Poetry / Poems

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Poetry Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers’ WeekThrough four highly acclaimed collections, Colette Bryce has steadily consolidated her position as one of the most important of the younger generation of Irish poets. Possessed of a preternaturally acute ear and eye, Bryce is the recorder and observer of tense times: perhaps no contemporary poet has better mapped the fault-lines of nation and family, of love and tribal loyalty, of landscape and border. In all this, Bryce again and again declares the primacy of song as a redemptive practice, and a glorious end in itself: no voice is more accurately pitched or effortlessly musical. Selected Poems draws together the best of her poetry from The Heel of Bernadette to The Whole & Rain-domed Universe, winner of the Ewart-Biggs Award, and is a marvellous introduction to the range and sweep of Bryce’s work.Trade Review[Bryce's] poems, sensitive as the needle that registers some distant earth tremor, are delicately poised . . . Bryce's vision is questing, disquieting, dark . . . as she seeks out the truths of life and love that transform the human heart * The Times *

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Book SynopsisPoet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and her friends across the country offer poems in praise of the magic of reading. In Off the Shelf: A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has commissioned a selection of the UK's most loved and lauded poets to each write a poem in celebration of books and bookshops - the worlds they hold, the freedoms they promise, and the memories they evoke. From a basement of forgotten books to the shelves of a cramped Welsh arcade, from the poetry corner of the local bookstore to the last bookshop standing in a post-apocalyptic world, these are poems that pay tribute to all the places that house the stories we treasure.With poems from Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish Makar Jackie Kay, National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, as well as Clive James, Michael Longley, Don Paterson, Patience Agbabi and many more, this beautiful anthology is a heart-warming reminder of how books nourish us, save us, and inspire us.

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Book SynopsisNorth of Boston (1914) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Following the success of Frost’s debut, A Boy’s Will (1913), North of Boston was published in London to enthusiastic reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. His success abroad quickly translated to critical acclaim in the United States, and Frost would eventually be recognized as a leading American poet. “Mending Wall” takes place in spring, as the people emerge from their homes to assess the damage done by the long, dark winter. Observing that parts of the stone wall on the edge of his property have fallen, the poet joins his neighbor “to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again.” Although he feels they “do not need the wall,” his neighbor insists that “’Good fences make good neighbours,’” continuing down the line to reinforce the space between them. A meditation on humanity, civilization, and democracy, “Mending Wall” is an iconic and frequently anthologized poem. 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. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Robert Frost’s North of Boston is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisHelen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s second collection, published several years before she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Helen of Troy and Other Poems revels in the mystery of existence itself. “Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn / The flames' red wings soar upward duskily. / This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead / That sparkled so the day I saw it first, / And darkened slowly after. I am she / Who loves all beauty—yet I wither it.” As Troy burns, Teasdale imagines an impassioned monologue given from the ramparts by the infamous Helen, whose faithlessness in marriage was the catalyst for war in Homer’s Iliad. Although she is often seen as a minor character, more an object of male desire than an autonomous subject in her own right, Teasdale refuses to follow the template passed down by generations of poets—mostly men. Her Helen is meditative and intelligent, capable of immense sorrow and full-throated rage alike: “Men’s lives shall waste with longing after me, / For I shall be the sum of their desire, / The whole of beauty, never seen again.” While acknowledging her role in Troy’s destruction, Helen is a tragic figure in Teasdale’s poem, a woman who never asked for beauty, let alone for the troubles that beauty brought down on the world. Containing monologue poems from such figures as Sappho, Beatrice, and Guenevere, alongside a series of love poems and finely-crafted sonnets, Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a brilliant collection by a gifted American poet. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdale’s Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

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Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY ?A powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air TrafficElegant, profound, and intoxicating?Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo?s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (?flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons?); and more.At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice?and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: ?If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician?s / paints.?

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Book SynopsisA revised and expanded edition of the bestselling Explorations of a Cosmic Soul. Align your soul and spirit with this beautiful collection of poetry straight from the author’s heart. Written by Allie Michelle, this edition includes her author notes that convey the energy she experienced when writing these poems. Inspiring and powerful, Allie's words will sweep you off your feet delivering the message that YOU are a cosmic being.

