicle"One of the strongest literary renditions of the Shoah I know." -- Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Years of Extermination
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Blue Buick
Book Synopsis“[B. H. Fairchild] is the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic.”—The New York TimesTrade Review"I have no trouble ranking [Fairchild] with the best poets of his generation." -- Hudson Review "One of the most readable poets of our time... This is poetry of the extraordinary ordinary, nonpareil." -- Ray Olson - Booklist, starred review "Acause of celebration... Noisy, visually arresting poems, full of occult weather systems, the barbed nostalgia of a man born into one world, now inhabiting another ... [Fairchild] has spent a lifetime singing the body electric of small, dying towns, day-laborers and the beers at the end of their day, the pressure it puts on the man who must remember it all." -- John Freeman - Boston Globe
£14.24
WW Norton & Co A Change of World
Book SynopsisThis reissue of Adrienne Rich’s first poetry collection reaffirms the author’s place as one of our most important American poets.
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Divine Nothingness Poems
Book SynopsisFrom the National Book Award–winning author of This Time, a new volume of poems that explore the very nature of existence.Trade Review"Gerald Stern has made an immense contribution to American poetry. His poems are not only great poems, memorable ones, but ones that get into your heart and stay there. Their lyrical ecstasies take you up for that moment so that your vision is changed, you are changed. The voice is intimate, someone unafraid to be imperfect. Gerald Stern's poems sing in praise of the natural world, and in outrage of whatever is antihuman." -- Toi Derricote "The best work of his career ... Stern's free verse-derived from William Carlos Williams-repudiates old rules while not quite creating its own: his incidents take on their own life, chaotic yet restrained, broken but passionate." -- Publishers Weekly "Stern, at 89, is as robust and forthright as ever, occupying the page with insouciant skill, wry humor, and flashing passion. His long-lined, long poems move with a jazzy tension, pushing the limits and keeping time, rippling and sliding like piano riffs, while his sonnets quake." -- Donna Seaman - Booklist
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Oracle Poems Movie TieIn Editions 0
Book SynopsisA witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful" verse (Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post).Trade Review"Poems finely tuned ... full of inventive echoes and spring-loaded syntax." -- Dialogist "She takes no prisoners." -- NPR "Intense and intimate." -- Rumpus "Channels the colorful voices of Staten Island." -- Vanity Fair "Spectral, charged poems: a wild, ferocious bunch capable of emotional darkness, bound by a strong poetic I ... a successful call to arms." -- Publisher's Weekly "These are poems of feeling, memory, and calamity, of a life lived near the edge and an edge that nevertheless always resolves itself into a haunting ethical music. This is a wonderful collection of poems. It makes a powerful claim on the reader at every turn, on every page." -- Eavan Boland
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Count the Waves Poems
Book Synopsis“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington PostTrade Review"Beasley tackles our moral progress, with its wounds of love, authoritatively and emphatically." -- Washington Independent Review of Books"Sandra Beasley is a master poet of facts, story, feeling, and the slipknot statement that binds them together. Inventive, ingeniously fitted, musical, precise, unfettered, her poems etch and mirror the clarities and strangeness of our human lives. This irresistibly visionary book resembles to no small degree a cabinet of wonders. To every phenomenon and circumstance of the heart, its poems open, saying, Yes, this too I know; this too we are. Then add, Now, let us see further." -- Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief"Her lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep." -- Poetry
£12.34
WW Norton & Co A Strangers Mirror New and Selected Poems
Book SynopsisA selection of poems that addresses the quotidian and the global, from one of our most essential poets.Trade Review"A major poet ... she transcends the very material she collects and alters." -- Grace Shulman - Kenyon Review Online "For Hacker devotees ... an essential book; for people just discovering her work it is a beginning." -- Lambda Literary "Stands as a textured but unified testament to [Hacker's] output over the past two decades." -- Publishers Weekly "[Hacker] remains an undisputed master of formal verse... one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today. No other poet manages the casual pyrotechnics she accomplishes in form." -- Carol Muske-Duke - Los Angeles Times
