Poetry / Poems
Little, Brown Book Group New and Collected Hell
Book SynopsisAward winning poet of our times Shane McCrae, 'peer to the peerless' (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.
£11.69
Pan Macmillan Standing Female Nude
Book SynopsisCarol Ann Duffy's outstanding first collection, Standing Female Nude, introduced readers to all they would come to love about her poetry. From lovers to wives to war photographers, the poems it contains range from the delicately poignant to the fiercely political, exploring memory, gender, childhood and place. Within it are also some of her best-known poems, including 'Education for Leisure', as well as, of course, the poem from which the collection takes its title. First published in 1985 to widespread critical acclaim, Standing Female Nude is a work of startling originality and the starting point of the Poet Laureate's dazzling poetic career.Trade ReviewBreaks the windows of perception in new ways altogether . . . a genuine and original poet -- Robert Nye * The Times *Carol Ann Duffy is a very pure poet . . . it is good to see a crusading sensibility refusing to surrender any touch of art to the urgency of its cause -- Peter Porter * Observer *
£10.44
Graphic Arts Books The Celtic Twilight
Book SynopsisThe Celtic Twilight (1893) is a collection of stories written and edited by W.B. Yeats. Compiled at the height of the Celtic Twilight, a movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland, The Celtic Twilight captures a wide range of stories, songs, poems, and firsthand accounts from artists and storytellers dedicated to the preservation of Irish culture. In “Belief and Unbelief,” a story is shared about a village at the foot of Ben Bulben. One day, a young girl disappears while walking through a local field. Fearful that the faeries have gotten her, the townspeople conduct a search of the village, checking every home while burning ragweed and reciting spells to ward off the mischievous spirits. “Mortal Help” discusses the interdependence of humans and faeries, who require the presence of the living in order to play games in the physical world. As evidence, an old ditch digger tells a story from his youth, when he witnessed a group of faeries playing the game of hurling not far from the field where he was working. In “A Knight of the Sheep,” an old farmer faces off with the local tax collector, and both struggle to maintain respect for one another while trading shrewdly concealed insults. “The Devil” discusses several demonic sightings among Irish peasants, who claim to have met Lucifer by the side of the road by day and under the bed at night. The Celtic Twilight captures the collision of ancient and modern Ireland, preserving its legends while ensuring their mystery remains. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.
£9.49
Andrews McMeel Publishing Every Good Boy Does Fine: Poetry and Prose
Book Synopsis“Glowing with warmth, vulnerability, and a heavy heart, Arsenia’s intimate reflections depict the past and present wrestling within the individual as he endeavors to chart his own course in the world.”—Atwood MagazineBoth a journey of individual healing and a call for action, these poems show that, with a little love and acceptance, anyone can flourish.From one of Kansas City’s most exciting singers Calvin Arsenia, comes a debut book of poetry and prose Every Good Boy Does Fine. Named for the classic mnemonic used to teach the lines of the treble clef (EGBDF), his collection speaks to his passion as a musician and also his deep and tumultuous history in the Evangelical community.Arsenia includes elements of queer poetry, writings on racial awakening, Christian de-conversion, and sexual awakenings in a homophobic community with the hopes that, when finished reading, readers will feel ready to start their own journey of self-expression through music and performance.A profoundly thoughtful and enlightening work, Arsenia uses his lyrical talent to show that there is always somewhere to go no matter where you are coming from.
£8.99
Andrews McMeel Publishing The Gift of Everything
Book SynopsisInternational best-selling author Lang Leav presents The Gift of Everything, a stunning hardcover gift book featuring her finest pieces to date, spanning across her world-renowned poetry and prose titles from Love & Misadventure to Love Looks Pretty on You. In addition, this beautifully conceived clothbound anthology includes 35 new poems as well as original and arresting illustrations by the author.Lang’s evocative words of love, loss, and self-empowerment have inspired millions across the globe to seek their own voice through the healing power of poetry. A definite must-have collection for all lovers of poetry and prose. The Gift of Everything will thrill and delight fans of Lang Leav as well as those yet to discover the enchanting world of one the most celebrated poets in modern history.
£13.49
Andrews McMeel Publishing The Heart of You
Book SynopsisIn the third and final installment of the Souls Trilogy, acclaimed poet Iain S. Thomas explores what hope feels like after despair.
£14.24
Andrews McMeel Publishing Love Is a Dog That Bites When Its Scared
Book SynopsisAn impressive and though-provoking collection from GRAMMY nominated artist and poet Courtney Marie Andrews.