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Book Synopsis welcome to the beautiful universe of Henn Kim who are you when you're alone Starry Night, Blurry Dreams is a collection of visual poetry about loneliness, love and existing in our world. a heavy heart is hard to carry hold on When words aren't enough to describe our emotions, this book will offer comfort, joy and a friend in the dark. we all have our own beautiful universe 'An intoxicating mix of familiarity and surreality' - Creative Review Trade ReviewFilled with page after page of beautiful and painfully true words and artworks, this is a compelling and unique collection that is more than worthy of a place on your bookshelves * Red *Experiencing Henn’s work makes for a a surreal but serene whole . . . vulnerable, sweet yet complicated love stories that anyone can relate to. * WePresent *An intoxicating mix of familiarity and surreality, they offer a poignant commentary on the themes that affect all of us at one point or another, from heartbreak to fantasy to sorrow. * Creative Review *The evocative illustrations of Henn Kim form a new graphic poem [which] riffs off her teenage desire to connect to other, possibly lost souls, through words and images * Harper's Bazaar *

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Book SynopsisA parliament of fools, or a confederacy of dunces? Blethering celebrities and blundering politicians, royal babies and right royal cock-ups, milkshake madness and vegan sausage rolls - and, of course, the long and winding road to Brexit. If ever the times were ripe for a return to the high days of Augustan satire, it’s now – and the Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith provides it. Our Times in Rhymes is a waspish, affectionate and very funny look at the state of our nation as it – let's be even-handed - teeters on the cliff-edge of a marvellous opportunity. Here is all the insanity and inanity of 2019, month by cherishable month, rendered in galloping comic verse and paired with satirical drawings by the brilliant cartoonist Edith Pritchett. It makes the perfect Christmas stocking filler for anyone who needs a good laugh at the damnable times we live in.Trade ReviewSam Leith…has turned to verse to unpick the ‘insanity and inanity’ of the year that was 2019 so you can relive the madness and the hilarity month by month -- Emelia Hamilton-Russell * Spears Wealth Management Survey *A new Dunciad specifically for 2019. When times get weird what's the point of a million rancorous tweets? Far better to follow Sam Leith's lead and conduct our discourses solely in sonnets * Martin Rowson *A gloriously satirical take on a darkly savage year. Leith transforms 2019 from bad to verse * Ben Schott *

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Book SynopsisA posthumous collection of poetry from Patrick Lane, compiled and edited by Lorna Crozier.In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies?the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river?ultimately revealing a tangled web of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.Together, the poems in The Quiet in Me are a clear-eyed and sharp meditation on existing in a world pulsing between life and death, death and life. When the body is ?a museum for what?s gone? and a heart is ?the sound of the wind seething,? there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet; the language of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn: ?the song of the falling water and wild birds.?With incredible poetic precision, this collection is an offering?to come back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight, sound and sense. Playing in paradoxes??empty marrow bones with their strings of red ants??these poems cultivate dualisms: intimacy and realism, vulnerability and the roughness of youth, a scar that is a father?s teaching, a blade that is a sigh.From one of Canada?s most lyric writers comes a book steeped in the wisdom of the natural world. Told by an eye that never ceases to observe and a heart that is willing to make itself known?to invite others into its warmth and wilderness?this collection transposes leaf to leaf, stone to stone, reminding us that water will always return to water and so will we.

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Book SynopsisThe latest from a Lambda Literary Award-winning poet, about the way we survive, revolt, and thrive.

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Book SynopsisAn incendiary debut poetry collection by Arielle Twist: an exploration of death, metamorphosis, and resurgence.

