Poetry / Poems

Book SynopsisSelf-seeding windis a wind of ever-replenishing breath.-from ''The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering''The title of Sylvia Legris'' melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behaviour of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of ''rapid peering''. Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist''s notebook in verse. Here is ''where nature converges with words,'' as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic mar

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Book SynopsisPublished in 2010, Ada Limon's debut collection Sharks in the Rivers announced the arrival of a beloved poet - now the 24th US Poet Laureate, National Book Award winner, Time Magazine woman of the year 2024. An extraordinary collection - at once urbane and earthy - Sharks in the Rivers navigates the thoroughfares and tributaries of human nature.

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Book SynopsisIn the highly anticipated follow-up to LVOE: Poems, Epigrams & Aphorisms, three-time New York Times bestselling author Atticus is inviting readers to take a deeper look behind the mask as he continues his powerful journey inward in search of love, peace, and acceptance.LVOE. Volume II is an expanded exploration of self-love, meditation, meaning, loss, and romance from the internet''s favourite poet. Atticus implores his instantly recognizable lyrical style, gorgeous illustrations, and relatable themes to once again dazzle readers, inspiring them to look within. This collection will feature all-new poems, each paired with beautiful sketches that bring the words alive from the page.LVOE. Volume II looks forward, backward, but most importantly inward to the often confusing yet hopeful human experience.

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Book SynopsisIn Maroon Choreographyfahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we—in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage—linger beside the unknown. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book ATrade Review“Maroon Choreography reads like liner notes for a dance unwitnessed except by sound, or a dramaturgy for a dance recorded by the mud and roots of trees who would have been the only audience. It is obscure but everywhere. More unknowable than little known. It participates in the important recent critical practice that goes beyond applying or extending theory and instead insists there is something else to perceive and another way to perceive it.” -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of * Dub: Finding Ceremony *“With great erudition and deep musicality, fahima ife has written a funky, rigorous, and lyrical investigation of what it is to have been made to have and not have a body. An incredible tempest of a book.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“ife invokes recent thinkers for whom the inherited rules and categories of what we have learned to call civilization look like acts of Western oppression. Against those categories, with sublimity and verve, ife’s verse raises up a defiant ‘queeribbeanness,’ celebrating ‘unruly contemporary dancers’ and other ‘black bodies” that ‘struggle to name our lives as sovereign, on our own terms.’ Spectacularly allusive in its canny, concise segments, sometimes programmatic but more often simply learned, Ife’s ‘tremulous / antegrammatical’ work invokes ‘the black morning of baldwin / across the river in another country.’” -- Stephanie Burt * New York Times Book Review *"Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of the familiar to practice otherwise. Through breathing, sitting, humming, and pausing with this text I am consistently reminded (as if one could forget) that our compulsory education systems are colonially choreographed. . . . To engage with this book in the field of comparative and international education is to practice asking more of ourselves and our work while making another world possible." -- Cee Carter * Comparative Education Review *“It is not often that an academic text takes you on a journey. fahima ife’s book of essays and poetry, Maroon Choreography, invites us to theorize not by defining and analyzing but rather by inhabiting an undocumented past of escape from slavery that links to present-day escapes from slavery’s afterlife. In this process of imagining, the text engages with an important conversation within Black studies, critical theory, and performance studies.” -- Omar Ricks * Dance Chronicle *"Maroon Choreography . . . inspires as possibility for what poetry might be, how it might bring forth homage and critical theory about Blackness in new forms and fresh ways of thought. It disassembles. I’m drawn to books of all sorts that unravel dominant discourses that plague our imaginations, and ife does that." -- Dawn Lundy Martin * Brooklyn Poets *"Maroon Choreography . . . . [is] a radical work that emerges from centuries of the informal, from the pneumatic symphony of all of us, but specifically of Blackness, 'in the slickness of joy,' and takes to the snake with great force. ife proposes questions that are rarely asked, perspectives refusing popular thought. They invite us to sit with them, to float, ascend, transcend, practice, to move through something not written by the choreography of coloniality — and to breathe 'in the upper air unseen.'" -- Cameron Lovejoy * Fugue *Table of ContentsA Prefatory Note ix Recrudescence 1 Porous Aftermath 15 Nocturnal Work 51 Maroon Choreography 79 Coda 93 Anindex 117