£12.74
Andrews McMeel Publishing Sometimes Its Heaven
Book SynopsisSometimes It’s Heaven is an inspiring poetry collection from Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Judy Collins.Written with the bold vulnerability that folk singer Judy Collins is best known for, Sometimes It’s Heaven: Poems of Love, Loss, and Redemption is an timeless collection that reaches audiences right where they are. Throughout her six-decade long career, Judy Collins has encouraged audiences with sublime vocals, personal life triumphs, and a firm commitment to social activism, this compilation of poetry captures the ethereal and inspiring nature of her artistry in an all-new way. Biographical and relatable, Sometimes It’s Heaven is a must-read for fans of poetry and fans of Judy, old and new.
£12.34
Manchester University Press Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets
Book SynopsisThe names Edmund Spenser and John Donne are typically associated with different ages in English poetry, the former with the sixteenth century and the Elizabethan Golden Age, the latter with the ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge this dichotomous view and to engage critically with both poets, not only at the sites of direct allusion, imitation, or parody, but also in terms of common preoccupations and continuities of thought, informed by the literary and historical contexts of the politically and intellectually turbulent turn of the century. Juxtaposing these two poets, so apparently unlike one another, for comparison rather than contrast changes our understanding of each poet individually and moves towards a more holistic, relational view of their poetics.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Spenser, Donne, and the trouble of periodization – Yulia Ryzhik1 Caring to turn back: overhearing Spenser in Donne – Richard Danson Brown 2 Comparing figures: figures of comparison and repetition in Spenser and Donne – Christopher D. Johnson 3 Refiguring Donne and Spenser: aspects of Ramist rhetoric – Niranjan Goswami 4 Artes poeticae: Spenser, Donne, and the metaphysical sublime – Patrick Cheney 5 Spenser and Donne look to the Continent – Anne Lake Prescott 6 Ovidian Spenser, Ovidian Donne – Linda Gregerson 7 Cosmic matters: Spenser, Donne, and the philosophic poem – Ayesha Ramachandran 8 ‘Straunge characters’: Spenser’s Busirane and Donne’s ‘Valediction of my name in the window’ – Elizabeth D. Harvey 9 Marriage and sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia – Ramie Targoff 10 Spenser’s and Donne’s devotional poetics of scattering – David Marno 11 Eliot, Yeats, Joyce and the modernist reinvention of Spenser and Donne –Jane Grogan and Anne FogartyIndex
£67.50
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Mothersong
Book SynopsisA lyrical excavation of trauma and healing in the midst of early motherhood - the debut work of an endlessly inventive poet whose work 'fizzes with energy, physicality, and the levitating openness of song' (Rebecca Tamás) **Selected as a book of the year by the Financial Times and Telegraph** 'An essential read, poignant, powerful and provocative. I love the feeling in Amy Acre's poems' Salena Godden Amy Acre’s debut collection is an unforgettable, unflinching excavation of motherhood, what it means to be a female artist, and what it means to be a poet with a deeply integrated community. This is a timeless work the like of which we haven’t seen enough of in the past, primed to last long into the future. 'Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this' Joelle Taylor, winner of the 2021 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 'Mothers, daughters, lovers, all the thrilling complexity of love and grief that the body must bear; these are poems which set the page aglow and make my heart spin' Liz Berry, winner of the 2018 Forward Prize for PoetryTrade ReviewMothersong is an essential read, it is poignant, powerful and provocative. I love the feeling in Amy Acre's poems, this timeless vulnerability, this ripe truth, these pieces are beautiful, evocative, and everlasting -- Salena GoddenAmy Acre’s powerful collection explores contemporary parenthood and the memory of a childhood marked by grief ... These poems are graced by an exquisite diction and enlightening observation * Irish Times *Acre’s debut collection, takes readers through the frightening, wearying, ecstatic experience of becoming a mother * Daily Telegraph *Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this -- Joelle TaylorAmy Acre’s poems are electric. They crackle and spark with wild feeling, inventiveness and deep sensuality. Mothers, daughters, lovers, all the thrilling complexity of love and grief that the body must bear; these are poems which set the page aglow and make my heart spin -- Liz BerryExpansive and risk-taking * Guardian *This debut collection from the London-born poet is confident, witty and a little addictive. As the title suggests, these poems explore motherhood and mother loss, in verse that manages to be both playfully frenzied and movingly intimate. * Financial Times, Books of the Year *
£9.49
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Precious Impossible Selected Poems