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Book Synopsis "...spare, psalmlike poems....Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection...provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it." —Publishers Weekly "(Hauge''s) poetry is miniaturist, pictorial, and ruminative; personal in that his experience, cognitive and sensual observations, and intentions are everywhere in it. Yet it isn''t at all confessional or self-assertive....He is a man who knows where he is and helps us feel that we can know where we are, too."—Booklist “If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples.”—Robert Bly, from the introduction Olav H. Hauge, one of Norway’s most beloved poets, is a major figure of twentieth-century European poetry. This generous bilingual edition—introduced by Robert Bly—includes the best poems from each of Hauge’s seven books, as well as a gathering of his last poems. Ever sage and plainspoken—and bearing resemblance to Chinese poetry—Hauge’s compact and classically restrained poems are rooted in his training as an orchardist, his deep reading in world literatures, and a lifetime of careful attention to the beauties and rigors of the western fjordland. His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous, an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand. The rose has been sung about.I want to sing of the thorns,and the root—how it gripsthe rock hard, hardas a thin girl’s hand. During a writing career that spanned nearly fifty years, Olav H. Hauge produced seven books of poetry, numerous translations, and several volumes of correspondence. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot in the fjord region of western Norway.

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Book Synopsis A Zen-Taoist poetry classic, in a handsome Chinese-English format This definitive translation of Han Shan’s poetry appears in a bilingual Chinese-English format. Included are extensive notes, a preface by renowned translator Red Pine, a findings list, and photographs of the cave and surrounding area where Han Shan (“Cold Mountain”) lived. Cold Mountain is one of the most revered poets in China. He was a Taoist/Buddhist hermit who begged for food at temples, often sang and drank with cowherds, and became an immortal figure in the history of Chinese literature and Zen. His poems were written twelve-hundred years ago on the rocks, trees, and temple walls of China’s Tientai Mountains. This revised edition also includes poems by Han Shan’s colleagues, Pickup (Shih-te) and Big Stick (Feng-kan), translated here for the first time. As Red Pine begins his Preface, “If China’s literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country’s greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China’s temples and shines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well.” Reviews of Red Pine''s Collected Songs of Cold Mountain: ”The translator’s preface describes his rendition of the life of Cold Mountain, offering an excellent historical and philosophical context for the simple yet profound poems attributed to the poet."—Library Journal “These are poems one must taste fully and drink whole... The poems of Han-shan read like a journal or memoir, and they often work as Zen koans, challenging the mind to go beyond the words and reason.”—Parabola “Red Pine... has given us the first full collection of Han Shan’s songs in an idiom that is clear, graceful, and neutral enough to last... His translations are accurate and mirror the music of the originals... The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain is a considerable performance and a truly valuable book. Thanks to Copper Canyon''s high standards of bookmaking, it is beautiful to hold and behold; thanks to Red Pine’s care, it will survive as the definitive text of Han Shan in English for many years. It belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in poetry and... should be opened often."—The Bloomsbury Review “An exquisite publication that captures the Taoist practice of passionate attention, of being still inside and relaxed in the comforts and discomforts around you, going nowhere else... We discover this in the poet’s vision and spirit, in the precision and balance of the translator’s scholarship and heart, and in the elegant wilderness of the bookmaker’s art around them. On every level this is a beautiful book.”—Judges’ comments on awarding the WESTAF Award in Translation “Cold Mountain’s colloquial poetry...sound like inspired raps—marvelously direct, with skips, jumps, verbal nudges and abrupt revelations... The volume is beautifully produced, with a long and careful introduction... This is an indispensable book.”—The Berkeley Monthly “More than anyone else, Red Pine has made [Han Shan’s] spontaneous poems accessible to Western readers... In this new, expanded edition, invaluable notes and an extensive new critical preface provide a contextual awareness, not just for the poems, but for their sources in Buddhist and Confucian culture.”—Inquiring Mind Red Pine is one of the world’s leading translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His other translations include Lao-tzu’s Taoteching (isbn 9781556592904) and Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (isbn 9781556591952).

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Book Synopsis"Bass's workabout marriage and parenting, illness and recovery, small daily pleasurescultivates an exuberance that's born of, and balanced by, close watchfulness." The New York TimesA bold and passionate new collection Intimacy is rarely conveyed as gracefully as in Bass's lustrous poems. BooklistIndigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life's complexities. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife's return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own succulent skin, the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents' lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