£17.09
WW Norton & Co Scavenger Loop Poems
Book Synopsis"[The] language . . . Feels almost ancient solely by the skill with which Baker uses it."—Los Angeles Review of Books.Trade Review"I can't think of a recent book of poetry so capable of moving so easily and effectively between the mind and heart of the experience." -- Stanley Plumly - Harriet "This is a towering poetic consciousness." -- Carol Muske-Dukes - Huffington Post "This is David Baker's finest book: combinations of poise and grit, sensitivity and impact, enlivened with an astute control of language. In 'Scavenger Loop,' the focal poem and Baker's masterpiece, we encounter the poetically immaculate. This poem is a true pastoral elegy out of which a new beauty comes-the beauty of resistance, of saying enough is enough. We have an obligation to utter this, and Baker has." -- John Kinsella "The breadth of Scavenger Loop is immense, encompassing nature's foment, the unbiodegradeable stuff of culture, and language itself. Somber yet savvy, elegant yet casual, Scavenger Loop is a book of becoming, a lost and found with a radius wide as consciousness itself. Reading it is like being inside the shifts of a capacious, roiling mind and, like all great poetry, it keeps unfolding with uneasy, surreptitious grace." -- Alice Fulton
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Roll Deep Poems
Book SynopsisA whimsical and “devastatingly effective” (The Washington Post) collection that captures the spirit of travel and pays homage to heritage.Trade Review"Extraordinary...Jackson has created a new poetry of praise." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Major Jackson wants art to 'Blow / back the ordinary / jive of planet Earth,' and his new poems roil and buckle, skitter and swerve, clot and spill out into the world. Roll Deep is his fourth and best book; his voice seems to have broken loose, allowing for all manner of praise and lament, for observation and meditation, the grim and the goofball, and for outbreaks of pure sorcery, where 'punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge.'" -- Mark Doty "Major Jackson's fourth collection of poetry, Roll Deep, juxtaposes the physical and the metaphysical, the external and the internal where the landscape and the mind of the poet converge until time bends. The imagery travels through a timely multiplicity, always surefooted and attuned, but never outdistancing the natural truth in this cosmopolitan voice. The poet writes the world he encounters, and imagines, with playfully deep interplay. The music in the language of Roll Deep is seductively straightforward, and each body-brain poem here puts genius squarely on the line." -- Yusef Komunyakaa
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Brain Fever
Book SynopsisRooted in traditional Japanese aesthetics and meditations on contemporary neuroscience, a stunning new volume from an essential American poet.Trade Review"In Brain Fever, Kimiko Hahn moves through the rooms of the mind with an oneiric weightlessness. She also touches concrete ground in the realm of neuroscience, and in the world outside the mind, where love, betrayal, regret, and debilitating loss reside. This is a beautiful and troubling book, a marriage of what matters most: the mysteries buried at our very core and the world that cradles and cuts into us at every turn." -- Tracy K. Smith "Hahn's poems glow with concentrated energy." -- Boston Review "The poems' brevity, precise imagery, and echoing of that imagery will make readers return to the collections, finding new connections each time." -- Moon City Review "A juxtaposition of current scientific research on brain function and cognition with ... a lyrical daydream of loss and resilience... Outstanding." -- Pleiades
£15.60
WW Norton & Co The Analyst
Book Synopsis[Peacock's] psychoanalyst is the inspiration for an intimate new collection [A] bittersweet pleasure. O, The Oprah MagazineTrade Review"Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock’s baton." -- The Washington Post
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Tough Luck Poems
Book Synopsis“[Todd Boss]’s poems generate their own rambunctious music and remind us ‘yes, / miracles happen.’ ”—Minneapolis Star TribuneTrade Review"[Boss] us[es] brilliant wordplay and portray[s] the people and landscape of his childhood in Wisconsin with clarity and hard-edged grace." -- The Washington Post
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Square Inch Hours Poems
Book Synopsis“Sherod Santos brilliantly negotiates the provinces of poetry and prose, of imagination and memoir.… As enigmatic as Borges, and beautiful in a way only Santos can be.” —David Baker
£13.38
WW Norton & Co 430 Movie
Book SynopsisIn highly charged, dazzling language, 4:30 Movie explores a sister's death and the ways movies shape our imaginations.