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Book SynopsisThe Countess Cathleen (1892) is a verse drama by W.B. Yeats. Dedicated to Maud Gonne, an actress and revolutionary whom Yeats unsuccessfully courted for years, The Countess Cathleen underwent several editions before being performed in its final version at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1911. Based on an Irish legend, the play, set during a period of intense famine, follows a land-owning Countess who decides to sacrifice her wealth and property in order to save the starving Irish people. As dusk gathers, a family prepares for dinner in their rural home. The fire is lit, and Shemus, the father, has returned home from a day of hunting with nothing to show for it. As they scrounge what they can to make themselves a meal, the Countess Cathleen arrives to ask them for directions. Touched by their suffering, the Countess returns home and begins to wonder what she can do to alleviate their difficult circumstances. Impatient, Shemus yells to the darkening woods to welcome whatever being, angel or devil, that would bring them money or something to eat. When two merchants arrive offering him gold for his services, it appears that the Countess, despite her good intentions, may already be too late. The Countess Cathleen is a drama written in blank verse that explores themes of poverty, faith, and Irish independence. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisSelected Poems (1923) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Dedicated to Edward Thomas, a friend of Frost’s and an important English poet who died toward the end of the First World War, Selected Poems is a wonderful sampling of poems from Frost’s early collections, including A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Known for his plainspoken language and dedication to the images and rhythms of rural New England, Robert Frost is one of America’s most iconic poets, a voice to whom generations of readers have turned in search of beauty, music, and life. “Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and simple music. In “After Apple-Picking,” as fall gives over to winter, the poet remembers in dreams how the “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end” as he climbs the ladder into the heart of the tree. Both a symbol for life and a metaphor for the poetic act, apple picking leaves the poet “overtired / Of the great harvest [he himself] desired”, awaiting sleep as he describes “its coming on,” wondering what, if anything, it will bring. “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, is a meditation on fate and free will that follows a traveler in an autumn landscape, unsure of which path to take, but certain he cannot stand still. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Robert Frost’s Selected Poems is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisWith vibrant ribbons of color and joyous words, These Are My Big Girl Pants depicts the complexities and nuances of being a woman in this world.From award-winning artist Amber Vittoria comes These Are My Big Girl Pants, a collection of poetry and artwork that embraces womanhood and all of its inherent intricacies. Overarching themes of enlightenment, analysis, and independence speak to young adulthood, and adulthood in all of its many forms, as each poem and accompanying piece of art helps women face these emotional and physical changes. A celebration of femininity and the female body, These Are My Big Girl Pants leverages naïve artistic approaches, like simple line and brush strokes, against deep and meaningful poetry and prose, creating a true exploration of individuality, female empowerment, and emotion.

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Book SynopsisThe vulture, the presiding genius of Gerard Woodward’s collection, is at once sympathetic and awful, intimate and other. Woodward naturally positions himself at uncomfortable borders and thresholds, and in doing so alerts us to the flimsiness of the conceits of home, of family and human culture. Many poets have challenged our lazy habit of addressing nature though the pathetic fallacy; few have had the nerve to consciously embrace it as a subversive strategy, through which we can explore the strange intimacies we share with other life-forms. The Vulture shows insects and animals and plants invade, infect and fuse with us at every turn; elsewhere, the architecture of our lives, our houses, gardens, careers and bodies, are revealed as the provisional drafts they are. No contemporary poet unsettles like Woodward: he does so through no easy surrealism, but instead an extraordinary ability to render our home the alien planet it is, and give conscious voice and vivid shape to the terrible sense of precariousness that lies just below our waking state.