Book SynopsisFeaturing exclusive new work, Precious and Impossible gathers together over three decades of poetry from the T S Eliot Prize-winning Anthony JosephWith an introduction by Lauri Scheyer___________________________________________For over three decades, Anthony Joseph's work has explored the transnational vibrations of the African diaspora. Precious and Impossible brings together thirty years of Joseph's poetry and lyrics cementing his status as one of our greatest living poets and polymaths''Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa's past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future'' Ali Alizadeh
£12.28
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Content Warning: Everything
Book Synopsis'A triumph ... A wholly original and creative mind' NEW YORK TIMES ‘A multi-genre phenomena, it’s a triumph of a creative mind’ GLAMOUR ‘Frightens and astonishes ... Combines Maya Angelou’s passion and Sylvia Plath’s devastating self-inquisition' GUARDIAN ‘Emezi is a dream of a writer’ BOLU BABALOLA ________________________ A fiercely contemporary collection which renegotiates the contract between poet and reader in the light of this moment in human history, from the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji Content Warning: Everything concerns itself with the fugitive nature of being in the world especially, but not exclusively, within blackness. The poems reshape possibilities for poetry by paying close attention to the author's rhythm of thought, making a series of durable anthems from the noise of the contemporary moment. In this bold debut poetry collection, Akwaeke Emezi – award-winning author of Freshwater, PET, The Death of Vivek Oji and Dear Senthuran – imagines a new depth of belonging. Crafted of both divine and earthly materials, these poems travel from home to homesickness, tracing desire to surrender and abuse to survival, while mapping out a chosen family that includes the son of god, mary auntie, and magdalene with the chestnut eyes. Written from a spiritfirst perspective and celebrating the essence of self that is impossible to drown, kill, or reduce, Content Warning: Everything distills the radiant power and epic grief of a mischievous and wanting young deity, embodied.Trade ReviewEmezi has combined Maya Angelou’s passion and Sylvia Plath’s devastating self-inquisition to create an edgy music that frightens and astonishes * GUARDIAN *A powerful debut poetry collection -- MARIA CRAWFORD * FINANCIAL TIMES, Best summer books of 2023 *A multi-genre pheonomena, it’s a triumph of a creative mind * GLAMOUR *Emezi’s work is deeply magical, it is stunningly selective, making you feel so much with so little * SNACK MAGAZINE *A triumph of selfhood that painstakingly journeys between belief and becoming. Holding tenderness and rage in one breath, the Nigerian-born nonbinary author excavates trauma, divorce and loss without restraint ... Illuminates a complicated past, expels antiquated what-ifs and allows readers to share in the possibilities underscored by a wholly original and creative mind * NEW YORK TIMES *A bold debut collection delving into Blackness, trauma, sexuality and the divine from the author of The Death of Vivek Oji * GUARDIAN, Best books of 2023 *A puzzle wrapped in beautiful language, raising questions of identity and loyalty that are as unanswerable as they are important * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW *In their poetry debut, Content Warning: Everything eye-catching novelist Akwaeke Emezi envisions a self that can’t be bent or brokeN * LIBRARY JOURNAL *From searing inquisitions of the nature of guilt and sin to radical reimaginings of biblical figures, Emezi operates with the ease of a seasoned poet throughout this visionary book * BOOKPAGE *Incomparable ... Emezi's lyrics radiate raw vulnerability in their exploration of themes of abuse, trauma, mental wellness, and sexuality * BOOKLIST *Emezi returns with a poetry collection that sounds electrifying. Emezi is one of our favourite writers today and we are lucky enough to get blessed with a poetry collection from them * SHEREADS *Swinging from home to homesickness, abuse to survival, grief to rage, and desire to surrender, the poems exemplify the stark power of Emezi’s writing * AUTOSTRADDLE *Dazzling ... Akwaeke Emezi continues to astound with their prolific multi-genre, multidisciplinary work * SHONDALAND *Each poem is stunning, and often feels uproarious immediately upon its completion, demanding another read, another look, a step or two back or to the side, to second guess, question, and feel * NORTH OF OXFORD *I’m excited to read more poems like this - pushing at the boundaries and drawing their content into wilder forms. * POETRY FOUNDATION *Spirit, source and sanctuary * MS MAGAZINE, Poetry for the rest of us 2022 *Emezi is an award-winning author making a big splash in poetry with this collection. Leading with the spirit, these poems celebrate the parts of ourselves that we cannot kill or reduce. Surrender, abuse, survival, and homesickness are all themes in play in these poems that really do need every content warning imaginable * BOOKRIOT *
£9.49
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Girls that Never Die