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Because A Lyric Memoir
Book SynopsisA gripping verse memoir that offers a compassionate and wrenching account of the author’s experience of childhood sexual abuse.Trade Review"[Because] is a rare and remarkable text. Although it deals unswervingly with abuse, violations of trust and the deeply damaging effect of both of these, it is also literary, powerful and consoling…A deeply achieved record of human truth, earned at cost and beautifully expressed." -- Eavan Boland
£15.60
WW Norton & Co A Memory of the Future
Book SynopsisZen-infused meditations on the limitations of memory, mortality, and the boundaries of human existence.Trade Review"Sprinkled with philosophical inquiries and Zen koans like that of the title, Spires's contemplative sixth collection opens with delicious wordplay." -- The New York Times Book Review"A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires is like a cup of tea for the weary. . . [Spires's] metaphysical concerns are grounded in refreshingly thoughtful poems as the speaker considers small moments through a spiritual, often Zen perspective." -- Elizabeth Lund - The Washington Post
£12.34
WW Norton & Co Made to Explode
Book SynopsisWith lacerating honesty, technical mastery, and abiding compassion, Made to Explode offers volatile poems for our volatile times.Trade Review"Made to Explode makes no attempt whatsoever to fight shy of dazzling and rafter-rattling detonation. Here the poet, known for her smooth mastery of craft and lyric, examines a life lived in and around the capital of her fractured and restless country. She aims unerringly at the contradictions of lush, picture-book days in Virginia, and later DC, with its paradoxes, its stern testaments, its stone institutions. In the process, she redefines her own root. There is unwavering insight in these poems. There is tenderness and personal revelation. There is everything we waited for." -- Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art"I know I am reading a Sandra Beasley poem when precision and music are driven by emotive, passionate force…But what I most recommend, and what I am most compelled by in these pages is their engagement with American history. ‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits in the nineteenth row of my heart,’ writes Beasley in what, in the end, becomes a book of reckoning. Beasley questions the late empire, yes, but perhaps more importantly, more honestly: she questions herself. Which is why, I think, this is a most beautiful book: you will find virtuoso music, and necessary clarity." -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic"A rare and vibrant exploration of whiteness and complicity when it comes to America’s history and traditions, Made to Explode is a courageous interrogation of self, culture, and how we are made. Both unflinching and tender, Beasley’s smart and radiant poems glow with a historian’s exactitude and a poet’s lyrical heart." -- Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
£19.94
WW Norton & Co A Memory of the Future
Book SynopsisZen-infused meditations on the limitations of memory, mortality, and the boundaries of human existence.Trade Review"A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires is like a cup of tea for the weary. . . . [Spires's] metaphysical concerns are grounded in refreshingly thoughtful poems as the speaker considers small moments through a spiritual, often Zen perspective." -- Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post"Sprinkled with philosophical inquiries and Zen koans like that of the title, Spires's contemplative sixth collection opens with delicious wordplay." -- New York Times Book Review"All the distinguishing characteristics we’ve come to associate with Elizabeth Spires’ poems—their shimmering clarity, verbal restraint, and self-interrogations—are enacted in this new work of meticulous surfaces and surprising depths…Spires’ consuming subject—the fluidity of time set against the immutable presence of death—is approached with Zen-sparked simplicity: ‘As one grows older, / there should be fewer / and fewer words to say.’ Yet those few words, as set down in A Memory of the Future, resonate with wisdom and insistent wonder." -- Michael Waters, author of Celestial Joyride"With insatiable imagination, subtle music, stark candor, an ingenious sense of play, and an all-encompassing vision, Elizabeth Spires builds poem after poem revealing world within word within world. Her subject is nothing less than the feral innocence and courage of a ‘poised / and ready’ soul in search of meaning, open to ebullient joy and harrowing loss…Discovering grandeur in miniature, alighting on a mortal’s fleeting moment in a sublime landscape, Spires enlarges the possibilities of lyric. A Memory of the Future affirms her stature as one of the finest poets writing in English today." -- Phillis Levin, author of Mr. Memory and Other Poems
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Felon
