Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisA book of poetry about the transitory physical world of the body, trains, and highways that reflects on the seamless quality of the present moment.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer's Award. Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine. The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet's eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.Angela Ball's lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the romantic and the brutal and how they exist within us and between us.Trade ReviewRed Sugar is tantalizing and forbidden, but it is no peepshow. The poems are raw, brash, and full of pluck, yet there is tenderness and honest emotion at the core. Jan Beatty reminds us that there is 'nothing / between us and death but one inch.' She takes us to the edge of being and shows us our own quick mortal souls. Yes, there's rock music and prison sex - but do not think for a moment that this book is merely licentious. Beatty casts a broad canopy over human desire, and within the scope of experience, she finds, too, that we are innocent and sublime beings. A rich, rare treat, this Red Sugar. - D. A. Powell ""What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else,' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Unflinching, vulgar, yet oddly welcoming in the 'biting joy' of their American riffs, these poems touch us here, and here, and even here."" - Michael Waters ""Jan Beatty's Red Sugar is a hard rocking book, a gorgeous sexual book, a fearless way high up and way down deep roller-coaster book of poetry such as you never have read before and will want to read over and over. It is full of strong language and full of love, and I loved and admired it to the hilt."" - Alicia Suskin Ostriker ""Having mastered the art of fury, Jan Beatty does not merely write a poem, she wrenches it into being, slaps it on the page, applies the flames of her passions, then gentles it into the sweating fleshy sweetness of childhood hungers, longings inspired by loneliness or loss, starkly erotic yearnings - all served in deliciously monstrous portions, to be savored like a long slow French, that perfect tongue of a kiss that sets the soul on throb."" - Wanda Coleman

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe poet employs colloquial diction, references pop and classical culture, and travels at 1000 miles per hour in his fourth collection. For those who think contemporary poetry is about abject confessions, vacation in Provence and opaque 'academicisms,' McDaniel is an intro to a new world.Trade ReviewEven if you count yourself among the unredeemed who claim they don't like poetry, buy this book anyway. It will convert you and install a skylight in your brain. Alive and kicking in these pages is the voice of a brilliantly comic consciousness. McDaniel is a candid, frisky survivor: hyperalert, conversant with drugs and sobriety, obscene phone call addicts, 'boner etiquette,' fatherhood, the special hell of family, being an 'emotional warrior' and so much more. He's an urban wordsmith of the first order. You hold in your hands his anguished autobiography, a smorgasbord of famished compassion, tenderness, luminous surprises, and armor-piercing humor. - Amy Gerstler ""It was an energetic moment when I encountered Jeffrey McDaniel for the first time. Even after a few lines it became obvious that he was someone who produced not only a very vivid but also innovative poetry. A fusion of pain and goodness, comic reliefs, and explosive moments on the crunchy surface of daily horrors/shocks."" - Ron Winkler, from the afterword to Katastrophenkunde ""McDaniel possesses one of the most extraordinary senses of metaphor in which I have ever taken delight. His work abounds in metaphor and simile, each or both always revealing an utterly lucid, rich, complex, passionate, contradictory, original way of confronting/praising this business of walking around on earth. Read his books, listen to him read his poems aloud: it will change you."" - Thomas Lux, from the introduction to The Spoken World Revolution: Slam, Hip-Hop, and the Poetry of a New Generation

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLove on the Streets is a selection of poems from four of Doubiago's books of poetry, two of which are book-length poems, plus new poetry. It is the culmination of thirty years of writing "on the road."Trade ReviewVividly narrative and intensely lyrical. Her voice and experience are compelling and the nature of her quest moving. - Bloomsbury Review ""Doubiago continues to stake a claim to being one of America's most vigorous and ambitious poets. This is rich, intense, enchanting work."" - ALA Booklist ""This is a remarkable poem-of-ideas - ideas that are provocative, insightful. A classic feminist text."" - Belles Lettres ""There is no more vivid book than South America Mi Hija. There is no more immediate poem. Hers is not a poetry of imagery. Nor, in a strict sense, a lyric poetry. Her poetry is narrative by nature and epic by intent, and it achieves its state of white-hot imagination because Sharon Doubiago meets life so imaginatively."" - LA Weekly

Read more less

Book SynopsisWinner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Prose poems that profile the interrelationship of the two central characters, looking deeply into their psyches and thoughts of race, class, and identity. Read a press release about this bookTrade ReviewNarrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man is a riveting interrogation of two men in a relationship. Ronaldo V. Wilson's prose poems are alternately tough and tender probes into the underbelly of their psyche. With audacity and wit, reminiscent of the work of Hilton Als, bell hooks, Franz Fanon and James Baldwin, Wilson uses narrative to decode sociopolitical narratives around race, sexuality, and class. Identity, Wilson seems to say, is only a collection of stories - the ones told about us in battle with the ones we tell ourselves. What we have here is palpable consciousness: a stunning achievement. - Claudia Rankine

Read more less

Book SynopsisEdson began publishing poetry in the 1960s. He has been called "the godfather of prose poems in America" by Booklist's Ray Olson. Edson has been quoted as saying "Prose comes so naturally that one doesn't really have to choose it, it's already in one's mouth".

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 1970, as the war in Vietnam was heating up, Ostriker was awaiting the birth of her son. On May 14, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The poems in this collection confront Ostriker’s personal tumult as she considered the world she had brought her son into.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDrawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in ]Open Interval[ locate the self in the interval between body and name. Finalist, National Book Award

Read more less

Book SynopsisSalt Pier is a hypothesis about the capacity of language to gain traction on experience in such a way that memory blossoms and judgment is made whole.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhirlwind is one woman's heartfelt, yet mordantly witty, sexy exploration of the breakup of a marriage in poems that keep their linguistic edge while seething with a story they must tell.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBlowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire. Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award

Read more less