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Book SynopsisEditors'' Choice Selection, The New York Times Book Review** Starred Reviews ** in Library Journal and Booklist "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet's work... [a] landmark collection."Raul Niño, Booklist, starred review"[E]ven the readers who know him may not know that Harrison began as a poet and remained one for the rest of his life. [Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is] a massive and bounteous body of work that would have made Harrison a significant American writer even if he had never published in any other genre."The New York Times Book Review, Editors'' Choice "In a collection that spans decades of living and writing, there are poems of every character, many of them superb."Library Journal, starred reviewThis densely rich book...places Harrison among the pantheon of our best American poets. New York Journal of Books"I''ve always loved Jim Harrison''s poetryso full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed. I think of him in many ways as a religious poet and was surprised that he was excluded from Harold Bloom''s anthology American Religious Poems. It seemed quite the oversight."Joy Williams, The Paris Review"That's what makes his poetry so intimate: the sense that it comes to us without filter, without the expectations or necessity of narrative. It is why I will always think of Harrison, most of all, as a poet."David Ulin, AltaWhen [Jim Harrison: Complete Poems] arrives in the mail I stare at it for a time a little dumbfounded. It is gorgeous and it is massive. The next day I carried it north with me to the Flathead Indian Reservation. I am teaching poetry to fourth- and fifth graders there. At the beginning of each of four classes I held the book up for everyone to see. We passed it around so everyone could feel its heft, see the photo on the back cover of the grizzled poet, his eyes turned down, drawing on the ubiquitous cigarette. I described it as a physical representation of a life devoted to poetry and how wonderful that is. I was asked how long it will take me to read the whole thing. A lifetime,' I answer.Chris La Tray, The Missoulian"Harrison described his own work as (c)rude, holy, natural, political, sexual,' and page after page here he hits those notes time and again."Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"The publication of the Jim Harrison: Complete Poems will be the major poetic event of the season." Paul Yamazaki, City Lights BooksellersJim Harrison's poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life's landscapes, events, and fellow creatures. His direct, chiselled statements of thought, feeling, and invention make the world bigger in every dimension. Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares"Some of the poems are funny, some are serious, and many are bawdy, but none will disappoint a reader." Bill Castanier, Lansing City Pulse"To say that Harrison's Complete Poems is Shakespearian in scope is probably an exaggeration, but only a little. Harrison certainly had far more time than the Bard to devote to his literary endeavors. . . . There is no denying the power and influence of his ghazals of the early 1970s, and if his voracious appetite for experience offends some readers, it's clear he was one of the major poets of the last six decades, someone who believed ''in the Resurrection mostly / because he was never taught how not to.''"California Review of BooksFrom the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great onesan elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. ''Such a powerful wounded poetwrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,'' said Jorie Graham."Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America's iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem correspondence with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser.Weaving throughout nearly 1000 pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weekly called him, an untrammeled renegade genius a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.The Heart''s Work: Jim Harrison''s Poetic Legacy: The Heart''s Work is a multi-book, multi-year publishing project by Copper Canyon Press to secure and advance Jim Harrison''s poetic legacy. To date, books published as part of the The Heart''s Work include The Essential Poems, Collected Ghazals (with afterword by Denver Butson), Jim Harrison: Complete Poems (produced as both a single volume and a three-volume box set, with introductions by Terry Tempest Williams, Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman), and the paperback printing of Dead Man''s Float. New projects forthcoming!Limited Edition Box Set: Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. (The ISBN for the box set is 9781556596414.) Print run was limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. As of March 2022, the box set is sold out and has been listed out-of-print. Copies may be available from the publisher.First Edition Points: Please note that there is no indication of first edition on the copyright page of the single volume of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems . To confirm a first edition, check the attribution on the poem "She" (page 886): First editions have only a single attribution, Alta, 2021, and all subsequent printings also include the attribution Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 2016.

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Book SynopsisA lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go.In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called wakas, each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to namewith reverence, economy, and whimsythe ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.

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Book SynopsisSexy, outspoken, and explosive, the terrorist of Soto's debut collection resists police violence with linguistic verve and radical honesty.This debut poetry collection demands the abolition of policing and human caging. In Diaries of a Terrorist, Christopher Soto uses the we pronoun to emphasize that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities. His poetics open the imagination towards possibilities of existence beyond the status quo. Soto asks, Who do we call terrorist, & why? These political surrealist poems shift between gut-wrenching vulnerability, laugh-aloud humor, and unapologetic queer punk raunchiness. Diaries of a Terrorist is groundbreaking in its ability to speakfrom a local to a global scaleabout one of the most important issues of our time.