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[Felon] pushes Betts's story forward, in verse that is nimble in its diction, tone and focus. The poems are about returning to everyday American life, but in an estranged and often painful way, as if blood were rushing into a long-pinned limb." -- Dwight Garner - New York Times"Searing...[Bett's] critique, having largely to do with the criminalization of poverty, charges these poems and flows through them, energizing their lyric force...This is a powerful work of lyric art. It is also a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state." -- Carolyn Forché - New York Times Book Review"[Felon] shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative... Betts's poems about fatherhood [are] some of the most powerful I've read... The black bars of redacted text [in the redaction poems], which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours... For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences." -- Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker"On every page of Felon, a book unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, there’s something far more playful, resonant, and ruggedly revealing happening. Reginald Dwayne Betts animates and really embodies the minutiae of revision in this once-in-a-lifetime art object…Betts’s artistry shows and proves a necessary breaking and blurring of the lines between wandering into yesterday, wondering into tomorrow, and wrestling with the funk of today. Betts has written the twenty-first-century book that will dictate how freedom, power and consequence are written about until the sun says enough. It is that good." -- Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir"In visually arresting poems, Betts exposes systematic prejudices, legal disparities, and the emotional strain of raising two sons in a country accustomed to assuming the worst about Black males... Also found in the powerful realism of Betts's poems are vivid portrayals of steadfast love for the speakers family, while the theme of reentry beats throughout. The importance of Betts's collection cannot be overstated as current events shed light on ongoing injustices." -- Booklist"Felon is the keenest of testaments to what it’s like to have lived behind the walls, to the crucible of having one’s humanity challenged, changed, erased, to how—for the anointed—prisons persist beyond the walls. While there are poems aplenty on the mental and physical violence of prison and our unjustice system, the collection is also a moving exploration of love—romantic and familial—and how one nurtures that love against odds that at times seem impossible. Felon is bracing, revelatory work. Read it and be transformed." -- Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math"Felon is a stunningly crafted indictment of prison’s dehumanization of Black men and their loved ones. Through his unvarnished descriptions of the path to prison and its aftermath from myriad vantage points—son, husband, father, cellmate, Yale-educated public defender—Betts does nothing to protect himself, or us, from what he has done and suffered and witnessed. His compassion and breathtaking literary gifts make it impossible for us to look away or remain complicit in mass criminalization’s status quo." -- sujatha baliga, director of the Restorative Justice Project
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Forever
Book SynopsisIn lucid, elegant poems, Forever contemplates love against the pressing question of mortality after a diagnosis of cancer.Trade Review"The poems in Forever wash over you like waves, lift you up and set you down back at the beginning of your life. Some of the people are familiar; the landscape is beautifully strange. You pick up your favorite book and start reading it again, but for the first time. Longenbach’s lucid poems echo across decades, bound for poetry’s future." -- Rob Schlegel"Magnificent. At once elemental—Freud might say "oceanic"—in its psychic vista, yet particular as one man’s life, loves, and losses, Forever is a wrenchingly personal account of memory, sorrow, and profound beauty, rendered in lyric poetry. It is also James Longenbach’s finest book, wrought of remarkable paradoxes—to be so precise, so spare, yet to be so inclusive, so elegant—where mortality shadows every erotic or tender gesture. That such existential breadth of vision comes at our moments of deepest crisis is—let me be clear—never a given. But it is, in Forever, Longenbach’s gift." -- David Baker"The lyric poems of James Longenbach’s Forever devastate, for they enact with such precision the very problem they pronounce: that the pleasure of the language we read can, like memory, only approach the lives we actually live. Line by line, the poems’ likelihood to narrate, repeat, or gorgeously veer describes what it is to love and simultaneously feel oneself inside the grandiosity of time." -- Sally Keith"In the pages of this tender, immediate, sharp book, you can find something our world has made nearly impossible: language freed of lies that nevertheless consoles. James Longenbach turns his cry outward, as if toward a friend in a future he won’t see, surveying childhood and marriage, surface and depth, Europe and America, with a sonic minimalism buoyed as much by the comedy in our affairs as the tragedy of their brevity. I’m certain I’ll remember the most beautiful poems in this book for my entire human life." -- Katie Peterson