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Book SynopsisIn her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes ?Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends? This slim volume acts as a palate-cleanser, a spirit-booster, a little rocket-ship of wonders.?While Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison were an unlikely pair to become friends, they shared an intimate correspondence of handwritten letters that often included new poems. After Kooser was diagnosed with cancer, Harrison sensed his friend?s poetry becoming ?overwhelmingly vivid,? and their friendship deepened through the exchange of brief poems that captured ?the essence of what [they] wanted to say to each other.? After hundreds of poems were sent back and forth through the mail, they found this volume hidden within the stacks of envelopes and postcards.In her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes ?Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends? This slim volume acts as a palate-cleanser, a spirit-booster, a little rocket-ship of wonders.?Wise, wry, and penetrating, these epigrammatic, aphoristic poems explore love and friendship, pausing to celebrate the natural world, aging, everyday things and scenes, and poetry itself. This expanded edition includes a dozen new poems, and when asked why none of the poems have attributions, one of the co-authors replied, ?This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.?

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Book SynopsisNobel Prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer explores the personal and political, the ecological and existential, through poems that expand like the widening scope of a telephoto lens.With slow strokes and subtle, rich lines, The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer is evidence of a Nobel Prize-winning poet tracing the world with his pen. A stunning testament to an illustrious career, The Blue House gathers poems and writings from Tranströmer’s fourteen collections into a single book. Original Swedish sits alongside their English translations as Patty Crane translates his words into revelatory language acute in the understanding of human change and loss.Subtle in politics and exact in imagery, the poems of The Blue House range from agile haiku to cinematic prose. Social phenomena are observed in rich detail—a “dictator’s bust” presiding over a train car of doomed passengers—and the collection is propelled by empathy and curiosity. Under Tranströmer’s watchful eye, no subject is overlooked: Milij Balakirev, the Russian composer; Nils Dacke, the Swedish peasant who led a rebellion against the king; and him, the stranger who forgets his name by the roadside. From the personal to the political to the existential, Tranströmer’s poems act as a telephoto lens, granting us reinvigorated access to the world we live in.

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Book SynopsisFilled with “moving water” and intuitive leaps, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is an elegy for Harrison’s sixteen-year-old niece. This new edition of The Theory and Practice of Rivers, by Jim Harrison, returns to print—as a stand-alone volume—a classic poetry title. In a heartfelt and powerful introduction, Rebecca Solnit calls this collection both elegy (inspired by the death of his sixteen-year-old niece) and “loose memoir” (filled with language that leaps intuitively across subjects, recalling various experiences, place, and memories). Beautifully adrift in the long poem sequence seated at the heart of this book, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is filled with “moving water, the search for consolation and meaning in the sublime rightness of wild landscape” (Outside). Harrison speaks to the rivers and leaps in all of us, leaving us profoundly changed.

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Book Synopsis“We waited for Word to arrive/ like a messiah in a stagecoach/ or a sheriff riding a thundercloud.”From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. “Thoughtful, witty, curious” (The New York Times), Equi’s subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.

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Book SynopsisAn exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”