Book Synopsis'Incredibly moving ... Every single poem is stellar' Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger ____________________________________________ In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power. Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning: [what if i will not die] [what will govern me then] ____________________________________________ 'Elhillo's is a voice that walks into the future' Ilya Kaminsky 'Brilliant. And fierce' Aracelis Girmay 'An astonishment' Tracy K. SmithTrade ReviewFearless ... has the makings of a breakthrough * LOS ANGELES TIMES *Mixing tenderness and profanity, Elhillo challenges man-made taxonomies, hierarchies and customs – rank and resilient, the book fearlessly illuminates dark contemporary places * GUARDIAN *A fantastically imaginative, powerful and poignant exploration of Muslim girlhood ... A superb book, certain to be one of the year’s standout collections * IRISH TIMES *Elhillo’s poems dig deep into how shame is passed down generations of women ... With these conversations comes power. And the title of Elhillo’s new book sings of the autonomy she imagines for her girls * NPR *Rebellion, liberation, multitudes * MS MAGAZINE *Girls That Never Die is an incredibly moving, and well-structured collection of poetry about being a Muslim girl, about shame, about the silent hurts women carry, about the pressures of cultural expectations, about dangerous silences. The writing here is incisive and intimate and eloquent. Truly, a stunning collection of poems. I particularly appreciated the range of forms across the poems and the structure of the book as a whole. Many of the poems end in ways that will leave you gasping. Loved this book. Every single poem is stellar, no skips as the kids say -- ROXANE GAYWhen I open a new book by Safia Elhillo, I know there will be fearlessness and beauty. There will be a voice that contains multitudes and yet is original and memorable in its daring. There is always lyricism and nuance, and memorable speech that knows how poetry opposes history. Indeed, Girls That Never Die is a book that gives us courage, despite all the despairing records of history. How does Elhillo do this? Perhaps by letting these pages be the space where witness and a new kind of mythology meet. And this meeting gives us strength. Why? Because there is in these poems an endlessly compelling voice that is unafraid to be vulnerable in order to tell the truth, a voice that walks against the current, walks between cultures, between languages, bridging them with honesty. Elhillo’s is a voice that walks into the future -- ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf RepublicSafia Elhillo traces the ongoing devastations of patriarchy while simultaneously making a refuge out of language, kinship, and sound. Electric, violet, plural with girls, this work pulses with memory and refusal, awakening language with its lucid imagination. Girls That Never Die is a book of resuscitations. Brilliant. And fierce -- ARACELIS GIRMAY, author of The Black MariaI am rapt, finding here the hurt and the heft of girlhood. All the old silences, all the unuttered shames are ruptured, tended to, and - finally - named. Elhillo is a poet of wisdom, rigor, and vindicating care. Girls That Never Die is an astonishment -- TRACY K. SMITH, author of Ordinary Light and Wade in the Water
£9.49
John Murray Press No, Love Is Not Dead: An Anthology of Love Poetry
Book SynopsisSilver Medal Winner for Poetry at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards.A powerful new anthology depicting how love over the past two-and-a-half millennia has found its expression in the words of the world's greatest poets.No, Love Is Not Dead is a timely affirmation of the great linguistic diversity of poetry and its ability to express passionate love, the most extreme of human emotions. With influential, award-winning poets including Kim Hyesoon, Laura Tohe and Warsan Shire, and languages ranging from Amharic, Akkadian and Ancient Greek to Yankunytjatjara, Yiddish and Yoruba, this unique anthology engages the reader in reflective tales of unlikely love stories and impossible love, love in a time of politics, surrealist love, visual love and free love, offering an intuitive insight into both historical and present-day perceptions of love across cultures. Including over 50 poets, writing on each of the world's continents, this new anthology of poems about love features a diverse range of original poems written in a variety of languages - modern, ancient, endangered and constructed -, accompanied by English translations and commentaries.Poets included in the book: Apollinaire; Nicole Brossard; Augusto de Campos; Catullus; Chaucer; Dante; Robert Desnos; Ali Cobby Eckermann; Goethe; Kim Hyesoon; Louise Labé; Federico Garcia Lorca; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Miklós Radnóti; Kutti Ravathi; Sappho; Warsan Shire; Laura Tohe; Marina Tsvetaeva.Languages included in the book: Akkadian; Amharic; Ancient Greek; Faroese; French; German; Hungarian; Italian; Japanese; Latvian; Maori; Persian; Polari; Portuguese; Russian; Sanskrit; Scots; Scottish Gaelic; Serbian; Spanish; Welsh; Yoruba.Foreword by Laura Tohe, the current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus with Distinction at Arizona State University, who has won awards including the 2020 Academy of American Poetry Fellowship, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Writers Award, and the Arizona Book Association's Glyph Award for Best Poetry.