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Someday the Plan of a Town
Book SynopsisPoems of wayfaring and wayfinding, recovery and discovery, from “one of the best poets of his generation” (Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post).Trade Review"With Someday the Plan of a Town, Todd Boss is part adventurer, part commentator, and total poet. The clarity and chiseled shapeliness of his poems operate in artful irony with Boss’s daring to risk ‘not one but all [his] lives.’ Boss maps the internal discoveries and day-to-day devotions of a great adventure, where renunciation leads not to piety but affirmation, and roving not to avoidance but engagement. In this fine and distinctive book, we learn from experience that ‘noplace is / like home.’" -- David Baker, author of Swift"Before we could go nearly nowhere, Todd Boss went everywhere. If you are not dazzled by this introduction alone, something is missing. His poems always seem like a backbone that holds other language up. They seem sturdy as metal. But fluidly elastic, at once. What a gift! What a luminous voice." -- Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next"Todd Boss is a walking violin—his ear so tuned to the hidden rhythms of speech that he could make any sorrow sing. And here, in Someday the Plan of a Town, we’re invited to follow that music around the globe as Boss housesits for strangers and falls in love with each new place, each new life. Yet despite this rich worldliness, Todd Boss’s poems turn resolutely inward, searching tenderly for the contours of the human heart." -- Anders Carlson-Wee, author of The Low Passions"The deepest pleasure in reading these poems is to find oneself at the crossroads where joy and grief meet, as if by surprise, and yet didn’t they know all along that this day of reckoning and recognition would come? Todd Boss broke all the rules, set sail across the globe, and came back with many tales, a few new rules, and a book of poems that honors those crossroads where challenge and delight collide. What a beautiful collision of a book this is!" -- Jim Moore, author of Prognosis
£19.94
WW Norton & Co Energy Environment and Climate Fourth Edition
Book SynopsisHelp students understand and prepare for a changing energy landscape.
£95.95
The University of Michigan Press From Sorrows Well
Book SynopsisHayden Carruth survived isolation, mental health problems, and long struggle with drink and smoke to produce a vision of modern poetry rooted in the New England tradition but entirely his own. This volume collects essays and poems from such notable contributors as Donald Hall, Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Philip Booth, Matthew Miller, and Sascha Feinstein, among many others.
£22.75
The University of Michigan Press The Allure of Grammar
Book SynopsisOf Angie Estes, the poet and critic Steph Burt has written that she ""has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world."" In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes's work that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigour and genuine awe.Trade Review[F]or pure pleasure in the curves and surfaces, the glittering facets and darker recesses, of language, it's hard if not impossible to top Angie Estes's Enchantée."" - Salon
£23.70
The University of Michigan Press Living Off the Country
Book SynopsisWhen he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence. In solitude, listening to his own voice, the events of his life reached into the past and the future.'
£20.85
The University of Michigan Press Theogony and Works and Days
Book SynopsisRepresents the earliest account of the origin of the Greek gods, and a compendium of advice for leading a moral life, both offering insights into archaic Greek society. This translation contains a general introduction, a translator's introduction, notes, and a glossary. It is aimed at students of and specialists in classical literature.Trade ReviewThis Schlegel-Weinfield translation of Hesiod is superbly crafted: compelling, unforgettable poetry to be read aloud with delight and gratitude. - Allen Mandelbaum, Endowed Kenan Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University
£16.95
University of California Press Selections From Les Amours Jaunes
Book SynopsisA book of poetry of "poet maudit" Tristan Corbiere, first published in 1873 in Paris. It features 101 poems that was published two years before the death of the poet at the age of 29, and it went completely unnoticed at the time.
£38.25
University of California Press A Companion to Piers Plowman
Book SynopsisA comprehensive guide to William Langland's fourteenth-century masterpiece, Piers Plowman.
£24.30