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Book SynopsisLooking back, within, and ahead-while ultimately focusing on the here and now-Kristin Brace traverses landscapes of memory, dreams, and the imagination, exploring the fragments and shifting perspectives that shape experience and identity and reinvigorate the creation of meaning. With tenderness and wonder, these poems build their own stepping stones for the journey, moving from connection to disconnection, frailty to strength, and fierce love to intense isolation, depicting a whole that is enlivened by the coexistence of seemingly opposing forces, emotions, and experiences. Despite the darkness and uncertainty they embody, the poems in this collection insist on their existence, forever traveling toward moments alive with color and light. The poet draws from the riches of art, nature, and the quiet moments of every day in reflections often startling in language and content and unified by their voice-driven musicality. Fraught with illness, longing, and loss, these poems guide readers through the intricate geographies of the heart, sometimes hurtling, sometimes dancing, sometimes feeling their way through the dark toward the wild abundance of each new day.Trade ReviewKristin Brace's Toward the Wild Abundance is a painterly book, not just in its evocations of Bonnard, Matisse, and Cassatt, but in the quality of light that threads the poems. It's an intimate light that 'blurs' and 'whirs,' 'streams' like a ribbon from a chickadee's beak. The light here goes absent at the mouth of a cave, comes to us in snow light, drips like butter. We might ask, as the speaker of one of these poems does, 'Who tilted the room to let the light spill so?' And does our world really shine back with such beauty? This book says yes, points us toward and toward." - Laura Donnelly, author of Watershed, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize"Kristin Brace possesses a marvelous delicacy of attention, tuned to the stillness deer carry with them-sheen of light through an insect's body- ferns / patient as dinosaurs-mouse / with a pulse like wishing'! I love her imaginative possession of the moment, of joy, and of sorrow, by way of the dear infinitesimal." - Nancy Eimers, author of Oz"Notice that easily missed 'Toward' in the title of Kristin Brace's elegantly down-to-earth collection. Through her unpretentiously precise language, she is taking us 'toward,' and along the way drawing our attentiveness to all that matters. These poems of the numinous reveal a world vacant of mere theory and speculation. Brace longs for lives where we love wastefully and stand in awe, whether it be before a work by Bonnard, a basil plant, or a clumsily played accordion. In 'A Pomegranate, or a Rhyming Couplet,' the speaker says, 'And this tablecloth / is a garden where I / could lose myself / and maybe find / us.' It is an abundant walk, this with the gently fierce Brace Toward the Wild Abundance." - Jack Ridl, author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

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Book SynopsisPoems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls. This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them. Trade Review“Hume’s profoundly intimate collection imagines how the porous interiors of women’s bodies are harmed and sickened by sexual violence, the industrial food system, racist fascism, climate change, and environmental contamination. In the middle of everything, Hume rehearses acts of tenderness, empathy, courage, and desire in order to protect and ‘love the body in its / one life its singular intensity after all.’” -- Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold

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Book SynopsisA poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus. Trade Review"Perhaps everything about her work can be described as through water: from waves, eddys and ripples. Throughout Pink Waves, Nakayasu’s poems explore boundaries both physical and temporal, as well as the edges of grief..." * rob mclennan’s blog *"Pink Waves is multiple things at once. As a performance art piece, Sawako Nakayasu’s newest poetic composition considers the shifting roles the reader, writer and spoken-word performer take on in relation to a piece of work; as a written recording of performance artistry, it offers a fresh and moving study on grief and otherness." * The Japan Times *"Pink Waves is a glowing poem of ninety pages. . . gently staying, for a moment, with method and arrangement. . . [t]hen the lines shrink and recede." * Colorado Review *“Pink Waves deepens my immense admiration for Nakayasu’s poems and translations. Expansive, working across genres, she always pushes her writing into new places. In Pink Waves, she has found another way to rigorously clear a space for herself or, perhaps more accurately, her many selves, attaining a fresh perspective. Registering the world crashing into her life, we hear and learn the different languages that flow around her, as well as encounter references to–and echoes of –Adam Pendelton’s collage text Black Dada, Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,’ and Ron Silliman’s groundbreaking Ketjak. She uses collage to give a resilient, changing shape to our relentless influx of chaos, and the resulting feelings of anxiety, passion, anger, and love stirred up in us. Turning detritus into sensuous music, Nakayasu’s greatness arises from [undertaking] ‘Experiments in Joy,’ à la Gabrielle Civil, to find a way to live in the here and now.” -- John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums“Nakayasu’s Pink Waves is an experience of questions becoming artifacts. The speaker asks: ‘how will i locate expansiveness in touch’? By ‘dreamlight’, a reader is trained, by this speaker, in a process of listening that’s both a ‘pledge of silence’ and the recognition that ‘we come to a limit and stop where it fits.’ Is this ‘genre trouble’? Nakayasu has written a book a writer could read, orienting to the desk, to the ‘passing moment,’ in turn. This is grounding. This is beautiful.” -- Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash a Heart"In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything." -- Fred Moten, author of The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)