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Book Synopsis[To] The Last [Be] Human collects fourextraordinary poetry books?Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway?byPulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts permillion; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. Thebody of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of thoseeighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, writtenfrom within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rifewith hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerfulto experience ? Graham?s poems are turned to face our planet?s deep-timefuture, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. Butthey are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they arevery far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: topreserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when?the future / takes shape / too quickly,? when we are entering ?a time / beyondbelief.? They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form?.Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeinglanguage; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping giftof the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ?whirling robehumming with firstness,? there to ?greet you if you eye-up.? I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry forpresentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ?Wind would benice but / it?s only us shaking.? ? To read these four twenty-first-centurybooks together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patternsforming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing withinthemselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song thatjoins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of thelast book:The earth saidremember me. The earth saiddon?t let go,said it one daywhen I wasaccidentallylistening?

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Book SynopsisDynamically pairing traditional and experimental forms, Philip Metres traces ancient and modern migrations in an investigation of the ever-shifting idea of home. In Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and cut-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—in order to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism.  Fugitive/Refuge pronounces the urge both to remember the past and to forge new poetic forms and ways of being in language. In one section, Metres meditates on the Arabic greeting—ahlan wa sahlan—and asks how older forms of welcome might offer gen

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Book SynopsisNavigating the uncertainty of a divided China wracked by warfare and corruption, Tao Yuanming?s poetry?expertly translated by Red Pine?chooses the path walked by China?s ancient sages, finding joy in living a simple life. The latest work in Red Pine?s rich career of translation, Choosing to be Simple: Collected Poems of Tao Yuanming, is a definitive portrait of the early Chinese politician and poet. Thoroughly researched and beautifully translated, this bilingual collection of over 160 verses chronicles Tao Yuanming?s path from civil servant to reclusive poet during the formative Six Dynasties period (220?589). Familiar scenes like farming and contemplating the nature of work and writing are examined with intimate honesty. As Red Pine illuminates Tao Yuanming?s sensitive voice, we find the poet?s solace and sorrow in a China transformed by modernity. Tao Yuanming?s distinct verse shows a keen attention to rhythm as he explores the tension of scarcity and indulgence, duty and escape. Reverberating with clarity and sincerity and laced with humor, the poems of Choosing to Be Simple portray a man?s timeless desire to live by the principles enshrined by China?s sages. Guided by Tao Yuanming?s own wonderment, we, too, find ourselves asking: ?Why did I ever question my heart?? We are encouraged to find joy in simplicity?the tending of a garden, the sharing of wine with a stranger.

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Book SynopsisIf a Mountain Lion Could Sing gathers 120 translations of Xin Qiji’s verses, exploring universal concepts of solitude, duty, youth, love, and nostalgia. Red Pine gathers and translates 120 of Xin Qiji’s lyric poems in his latest bilingual collection, If a Mountain Lion Could Sing. Visiting the very places where Xin composed his stanzas—the cassia trees of the Wu River, boathouses along the Yangzi—and paying respect at the poet’s grave, translation becomes a spiritual and physical exercise for Red Pine. In his skilled hands, Xin’s revolutionary consciousness is firmly on display. Political themes and ideas of intimacy cross paths, moving between the voices of statesman and lover. Written over 800 years ago, Xin’s verses leap across centuries to relay the universal concepts of solitude, duty, youth, aging, love, and nostalgia. Though “true mirrors are hard to come by,” Xin’s poems serve as haunting reflections of the self.

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Book SynopsisNavigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor, Close Escapes searches for an answer to our earthly existence by way of visions only the blind can see.  “Never ''in'' time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”

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Book SynopsisA compendium of stories about the importance of poems in people’s lives, accumulating a remarkable history of Copper Canyon Press. For its fiftieth anniversary, Copper Canyon Press invited a broad community of staffers, board members, and poets to help curate a celebratory anthology that it named A House Called Tomorrow. The response to that invitation, however, exceeded the book. The Press received so many stories about the poems, from people far and wide, that it knew it had to publish a second volume—this one.  Come Shining is both an oral (and visual) history of Copper Canyon Press and a lasting testament to the power of poetry within people’s lives. If A House Called Tomorrow is the birthday cake, this is the birthday party: a joyous din of reminiscences, laughter, support, and yet more poems, all bound between two covers. Contributor stories are organized across thematic sections—such as “Personal Voltas” and “Stories for Our Tomorrow”—and are accompanied by a timeline of the Press, historic photos, and facsimiles of touching notes that Copper Canyon has received from readers and poets. The result is a remarkable account of a half-century of publishing, proof positive that poetry is, indeed, vital to language and living.