£11.69
Quercus Publishing Poems as Friends
Book SynopsisThe Poetry Exchange is an award-winning podcast and project that celebrates the role poetry plays in people''s lives. In their first anthology, Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer draw on ten years of archival material to bring together a collection of poems chosen by readers that know them as friends, presented alongside their personal stories of connection. Featuring Brian Cox on John Clare, Andrew Scott on George Herbert, Maxine Peake on Tony Harrison and many more, in this gathering of poems you can reacquaint yourself with old friends, perhaps make some new ones, and enjoy the companionship poetry can offer us. Friends that offer connection and solidarity.Friends that help us wrestle with difficult things.Friends that name our experiences.Friends that comfort and help us move forward.Friends we admire.
£13.49
Copper Canyon Press,U.S. Event Horizon
Book SynopsisWith poems that contemplate the everyday?errands, gardening, dog walks?or confront the white-body supremacy of local sunbathers, Cate Marvin reckons with the hurt of our patriarchal world, facing her own past, toxic relationships and pondering what we can gain by leaving some loved-ones behind. Her brilliant fourth poetry collection exists just outside of calamity. Set between the violent realm of patriarchy and the bright otherworld of female agency and survival, these are poems of pointed humor and quick intellect, radical exposure and (re)vision. At Marvin?s table, the knife of domesticity becomes a threat, sharpened and shined. Misogyny pulls the sheets from the bed; motherhood wails from the backseat of the car; our hero is ghosted (abandoned, haunted) by past friends and beloveds. Event Horizon asks, at what point do we disappear into our experiences? How do we come out on the other side?
£10.19
Copper Canyon Press,U.S. Every Sound Is Not a Wolf
Book SynopsisFrom backyard to Sonoran desert, Every Sound is Not a Wolf explores the tender connection between people, place, and the natural world. Alberto Ríos’ Every Sound is Not a Wolf evokes and awakens the senses—the smell of herbs, “the geckos at their mysterious work.” Even silence grows loud and expansive in its stillness. Told entirely in couplets, and with remarkable lucidity, Ríos balances the harmonies and disharmonies found throughout all of existence—between people and the natural world, between life and death, between spirit and body, between borders real and imagined. What does it mean for a body to house two languages? And what is an imaginary line between countries? From backyard to Sonoran desert, from mining town to river, this collection journeys the human experience, through grief and joy, tuned to the “small buzzing of a live world.” Ríos asks us to feel the connective electric pulse between all things, to find newness, musicality, and beauty in the mundane. That the world keeps moving forward, this is miracle enough.
£12.34
Milkweed Editions Making a Living
Book SynopsisA brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?” probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism—it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away—on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.
£14.40
Milkweed Editions Small Wars Manual
Book SynopsisSmall Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I?ll be coming back to the rest of my life.??Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, ?a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.? In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago?s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where ?stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees? and ?even small wars waged // on the living room floor? cause trepidation and harm.This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors?empire, army, their systems and tools?and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.
£12.34
Hampton Roads Publishing Co A Little Book of Mystical Secrets: Rumi, Shams of
Book SynopsisAt long last, an accessible little book that focuses on the teachings of Rumi''s teacher and inspiration, Shams of Tabriz. Included in this slim, charming volume is a biographical sketch of the great Sufi teacher and mystic and a new translation of 500 of his core teachings that bring into fresh focus the meaning and mysteries of life and love.There are many books on Rumi and many translations of his works and yet most readers are unaware of how Rumi became a mystic. Shams, an Arabic word that means the sun, was the catalyst that converted the rather resolute and ascetic Rumi, the cleric and teacher, into Rumi, the passionate disciple of the religion of love. He was the agent of the propulsive mystical energy that transformed Rumi the reticent into Rumi the ecstatic poet.Rumi lovers, spiritual seekers and devotees of the mystical path will meet this little book of wisdom and mystical secrets with enthusiasm.''I shall not place you in my heart, For you may get hurt by its wounds.I won''t keep you in my eyes,For I may belittle you andexpose you to the ridicule of common men.I will hide you inside my soul, not in my heart or in my eyes,so that you may become one with my breath.
