Poetry

For more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation's most popular and respected poets. Christmas Poems collects together her best festive poems, including anthology favourites such as 'The Christmas Life', together with new and previously unpublished work. Cope celebrates the joyful aspects of the season but doesn't overlook the problems and sadness it can bring. With lively illustrations to accompany the words, it is a book to enjoy this Christmas and in years to come.With illustrations by Michael Kirkham.

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"Very fast, very conceptual, funny and magical. Nobody like her. I loved her work then and now."--Eileen Myles Thirty-five years' worth of poems by Susie Timmons, a poet beloved by her peers, previously only available in small-run editions. Her poems are witty, smart, and quick, with a pleasantly surprising clarity and freshness. Susie Timmons was born in Chicago and has lived in New York most of her life. Timmons's first book of poetry, Locked from the Outside, was the inaugural winner of the Ted Berrigan Award, judged by Alice Notley, Robert Creeley, Anselm Hollo, and Ron Padgett.

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"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces--from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." --Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and grief--as love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen's writing as "a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the words find their pathways." As grounded in the earth as in the stars, her poems are reminders of the possibilities of contemplation in every space and moment. A Brief History of War And what if Jupiter is your faith a balloon but I call you by the improper names I'm stained by the world here To be brave and endure the losing To be brave and be the losing Luck Brutal Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home for fourteen years. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and As Long as Trees Last. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics privately and at Ryerson University.

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Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

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'THE BEST AMERICAN POET OF HIS GENERATION.' - TIMEGathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell's one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry. The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States' most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977).Katie Peterson's incisive selection of Lowell's poems draws attention to 'the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.' Lowell's own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience - not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was 'constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.' Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.

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In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.

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The language of flowers is as old as language itself. In the earliest poetry familiar plants were used to represent simple emotions, ideas, or states of mind: love, hope, despair, fidelity, solitude, beauty, mortality. Over time these associations entwined with myth and legend, with religious symbolism, folk and herbal lore. By the early 19th century the 'Language of Flora' had become increasingly refined, especially in England and America, where sentimental flower books listing flower meanings and illustrating them with verse were perennial bestsellers. The Everyman Language of Flowers without sacrificing the charm of its Victorian predecessors aims to provide extended, updated and rather more robust floral anthology for the 21st century, presenting poetry from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain and America, and spanning the world from Cuba to Korea, Russia to Zimbabwe. Here are Rumi and Rilke on the rose; Herrick and Louise Glück on the lily; Chaucer, Emily Dickinson and Jon Silkin on the daisy; Mary Robinson and Ted Hughes on the snowdrop; Lorenzo de Medici, John Clare and Alice Oswald on the violet; Hugo and Roethke on carnations; Ovid and Goethe on poppies; Blake and Eugenio Montale on the sunflower; Christina Rossetti on heartsease and forget-me-nots; Emily Brontë on harebells and heather, Seamus Heaney on lupins, Pasternak on night-scented stock... Eastern cultures, rich in flower associations, are well represented: there are Tang poems celebrating chrysanthemums and peonies, Zen poems about orchids and lotus flowers, poems about jasmine and marigolds from India, roses, tulips and narcissi from Persia, the Ottoman empire and the Arabic world. Flowers are arranged by season, with roses and lilies in a section of their own. In a final section poets comment directly or indirectly on the language of flowers itself. The book concludes with a selected glossary drawn from several celebrated Victorian collections.

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The informing spirit of Garrett's second collection is music – in the cadences of the language, the forms and resolutions of the poems. For her, a memorable poem is a kind of two-part invention, an interplay of the reader's imagination and the poet's intention. As in Bach's deceptively simple studies of that name, when the two discrete melodic lines of reader's and poet's imagination run parallel, polyphony is suggested. Elizabeth Garrett's debut volume The Rule of Three was one of the 20 'New Generation Poets' titles in 1994. A Two-Part Invention was her second collection.

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Peter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. The collections included (in full) in Volume 3 of his Collected Poems are: Work in Regress (1997), Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), Civil (2002) and d (2003).

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Sensual, salacious and above all scandalous, the erotic verse of the Roman poet Catullus has delighted - and shocked - readers for centuries. Charting the lives and loves of a group of smart young men about Rome during the late Republic, Catullus' urbane poetry is renowned for its emotional range and psychological insight, not to mention its often startling obscenity. Josephine Balmer's new translation of the complete shorter poems highlights both the intense lyricism and scabrous wit of the original, bringing Catullus' vivid cast of characters back to life for a new audience.