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Book SynopsisAmidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love. Fiercely self-aware and ?utterly present tense,? Traci Brimhall?s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift?the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth?a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet ?cannot live in or leave,? she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in ?a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.? Told through various forms?aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay?Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.

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Book SynopsisSpanning four decades of writing—and including never-before-seen poems—The Essential C.D. Wright carries the reverence and wisecracking lyricism of poems that reshaped American poetry. The Essential C.D. Wright, with a moving introduction by Forrest Gander, gathers rare selections from across her entire oeuvre—from the first book, Room Rented by a Single Woman (1978), through the final collection, Shall Cross, which was in production at the time of her unexpected death in 2016. It also presents readers with the very first look at a remarkable selection of works that have been entirely unpublished until now. Tracing a writing life that spans more than four decades, this collection illuminates works that remain empowered by an unrelenting independence, a reverence for mentors, and wry wisecracking lyricism. It is a powerful entry in Copper Canyon''s revered Essential series, which has provided reader-friendly editions of some of contemporary poetry''s most important voices. C.D. Wright introduced a contemporary audience to the promise and power of docupoetics, while pushing the musical boundaries of vernacular speech and reshaping American poetry. Formally restless and energetic, The Essential C.D. Wright stands as a staple in the larger poetic landscape.

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Book SynopsisA call to anyone who thought they were alone on the journey, Incantations for Rest is for kindred spirits: neurodivergent folks, parents up late past bedtime nursing resentment, Black people in predominantly white spaces—anyone who has found themselves at the edges of Beloved Community.Incantations for Rest is an invitation to slow down and explore every kind of rest, providing sacred space for those exhausted by the demands of a racist, ableist society. This stunning collection of poems, meditations, and magic by poet-activist Atena O. Danner is an examination of spiritual spaces, a love letter to Black well-being, and medicine for BIPOC people. Within these pages you are invited to savor connection, question assumptions, admit to complicated feelings, and still make room for joy. It is a beacon of affirmation and a vital tool for ritual and reflection.Trade Review“My tensed shoulders relaxed while reading the radical care captured within Incantations for Rest. Atena O. Danner wields her powerful magic by bringing the systems that produce the weariness of racial and ableist oppression to light while she also lovingly rubbing a healing balm upon her rest-worthy readers’ spirits." —Sekile M. Nzinga, author of Lean Semesters: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequity and editor of Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering, and the Academy“Atena O. Danner has offered the world a reflection and revelation on legacy, imagination, and truthful naming in Incantations for Rest: Poems, Meditations, and Other Magic. Moving back in time to visceral memory and ancestral lineage and stretching out into a connected collective future where we leave no one behind, these poems are both a mending to the weary and a hymn to affirming what matters. I will be returning to them again and again throughout the years, for guidance, fortification, and magic. —Isabel Abbott, author of Salt + Honey: secular prayers for hedonistic hearts“Atena O. Danner’s poems invite us into the universal, while also singing praise and honor of what it means to be a Black woman in today’s United States. She covers specifics and love of her community via the heartbreak and joy voiced via such powerful pieces as ‘Generational Wealth,’ ‘Reciprocity,’ ‘Giving Each Other Our Flowers,’ and ‘Ancestors of the Page and Call.’ This heart-centered collection is the balm that can bring all of us to better love, understanding and movement toward a just world fit for our beloved generations to come." —Jen Haines, poet and educator“How deeply we need this invitation to divine rest—these spells for singing out, for swimming alone, for the beauty of Blackness, and for being ourselves, whoever we are. I will be reaching for this book for public worship and private reflection. I love how personal yet accessible and universal Danner’s poetry is, honoring her own experience and ancestors while calling each of us to grow and feel our interconnectedness. I feel honored now to witness the truth and beauty she has nurtured in this book. She has given birth to art and magic. Keep this book in your spiritual medicine kit.” —Erin J. Walter, editor of Care for the World: Reflections on Community Ministry“Whether you are an avid reader of poetry collections or a casual appreciator of the occasional poem, you'll want to add this book to your repertoire. To call Atena O. Danner's poems ‘incantations’ is exactly right—these are incantations, spells, prayers, recipes, and passionate calls to rest, care, and liberation. A long-time organizer and educator, Atena O. Danner offers balms for the weary, reminding us to rest so that we can show up for others in the ways we most want to. Reading these is a gift for anyone feeling worn down by the big (systems of oppression, especially against Black women and femmes) and the small (the everyday challenges of parenting, for example.) Since I read this collection, I've been keeping these incantations close. They work as monthly meditations or daily affirmations—reminders to breathe, to sing, to ‘pour love into an active volcano.’ —Coya Paz, writer, director, and artistic director of Free Street TheaterTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Storyteller’s Invocation Decatur, Georgia Creeks Mending Prayer for Artists and Creatives Ancestors of the Page and the Call Conspiracy Sharing Of the Altar Singing Prayer Evolution of Worship Lineage of Magic Facebook Vespers Simple Parts of Faith Sharing Losses Swimming Alone The Divine Audacity of Bree Newsome Reckon: Reclaim Changeling Generation Teacher to Teacher to Teacher Divine Right to Rest Litany for the Exhausted Litany of Oops and Ouch Litanies of Worthiness Labyrinth Chant Benediction to Build a World Psalm of Talents A Spell for Warriors and Heroes Thinking of Mathew Reciprocity Spirit Does Election Night 2020 Every Storm Runs Out of Rain Blessing of the Instigators Giving Each Other Our Flowers Humble yourself before the brutal lessons of the free Black child! Combing Liturgy A Normal Conversation About Attending UU Churches Unconditional Earth In Darkness, All Things Are Possible MYOB A Black Daughter Speaks of Rivers Generational Wealth Praise Song for a Desert Rock Spitting Out Rocks Instincts Attention Deficit Invocations Dear Fear, Earthen Vessel Revenge Bedtime Contemplation Stories and Stars Kuumba and the Fourth Principle