£11.39
Hampton Roads Publishing Co The Book of Rumi: 105 Stories and Fables That
Book Synopsis
£14.39
The New York Review of Books, Inc Poems Of The Late T'ang
Book SynopsisClassical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T''ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T''ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o''-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.
£15.29
The Library of America African American Poetry: : 250 Years Of Struggle
Book SynopsisA literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present
£34.39
Michigan State University Press Extant
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£18.95
WW Norton & Co The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey
Book SynopsisNearly two decades in the making, The Warped Side of Our Universe marks the historic collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”—objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the authors explicate Thorne’s and colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backwards in time? And what weird and marvellous phenomena inhabit the Warped Side? Featuring more than 100 paintings, including a soaring Stephen Hawking, this one-of-a-kind volume, with its multiple gatefolds, takes us on an Odyssean voyage into and through The Warped Side of Our Universe.Trade Review"A fascinating account of our universe's most bewildering phenomena written entirely in verse... Dimension-defying paintings decorate every page. The textual and visual narrative that emerges is something akin to an epic poem about the nature of spacetime.... The enigmatic concepts discussed in ‘The Warped Side of Our Universe’ are some of the most difficult for humans to understand, but Mr. Thorne’s verse and Ms. Halloran’s art bring these far-out concepts down to earth. Even what the eye can’t see can be beautiful." -- Angelina Torre - The Wall Street Journal"Evocative... an ambitious art-science artifact.. grounded in cutting-edge research" -- David Kaiser - Science Magazine"Physicist Kip Thorne and artist Lia Halloran find a novel approach to exploring these topics in startling detail. The collaboration between the two is just as fascinating as the book itself...Written in verse form, Thorne’s writing is perfectly complemented by Halloran’s vivid illustrations in explaining how that research has pierced a universe that is ‘varied and vast.’ The paintings portray a swirling universe of wonders, explaining a black hole’s characteristics with images of Halloran’s wife being bent by its warped spacetime." -- Andrew DeMillo - Associated Press
£35.99
Omnidawn Publishing Yours, Purple Gallinule
Book SynopsisLyrical satire that imagines mental illnesses as various bird species. Ewa Chrusciel’s fourth book in English, Yours, Purple Gallinule, playfully explores health and illness as they are culturally constructed. Using research into clinical understandings of mental afflictions and their treatments through history, Chrusciel maps various diagnostics onto an array of bird species. A lyrical satire, the book is a reflection on a society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, and over-medicate. These poems pose questions about what it means to be unique and to accept pain and suffering as a fact of life. On the pages of Yours, Purple Gallinule, we encounter birds, a poet, and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist undergoes a series of conversions as she realizes that the point is not to classify thoughtlessly, but to “make music instead”—to dwell in astonishment. Birds evade the anthropomorphizing intentions of the human protagonists as the psychiatrist and the poet eventually become one. The anthropomorphizing goes in reverse, and the human being becomes more avian. Like the dove in the biblical Noah’s ark story, the bird proclaims a new covenant, with a twig in its beak and a message: “We are all mad; some more than others, but no one is spared the affliction. And the madder we are, the more sacred.” Trade Review"As we continue to live through our world’s 'chain of unbearable events,' it is time for the sharp and sweet audacity of Ewa Chrusciel’s work. You don’t have to believe a person can become a bird to adore Ewa Chrusciel’s new book, but I dare you to read it without considering it might be true. The book is poetry because you’ll find yourself considering not just that it might happen, but how. Using the world of birds, Yours, Purple Galinulle shows us, in observations and witticisms crisp as the bite of an apple, the limits of our own understanding, as it directs us towards new possibilities we can be grateful for. Paired with illustrations by Nancy Sepe that marry playfulness and sorrow, Yours, Purple Galinulle is both light and dark, comedy and tragedy, agile at both: what Robert Frost would call 'play for mortal stakes.'" -- Katie Peterson, author of Life in a Field"In Yours, Purple Gallinule, Ewa Chrusciel invites us to fall in with birds and be astonished by an aclosural world of mental aviaries and 'tiny throat' diagnoses. Like the poet herself, who is a descendant of birds, our souls are 'winged'. Thus we are transported to a liminal world of mythmaking and identity formation by embracing derangement and creating our own migration. Yours, Purple Gallinule brims with humor, erudition, and, yes!, heresy. It