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When he was awarded an honorary degree in civil law at Newcastle University in 1967, Dr Martin Luther King gave an electrifying extemporaneous address, speaking without notes, in which he said: 'There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face today...That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty and the problem of war.' As part of a fifty year anniversary and celebration, this anthology gathers poets from both sides of the Atlantic to address the challenges set out by Dr King. It's a shock to think how little has changed, and that Martin Luther King could well be speaking right here, right now. In the spirit of Dr King and his work as a humanitarian and activist, this anthology brings together poems that offer powerful testimonies to the urgent issues Dr King defines and represents the polyphony of voices that speak in resistance to our continuing problems of racism, poverty and war. Featuring poems by Claudia Rankine, Grace Nichols, Yusef Komunyakaa, Moniza Alvi, Rita Dove, Daljit Nagra, Imtiaz Dharker, Fred D'Aguiar, Oliver de la Paz, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, John Agard, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Toi Derricotte, Vahni Capildeo, Carl Phillips, Sarah Howe, Elizabeth Alexander, Ishion Hutchinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Marilyn Nelson, Mimi Khalvati, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Pinsky, Bernardine Evaristo, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Major Jackson, Tim Seibles, Choman Hardi, Benjamin Zephaniah, Shazea Quraishi, E. Ethelbert Miller, Sandeep Parmar, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rae Paris, Kendel Hippolyte, Amali Rodrigo, Zaffar Kunial, Rishi Dastidar, Raymond Antrobus, Mai Der Vang, Martin Espada, Inua Ellams, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Gregory Pardlo, Edward Doegar, Degna Stone, MacDonald Dixon, Ada Limon, Philip Metres, Nick Makoha, Nathalie Handal, Lauren K Alleyne, Kevin Bowen, Bashabi Fraser, Satchid Anandan. Co-publication with Newcastle University.

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'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the 'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity. Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading?

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Heather Phillipson is an internationally exhibiting artist and award-winning poet. Instant-flex 718 is her much anticipated first book-length collection. She is already a widely published and anthologised poet. Her Faber New Poets pamphlet appeared in 2009, and her text Not an Essay from Penned in the Margins in 2012. She received substantial publicity as one of the first four writers featured in the Faber New Poets launch, taking part in a national tour supported by extensive TV, radio and newspaper coverage. Heather Phillipson’s poems are a protest against well-stitched seams, an off-loading of intellectual baggage, a shout from the deepish channels of fear. With its cover designed by the artist-poet herself, Instant-flex 718 is an operatics of reactivation. Phillipson has an impertinence and dynamism incomparably her own. Her poems observe the ordinary world stagger.

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Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensible to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield's structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.

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Known and loved throughout the world as the author of The Prophet, the twentieth century’s bestselling book after the Bible, the great Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran is widely regarded as one of history’s most gifted writers. With an immediate ability to connect with his audience, his profound words have transcended barriers of culture and creed to touch the hearts of millions. Compiled by the world’s foremost authority on Gibran, Professor Suheil Bushrui, The Essential Gibran draws on a wide-ranging collection of prose poems, dramatic sketches, parables, letters, essays, and national and international addresses to capture the essence of Gibran’s style and thought. With an excellent introduction to the man and his work, this impressive edition will add a fresh dimension to our understanding of one of the greatest wordsmiths of the last century.

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Gathers together the finest of Ruth Pitter's poems.

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Walking the Animals is a sort of travel book: it brings together inner and outer landscapes, the wet skies of the Pennines and the drought of the South African lowveld; landscapes of loss, landscapes of longing. Carola Luther tracks journeys between disparate worlds, between north and south, earth and air, fantasy and fact, the future, the present. Her poems explore dislocation and search, and the importance of relationship in establishing a sense of place. In her first collection, Carola Luther makes a new kind of space in poetry, both impassioned and level-headed.

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During his career John Ashbery has been hailed as the "eminence grise" of postmodernism, championed by W.H. Auden and has carried off every major literary prize. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish and tackle fundamentals. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of "Some Trees" and the disjunctive, experimentalism of "The Tennis Court Oath", to the powerful mediations on subjectivity of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and "A Wave", this collection makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.