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Book SynopsisPoems that navigate the complexities of human relationships, personal ethics, and religious tradition. Wind moves through this collection, opening the poems to the dying beauty of the natural world, to the weathers inside the psyche and without, and to the connections between a family and between the speaker his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert. The collection navigates the intimacies of human relationships with others, the challenges of working as a lawyer trying to maintain integrity as others fall prey to corporate greed, and the complexity of holding a Jewish identity while being awake to tradition’s hold on the mind and its cost. Steven Rood offers a powerful account of how to be a human in dynamic relationships while also holding respect for the non-human beings that comprise most of the life on our planet. Rood employs structures and forms that directly relate to the content of the poems themselves. Spontaneous breaks and starts reflect the writer’s turns of mind, offering readers insight into the meaning and measure of the work. Trade Review"In Steven Rood’s brave and lyrical debut collection, Naming the Wind, the quixotic project of naming the wind is a metaphor for how we struggle to make sense of what is beyond our control. This is the work of a mature poet, one who makes the details of everyday life luminous and gives meaning to suffering while offering a glimpse of the sublime." * Colorado Review *“Tender, curious, yearning, and full of astonishment, Rood’s poems reside in the wondrous entanglement of place and self, present and past, body and mystery. Rood’s poetry bears the marks of a life lived, of experience understood, just as his intimately observed California landscapes bear traces of geologic time. Insight awaits here, as a cache of ‘harder, ocean-smoothed pebbles’ emerges shining from a spine of ‘soft sandstone’ on Mount Diablo. Of such a pebble, Rood writes: ‘It is where art lives, and I can rub it in my palms.’ His poems, too, are where art lives. This book is a force of tenderness, a visitation of wisdom.” -- Liza Flum, Francois Camoin Fellow, University of Utah"Late in this ranging and wild book, this Naming the Wind, Rood offers—this in response to an older poet’s challenge—'I have power, depth, fear/ as my tones, and uncertainty as my shape.' And the beauty and the multiplicity of uncertainties—that call, that calling forth—is what this book stakes its being on; and partnered to that is the acknowledgment, throughout these pages, of the profound power of intervals, of how sound’s suspended 'until a silence glows around it.' But I would be remiss if I failed to note how the book’s populated too with visitations (sightings and sittings) and that its praises include, among others, dybbuks, Dinobots, the 'ten or fifteen turkeys eating quietly amid the/ wild oats' of Twin Peaks, as though—rising or not rising off these pages—they were the storied wild birds of heaven; and other locations named into being, places equally unlikely—'Weedlot I’ve kept my eye on for thirty years,' e.g.—as well as the tantalizing possibility of a 'walk off the path into Hallelujah.' Steven Rood writes, 'Maybe I’ll turn to dust and befriend the wind.' Read this book." -- C. S. Giscombe, author of Ohio Railroads