dazzles with a fierce imagination and is a superb addition to Ewa Chrusciel’s already impressive body of work." -- Abayomi Animashaun, author of Seahorses"'A baby titmouse is tucking itself under my elbow,' Poet Ewa Chrusciel says in the first line of her boldly ambitious fourth collection, Yours, Purple Gallinule, in which she weaves an inextricable connection between the lives of birds and our own spiritual and physical lives. Chrusciel wrestles with the definition and meaning of poetry and its relationship to imagination, psychic disorder, fragmentation, exile and history: 'A poem is a ravenous flock of snow buntings, an apocalypse of the air. Mad in its dazzlement,' she notes. Hundreds of birds sing, shit, nest, shed feathers, hide in crevices, mount defenses, create families, search for food for their babies, and soar in these pages. Yours, Purple Gallinule is a book of migrations and transformations, astounding facts and revelations—wise and utterly original." -- Jeff Friedman, author of The Marksman and Floating Tales
£12.80
Akashic Books, Ltd. 82nd Division
£15.29
Red Hen Press Call Me Fool
Book SynopsisTrowbridge’s Fool is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. Often the scapegoat, he is, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” Trowbridge’s Fool, after blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega-corporation by its Enron-style CEO. Trowbridge thought he was through with his not-so-distant relative after his collection came out, but the Fool is back again, none the wiser.
£11.04
Red Hen Press Flight Plan
Book SynopsisAUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING I WAS A BELL M. Soledad Caballero explores the complexities of the body, delving into themes such as cancer, memory, and love in a lyrical collection of poems you won’t want to miss.“This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.”-Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder “Masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land.”-Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without AltarIn this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation.Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.
£12.34
Red Hen Press Pandoras Kitchen
Book Synopsis
£16.14
Red Hen Press Dwelling
£12.34
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC It Comes In Tides
Book Synopsis
£8.54
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Perfectly Placed
Book Synopsis
£9.49
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Sweet Debris
Book Synopsis
£6.99
Button Poetry Poetry By Chance: An Anthology of Poems Powered
Book Synopsis
£20.39
Milkweed Editions All Us Beautiful Monsters
£12.34
Counterpoint Another Day
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£22.09
Red Wheel/Weiser Hafiz'S Little Book of Life
Book Synopsis
£12.99
Nightboat Books Vibratory Milieu
Book SynopsisVibratory Milieu weaves together eight years of writing and the author’s daily practice of collection to build a glistening web of perception and interconnection, including bits and pieces from a myriad of sources: current events, news briefs, facebook & twitter quips, the movie “Carrie,” Buddhist texts, and feminist theory. Hunter’s own writing practice becomes material for the collage as she culls lines from journals, poems written to music, poems written after meditation and dreams, poems written in response to friends’ poems, poems inspired by the Divine Comedy (itself a collage text). What emerges from the field of language is a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, friendship.Trade Review"As in her first collection, The Incompossible, Hunter effortlessly blends private dialogue with public testimony orchestrated in a variety of forms. Orphan Machines drones a bittersweet urban lyric, and by the end readers may also be asking themselves in public, 'Should / I fake normalcy or be real?'”—Jacket2"This is a book of subtle curiosity, attentiveness, and carefully balanced juxtaposition. It re-enlivens a kind of attention to language and shows us possibility and resonant significance within the mundane.”—Full Stop"Vibratory Milieu is a polyglot chorus where the lines reverberate in a sound cloud, and where we take in more than we might have thought we could handle. It vibrates, this cacophonous milieu. The title of this potent book makes a resonant promise that the work delivers on."—Colorado Review"This is a book with many entry-points, without a singular intended route. Turn to any random page and it will feel like you’re walking into another dimension. I enjoyed encountering it as if I was doing contact improv. My attention and comprehension had its ebbs and flows, but I enjoyed watching how the text blocks surged and retreated; I attended to moments of resonance and harmonized in the margins with my own citations and lived history."—Anomaly"Vibratory Milieu is a high-speed polyphonic lyric suite that somehow feels simultaneously an extension of her prior work, and yet, leagues ahead in terms of structure."