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Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness. Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations communicate and fail to agree.

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To catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.

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Inspired by Shakespeare's songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, this collection of songlike poetry is based on the ubiquitous spread of weeds - like the shallow rooting plants, small poems can grow anywhere. In her seventh collection, Khalvati demonstrates a dazzling mastery of traditional forms and experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form comprised of an unrhymed couplet. Evoking three generations and geographies of women, "The Meanest Flower" reinstates the joyful, audible aspect of the lyric.

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"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino's famous self-portrait, has become Ashbery's best-known poem. It is accompanied here by a number of shorter pieces - playful, witty, elusive. The collection remains one of the most significant poetic achievements of our time.

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Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Her's is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.

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Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful book and an unequivocal delight" and by the LA Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the late 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg's landmark anthology Technicians of the Sacred has educated and inspired generations of poets, artists, musicians, and other readers, exposing them to the multiple possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Juxtaposing "primitive" and archaic works of art from many cultures with each other and with avant-garde and experimental poetry, Jerome Rothenberg contends that literature extends beyond specific temporal and geographic boundaries, while acting as a retort to those who would call that larger humanity into question. A half-century since its original publication, this revised and expanded third edition provides readers with a wealth of newly gathered and translated texts from recently reinvigorated indigenous cultures, bringing the volume into the present and further extending the range and depth of what we recognize and read as poetry.

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Published in 1917 by The Four Seas Press, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams’s breakthrough book and contains some of his best-loved poems (“Tract,” “Apology,” “El Hombre,” “Danse Russe,” “January Morning,” and “Smell!”), as well as a Whitmanesque concluding long poem, “The Wanderer,” that anticipates his epic masterpiece Paterson. Al Que Quiere! is the culmination of an experimental period for Williams that included his translations from Spanish. The Spanish epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is from the short story “El hombre que parecía un caballo” (“The Man Who Resembled a Horse”), by the Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez. This centennial edition contains Williams’s translation of the story, as well as his commentary from a book of conversations, I Wanted to Write a Poem, on the individual poems of Al Que Quiere!

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Byron's poetry took Europe by storm in the early nineteenth century and the poems which made him a star are here represented by a selection of the early lyrics, including still popular pieces such as 'She walks in beauty' and 'We'll go a no more a-roving'. But Byron's real talent was for comedy. He is the greatest comic poet of the Romantic movement and his comic verse is here represented by BEPPO, A VISION OF JUDGEMENT and selections from his greatest masterpiece, DON JUAN, which satirizes the very reputation for amourous adventures which helped to make Byron himself famous.

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The greatest English religious poet of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was a Jesuit priest and literary scholar whose life ended prematurely after his exhausting pastoral work among the slums of Liverpool and Dublin. His poems are dazzling celebrations of God's endless creative power couched in a uniquely expressive poetic diction, and all his mature poetry is her reprinted, together with illuminating fragments from journals, letters, sermons and lectures in which he expounds his literary and religious outlook.

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"Eyes To See Otherwise" is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. W.S. Merwin writes, "In his early books, it was immediately clear that Homero Aridjis was a poet of great vitality and originality ...[his] range grew with astonishing vigour in one book after another ...Poems of his have been published in English translation for decades but it is more than time to have a large, widely representative selection of his poems available in English". Charles Tomlinson recalls, "When I first met Homero Aridjis, he was a youthful poet. He has carried that sense of youth with him throughout his life and it has left a mark on all his work. Born in a Mexican village, near which the monarch butterflies swarm yearly after their flight from Canada, he experienced early life in a profound relationship with the cycles of nature. This lies at the root of his two principal concerns, poetry and ecology. He not only writes of the whale, but has long fought for the protection of its breeding places in Baja California". Kenneth Rexroth calls him "a visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces". He adds, "These are words for a new "Magic Flute"".

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This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other.

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If you've ever wondered what happened to the young fellow from Malta who bought his grandfather an altar…If you're concerned about the camper called Jack who found a huge snake in his pack…And if you suspect that an eccentric landowner called Grey spent Christmas a very strange way but aren't sure precisely what that entailed…Then a dip into Michael Palin's Sackful of Limericks will provide all the answers – and a lot of fun besides.

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Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.