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Book SynopsisWinner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders. Trade Review"Perez uses this volume of poetry, his fifth in the unincorporated territory series, to ponder what healing looks like. What medicine can serve as a remedy for post-colonialism, environmental and climate collapse, rising extremism, and late-stage capitalism? Perez seems to offer answers in community, heritage, connection . . . He alternates a softer yearning for family and community with nods to the fraught legacy of Guåhan’s colonization. It’s a powerful framework, this back and forth — this poetry both slaps and slaps back: Rice becomes a motif, but so does rampant abuse at the hands of the Catholic church; so does military destruction. In this way, the work of remembering, of holding together the collective experience of trauma, becomes an active practice." * Vox *"Perez's ongoing project is one of the longest-running and most rewarding literary engagements with Pacific Islander and Indigenous poetics of the twenty-first century." * Booklist starred review *"Say you want poetry that both innovates and accumulates, something with brainteasing difficulty and world-building breadth—part modernism, part Marvel Cinematic Universe. One sure bet, for 15 years and counting, is the ongoing series from unincorporated territory by Craig Santos Perez, an indigenous Chamoru poet-scholar from Guåhan (Guam). . . . In this fifth installment, that Chamoru word is [åmot], meaning 'medicine'; the word commonly refers to plants, but as Perez explains, specialists in åmot employ a plethora of healing practices, including massage, dietary advice, and 'prayers, chants, and the invocation of i taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits'—centuries-old rituals undergirding Perez’s verbal arts." * Harriet *"A rich and expansive collection of fragments, fractals, family stories and archival material, from unincorporated territory [åmot] holds elegies for the past and present around a land and people still in flux; of occupation and mourning, loss and family, flora and fauna, documenting the visual literacies of an island and its people, examining what erodes and what holds, and what might already be lost." * rob mclennan's blog *“Perez continues to expand visual literacies of Pacific literature as he grapples with the question: what does it mean to write the ocean? Here are handwoven, blessed nets of intergenerational Chamoru stories. If a poem could unstitch a barbed wire fence, throw net, play bingo, unshipwreck Indigenous youth, care for elders, or heal a broken heart with Spam, that poem is in these pages. Propelled by gratitude, this book is a call to defy and protect, a sea of poetic innovation and care.” -- No'u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled“In from unincorporated territory [åmot], Perez sings down healing for the speaker who asks, ‘isn’t that too / what it means to be / a diasporic chamorus // to feel foreign in your own homeland.’ Each poem probes this question against the continued disenfranchisement and militarization of Guåhan and the CHamoru people. From elegies for loved ones, continual rewriting of prayer, and eating rice with the grandmother, the rituals in this collection bear the histories of family, of the church’s spiritual abuse, and of the colonization of the island. But for endurance and renewal there is hope; each poem-story is itself a plant that yields a seed the speaker gathers. Each seed bursts its casing to branch into a meeting place for inter-generational memory and wisdom. What was deemed unworthy, flowers wildly, coded in the name of the plants reclaiming their CHamoru names banking these pages. In this collection Perez’s vital poems prove yet again that his necessary and clear voice is one that shakes the foundations of nation and demands of the reader to consider their complicity in the machinations of Empire.” -- Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cutlish“[åmot], the fifth stunning collection of Perez’s series from unincorporated territory combines Guåhan’s natural and cultural histories, as well as CHamoru visual and oral literacies, to create a poetic form of healing that Édouard Glissant might have hailed an aesthetic of the Earth. Like the banyan tree that expands and strengthens through aerial roots, the poetry of [åmot] is a ‘medicinal plant’ that seeds from the diasporic roots of Guåhan, from its histories fragmented by imperialisms, from CHamoru ancestors and elders, from the egg of an exiled Micronesian Kingfisher, to radiate back to their center: Guåhan. With this fifth opus, Perez accomplishes a tour de force by literally fusing Guåhan’s natural and cultural forms with the poetic fabric, and by mapping a CHamoru ecology of healing, between home and displacement. A literary achievement carried out through lyricism, communality, humor, gratitude, and responsibility.” -- Beatrice Szymkowiak, author of Red Zone"Craig Santos Perez’s multi-volume from unincorporated territory is one of the great poetic sequences of our decolonial time, and this latest installation åmot is an urgent meditation on dispossession in the face of ecocide and a celebration of poetry’s eccentric, medicinal power to counter new and old forms of imperial violence, from military occupation to resource extraction. Against the 'latitudes & longitudes / of empire' and its 'bleached coral,' Perez deploys lyric narratives, family histories, indigenous legends, recipes, hashtags, reading lists, archipelagic calligrams, translingual jokes, (alter)native botanies, and a range of diasporic maps (Spam backwards), so as to center the 'aerial roots' that can attune us to 'the intertextual / sacredness / of all things.' In a small place like Guahån (Guam), Perez finds the oceanic language for a new kind of book that can 're-wild' the word and the world." -- Urayoán Noel

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Book SynopsisEloise Klein Healy’s A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke’s aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her reading with Caroline Kennedy at the Central Library. Also called fluent aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia affects language and the use of words. Healy’s collection shows that her brain has access to its deepest unconscious, and that place is poetry. Her deepest language is poetry. It’s as if a dancer was denied the ability to walk or run, and could only dance. Healy writes of losing her words and finding big love.