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Book SynopsisFrom the celebrated author of Philomath, an astonishingly inventive collection of poems illuminating human, planetary, and personal survival. Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity, she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a Lazarus speciescreatures thought vanished, even while they live. Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla's space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like The Euthanasia Coaster, a Desert Theater, and Paradise Lust.Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.

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Book SynopsisCalled the "Tenth Muse" by the ancients, Greece's greatest female lyric poet Sappho (ca. 610-580 b.c.e.) spent the majority of her life on the famed island of Lesbos. Passionate and breathtaking, Sappho's poems survive only in fragments following religious conspiracies to silence her. Sappho penned immortal verse on the intense power of the female libido; on the themes of romance, love, yearning, heartbreak, and personal relationships with women. This work retains the standard numerical order of the fragments and has been arranged in six sections. Distinguished poet and lecturer Paul Roche's translation of The Love Songs of Sappho is enhanced with his brilliant essay, "Portrait of Sappho," as well as a lucid historical introduction by celebrated feminist and classicist Page duBois.

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Book SynopsisRomano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and soul that display a profundity the post-modern reader only thinks he possesses. In an expanded collection of Rilke’s sonnets, Rick Anthony Furtak not only makes this lyrical masterpiece accessible to the English reader, but he proves himself a master of sorts as well. His introduction that elaborates on Rilke’s marriage of vision and voice, intention and enigma, haunted companionship and abandonment is a stand-alone marvel for the reader. Furtak’s praised translation of Sonnets to Orpheus (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is surpassed in this much broader collection of verse that also includes the original German text. It is Furtak’s great achievement that Rilke resonates with the contemporary reader, who uncertain and searching wants to believe that the vision of existence can mirror much more than his own consciousness. In his feat of rendering Rilke in English, contextualizing the philosophical meanings of verse, and presenting literary romanticism, Furtak provides a formidable contribution to the vindication of true poetic voice.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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