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Tom Raworth's Collected Poems (2003) was acclaimed by the Times Literary Supplement as a milestone: thirty years' work by a major poet of English modernism gathered for the first time. Raworth moves on, radical, inventive and politically engaged. Windmills on Fire takes a vertiginous ride through the language landscape we inhabit. Poems fragment and distort, veer in unexpected directions, reconfigure. Playful, often funny, Windmills on Fire is fuelled by anger at the use of language as an instrument of political deceit and military aggression.

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The first definitive collected edition of American poet Edward Dorn s writings, this irrepressibly offbeat volume marries the old West with American counterculture. As it celebrates Dorn s epic poem "Gunslinger, "this collection which is both wonderfully resourceful in tone and idiom puts Edward Dorn on an equal footing with his masters."

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Unreeling like a series of film clips recorded during a stroll through Paris, Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets is wickedly funny. It is also a bittersweet meditation on the effects of time and memory. Hitting the Streets is Queneau's love letters to Paris - a Paris that is always in the process of becoming obsolete. This lively, idiomatic version is the first complete translation available in English.

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Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection 'At last the night surrounded me; / I floated on it, perhaps in it, / or it carried me as a river carries / a boat'. In Louise Gluck's new collection, night takes on the dimensions of myth, becomes the setting for a sequence of journeys and explorations through time and memory, as the speaker of the poems moves backwards into childhood and forwards into 'the kingdom of death'. Gluck draws equally on the worlds of fairy-tale, of dream and of waking life, each poem a door into a narrative both haunting and compellingly beautiful.

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In this new translation of Hesiod, Barry B. Powell gives an accessible, modern verse rendering of these vibrant texts, essential to an understanding of early Greek myth and society. With stunning color images that help bring to life the contents of the poems and notes that explicate complex passages, Powell's fresh renditions provide an exciting introduction to the culture of the ancient Greeks. This is the definitive translation and guide for students and readers looking to experience the poetry of Hesiod, who ranks alongside Homer as an influential poet of Greek antiquity.

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First published by Azul Editions in 1993, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems is the only book-length collection of Mir's poetry in English translation. The eight poems selected include several of his signature pieces from the late 1940s through the 1970s: “Countersong to Walt Whitman”; “There Is a Country in the World”; “If Somebody Wants to Know Which Is My Country”; “To the Battleship Intrepid”; “Not One Step Back”; “Amen to Butterflies”; “Concerto of Hope for the Left Hand”; “Meditation on the Shores of Evening.” The introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant, author of Caribbean Poetics (Peepal Tree Press), and foreword by Jean Franco, author of Cruel Modernity (Duke University Press), enable a broader appreciation for the personal context and general impact of Mir's work. A selected bibliography of works by and about the poet, including an accounting of the prose he has published as a novelist, author of short stories, essayist, and historian, provides readers with ample resources for further appreciation of Mir's achievement. In his introduction, Torres-Saillant emphasizes: “The present bilingual edition... will give both Spanish- and English-speaking readers... the opportunity to recognize themselves in the poetic visage of one of the most authentic literary artists to have come from the Caribbean.” About the first publication, Roberto Márquez stated in the Village Voice: “The publication, in bilingual format, of this first book-length anthology of work by the Dominican Republic's internationally acclaimed and locally celebrated National Poet is an event—long anticipated, too long delayed... Colleague, contemporary, and the equal in lyric vitality, epic ambition, and communal significance to Pablo Neruda or Nicolás Guillén, Mir remains, with Martinique's Aimé Césaire, perhaps the most masterfully elegant and majestic among the living voices of a generation that boasts more than its share of world-class poets... [Mir's] poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its landscape, peoples, and societies.”

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Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.

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Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, a playwright, and a director. He is the author of five books of poetry, including "Birthright" and "Fault Lines," and his writing has been featured in various journals, such as the "Greenfield Review" and the "Massachusetts Review," as well as in the anthologies "Caribbean Poetry Now" and "Voiceprint." He has twice won the Minvielle & Chastanet Fine Arts Award for Literature and was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit in 2000.""

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From the first poem to the last, Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately 'til morning cum. From the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica for some couples, to the manipulation of heterosexual marriage conventions in Barbados in the name of love, to the freedom of sexual abandon and the fulfilment of desire in Amsterdam, this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams. Ultimately, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.

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