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Book SynopsisAn authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’s rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.“Love tore apart all my theories,” writes Šalamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pr

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Book SynopsisA ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.Latif Askia Ba?an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy?honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. ?This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.? Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader:?I am not here to accommodate you.?Becausethese poems are not so muchforyou as they arewithyou, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to ?relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,? all to see and sing the vital ?thing that we be.?

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Book SynopsisIn his anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community. With the wit and musicality fitting of a 90s baby raised during the Golden age of hip-hop, Cortney Lamar Charleston grapples with the landscapes of Chicago’s South Side and surrounding suburbs, and the tensions that impact a Black boy’s struggle through self-destructive definitions of manhood. While the language in these poems is playful, Charleston’s vulnerability invites readers to intimately witness the speaker’s journey from adopted persona to an authentic self that defies traditional molds.Trade ReviewWith stunning knowledge and sharp vulnerability, Cortney Lamar Charleston has rendered a classical epic of love, war, and self-discovery, in the tradition of Milton, Homer, and Virgil if they were Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. —Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro “Cortney Lamar Charleston burns his signature into these stanzas. With an unrelenting intimacy, he dares us into a narrative we think we know—Black boy vs. the scheming wiles of the city vs. the rest of his life—then backhand slaps us toward a singular experience marked by choices that can only guide the life of one man.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art “Cortney Lamar Charleston is one of our most necessary observers of Black boyhood in all its beauty and difficulty. These poems sing to us of us.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Fuel pick at the weave of oil-soaked world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives. Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

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Book SynopsisA series of poems that explores walking, writing, and making as divinatory practices. Documenting (and interrogating) the poet’s daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Gender is also a central concern in this intensely feminist work. Moriarty’s book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author’s visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break. Here she succeeds in existing—even thriving— in today’s strange, often terrifying, world.

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Book SynopsisSince the 2015 publication of The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford has delighted readers with his English-language translations of Old Norse sagas and poems that tell the tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, Hrólf Kraki, and many more. This limited-edition set collects three of Dr. Crawford's Hackett Publishing books, The Poetic Edda (2015), The Saga of the Volsungs (2017), and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes (2021) in a beautifully designed, hand-numbered, and hand-crafted slipcase box. Each book in the set features smyth-sewn hardcover bindings with new custom artwork for the front covers. The Poetic Edda features a medallion of the wolf Fenrir, The Saga of the Volsungs a medallion of the dragon/serpent Fafnir, and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes a medallion of a bear. Each volume in the set begins with a phrase hand-written by Dr. Crawford that best exemplifies the text to follow or Dr. Crawford's favorite passage from the book. The quotes in The Poetic Edda and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes also contain the runic "originals." The Poetic Edda also includes a bookplate personally signed by Dr. Crawford and hand-tipped into the front of the book.

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Book SynopsisGet through any relationship split with this collection of relatable, impassioned, and irreverent breakup haikus.When her marriage came to a sudden and infuriating end, celebrated relationship columnist Kristina Grish found solace in a unique outlet—penning fiery breakup haikus. Now, she shares her cathartic creations in a compilation designed to guide you through the wreckage of your split. In F*ck You Haiku, Kristina has compiled more than 100 breakup haikus— drawing inspiration from her own tumultuous love affairs and universal experiences that strike a chord with us all. These poetic gems serve as a lifeline for anyone grappling with heartbreak, providing a cathartic path to healing. Representing a range of emotions and clever ways to vent about your ex, these haikus are entertaining and enraging, as well as enlightening and empowering. So, if you’re currently going through a breakup—whether you did the deed or are on th

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Book SynopsisA harrowing meditation on tyranny, torture, and freedom by one of Chilé''s most celebrated contemporary poets.Raúl Zurita’s INRI is a visionary response to the atrocities committed under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In this deeply moving elegy for the dead, the whole of Chile, with its snow-covered cordilleras and fields of wildflowers, its empty spaces and the sparkling sea beyond, is simultaneously transformed into the grave of its lost children and their living and risen body. Zurita’s incantatory, unapologetically political work is one of the great prophetic poems of our new century.

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

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Book Synopsis

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