—rob mclennan"Like the eponymous teen heroine of strategic reversals, Carrie White, Carrie Hunter wields awesome telekinetic powers. Collaged quotations and phrases hover on the page, spotlighting the objects of our desire, fury and incredulity. We find ourselves somewhere within 'boundaryless metamorphosis’s apparent borders,' a tensile and refractive echo chamber of mega consequence. With heightened awareness of the stimulations and fabrications at hand, we become emboldened to bring down the house (capitalism, racial, gendered and ecological violence, etc.), an imbricated architecture, every part, every function accumulative and inextricably linked. In Vibratory Milieu, feminist provocation tackles the garish and overarching humiliating features of the omnipresent succubus that wields so many guises. 'If true consciousness lies below the conscious level,' ease into the hypnotic genius of Carrie Hunter’s representation of encounter."—Brenda Iijima"Vibratory Milieu casts a spell of ecstatic, esoteric associations, forming unexpected neural pathways with a language that reminds us, 'the book is still a technology.' Carrie Hunter’s maximalist collage form masterfully weaves together language and living, acting as an antidote to the static-apocalypse all around us, reminding its reader, 'Reality is music.' This vibrant text shakes the body of the reader into a dance of memory, language, and unknowing sublimation."—Angel Dominguez "'Dreaming prepares you for clairvoyance,' Hunter writes, which in turn prepares us for clairvoyance in the various realms of consciousness. We are continually made to know we’re in a poem, and that we’re likewise in a dream, awake. Hunter creates this lucid dreamstate wherein the poem is written and we dwell there, a place where she has dwelt, where she has made a dwelling place for us. Where consciousness is a multifaceted gem to behold, to hold up as we look at it, turning it around. Aphoristic in form, but cohesive in poetic narrative, because the voice drawing together the source fragments is so magnetic. Ripped intelligence is the phrase that comes to mind, ripped like the way muscles are ripped, or the way a text is ripped off. Diamond-like, dovetailed, and then suddenly, your aura drops around your knee."—Julian Talamantez Brolaski
£12.34
Nightboat Books E
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£15.75
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Nighted
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£6.99
Canterbury Classics The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
£14.32
The New York Review of Books, Inc Drafts, Fragments, And Poems
Book SynopsisThe first appearance of this award-winning writer''s work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray''s striking poetry to its originally intended form.Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.
£11.39
New York Review Books Paradiso
Book SynopsisA new translation of the final part of Dante's Divine Comedy by a poet and psychoanalyst praised for his previous translation of Dante's Purgatorio.Paradiso is the most stylistically virtuosic book of the Divine Comedy—yet it is also the most underappreciated, due to readers’ fears that it is boring and about “nothing but goodness.” D. M. Black’s clear and energetic new translation offers not only a glorious contradiction of such a view, but also, in highlighting the extraordinary beauty and sensorial richness of Dante’s verse, proves that Paradiso is in fact “Dante’s genius at its most indisputable” (Harold Bloom).Cleansed of sin and born anew after his grueling trek up Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim leaves all that is earthly behind him as he makes his ascent through the celestial spheres. Under the guidance of his childhood sweetheart and lifelong muse Beatrice, he contemplates optics, angels, free will, justice, and love, to arrive at one of the most moving and ecstatic epiphanies in the history of literature—that God is “the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”Written at a time of great political turmoil in Italy and great personal anxiety in Dante’s life, Paradiso wrestles with many questions that have echoes in our own disturbing times. At its heart, it is a book about the shape of the universe and how to find one’s place within it, composed with inventive daring and linguistic ingenuity as Dante stretches the Italian vernacular to its very limits, striving to make vivid and tangible the ineffable and sublime.
£17.85
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Out Of My Skin
Book Synopsis
£7.16
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Of the Sun Fire
Book Synopsis
£8.54
Austin Macauley Publishers The Honeybee Rivals the Spring
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£7.16
Book*hug Press Medium
Book SynopsisFrom award-winning writer Johanna Skibsrud, Mediumshares the lives and perspectives of women who?in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums?have helped to shape the course of history.Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie: Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman?s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.These deeply resonant and performative poems use language as a bridge across experience, sensibility, and time. Each exploration begins with a brief vignette inspired by the ?vidas? that once began manuscripts of the troubadours. Both vidas and poems provide lyrical reinterpretations of real and imagined elements in the lives of scholars, scientists, computer engineers, mystics, entrepreneurs, artists, nurses, and other leaders.
£13.56
