A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Random House USA Inc The Shout
Book SynopsisNow in paperback, the powerful selected work of Simon Armitage, the most distinctive poetic voice of contemporary Britain.Simon Armitage is arguably the leading British poet of the past twenty years. His knowledge of the English just as they are (a gentleman farmer / living on reduced means, a cricketer's widow, / sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas), his colloquial Yorkshire wit and eye for situational ironies, his ability to steal up on us with the surreal while capturing the ordinary speech of everyday life: these qualities place him at the forefront of British poetry today. This slim volume is the perfect introduction to his work for newcomers, or the ideal selection for longtime readers to keep on the bedside table.
£15.30
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group F
Book SynopsisFranz Wright is at his best in this beautiful and startling collection. In these riveting poems, as he considers his mortality, the poet finds a new elation and clarity on the page, handing over for our examination the flawed yet kneeling-in-gratitude self he has become.Wright declares, “I’ve said all that / I had to say. / In writing. / I signed my name. / It’s death’s move.” F stands both for Franz, the poet-speaker who represents all of us on our baffling lifelong journeys, and for the alphabet, the utility and sometimes brutality of our symbols. (It may be, he jokes grimly, his “grade in life.”) From “Entries of the Cell,” the long central poem that details the loneliness of the single soul, to short narrative prose poems and traditional lyrics, Wright revels in the compensatory power of language, observing the daytime headlights following a hearse, or the wind, “blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return.”
£15.20
Alfred A. Knopf A Night in Brooklyn
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£13.60
Random House USA Inc Joyce Poems and a Play
Book SynopsisThis selection of the major poems James Joyce published in his lifetime is accompanied by his only surviving play, Exiles. Joyce is most celebrated for his remarkable novel Ulysses, and yet he was also a highly accomplished poet. Chamber Music is his debut collection of lyrical love poems, which he intended to be set to music; in it, he enlivens the styles of the Celtic Revival with his own brand of playful irony. Pomes Penyeach, a collection written while Joyce was working on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, sounds intimately autobiographical notes of passion and betrayal that would go on to resonate throughout the rest of his work. Joyce’s other poems include the moving “Ecce Puer,” written on the occasion of the birth of his grandson, and his fiery satires “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner.” Exiles was written after Joyce had left Ireland, never to return; it is a rich
£16.00
Random House USA Inc Monster Verse
Book SynopsisMonster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman brings to life a colorful menagerie of fantastical creatures from across the ages. Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of da
£16.00
Random House USA Inc Cavafy Poems
Book SynopsisThe Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) is a towering figure of twentieth-century literature. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the taboos of his time surrounding homoerotic desire. In this edition, award-winning translator and editor Daniel Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet’s best-loved works, including such favorites as “Waiting for the Barbarians,” “Ithaca,” and “The God Abandons Antony.” Accompanied by Mendelsohn’s explanatory notes, the poems collected here cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy’s own lifetime. Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poems make the historic profoundly and movingly personal.
£16.00
Random House USA Inc Arabic Poems
Book SynopsisA bilingual anthology of poems from the sixth century to the present, Arabic Poems is a one-of-a-kind showcase of a fascinating literary tradition, here presented in stunning pocket-sized hardcover, with English and Arabic on facing pages. The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. Themes of love, nature, religion, and politics recur in works drawn from the pre-Islamic oral tradition through poems anticipating the recent Arab Spring.Editor Marlé Hammond has selected more than fifty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds: for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland, and for change and renewal. Poets include the legendary pre-Islamic warrior ‘Antara, medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, the mystical poet Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, and the influential Egyptian Romantic Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi. Here too are literary giants of the past century: Khalil Jibran, author of the best-selling The Prophet; popular Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani; Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan; Mahmoud Darwish, bard of occupation and exile; acclaimed iconoclast Adonis; and more. In their evocations of heroism, nostalgia, mysticism, grief, and passion, the poems gathered here transcend the limitations of time and place.Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
£17.00
Random House USA Inc Poems of the American South
Book SynopsisThis one-of-a-kind collection of poems about the American South ranges over four centuries of its dramatic history. The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions. Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, and Donald Justice, and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.
£16.00
Random House USA Inc Measure for Measure
Book SynopsisThis comprehensive and joyous celebration of metered verse brings together some of the best rhythmic lines in literature.After a century dominated by free verse, there is a new excitement about rediscovering poetry’s ancient musical and performative roots. Iambic pentameter is the most familiar meter for most readers, but it only scratches the surface of the extraordinary diversity of rhythmic patterns that poets have employed over the ages. That astonishing variety is fully explored in this one-of-a-kind anthology, packed with great poems that beg to be read aloud. Measure for Measure is organized by meter, with brief explanatory headnotes covering accentual meter, trochees, anapests, dactyls, iambs, ballad meter, and more exotic species like amphibrachs, dipodics, hendecasyllabics, sapphics, and more. The entrancing examples of each meter are drawn from a wide range of poetic traditions, from Ovid and Sappho to Shakespeare and Milton, encompassing the Romantics, the Victorians, ballads, folk songs, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and modern-day poets. Whether performed aloud or enjoyed in silence, Measure for Measure is a treat for the ear, the heart, and the mind.
£16.00
Random House USA Inc Poems Dead and Undead
Book SynopsisIn time for Halloween: a one-of-a-kind hardcover collection of poems from ancient times to the present about ghosts, zombies, and vampires. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.This selection of poems from across the ages brings to life a staggering array of zombies, ghosts, vampires, and devils. Our culture's current obsession with zombies and vampires is only the latest form of a fascination with crossing the boundary between the living and the dead that has haunted humans since we first began writing. The poetic evidence gathered here ranges from ancient Egyptian inscriptions and the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh to the Greek bard Homer, and from Shakespeare and Milton and Keats to Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Here too are terrifying apparitions from a host of more recent poets, from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Rita Dove and Billy Collins, from Allen Ginsberg and H. P. Lovecraft to Mick Jagger and Shel Silverstein. The result is a delightfully entertaining volume of spine-tingling poems for fans of horror and poetry both.
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Break Blow Burn
Book SynopsisAmerica’s most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis to the most famous poems of the Western tradition—and unearths some previously obscure verses worthy of a place in our canon. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia sharpens our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath, and makes a case for including in the canon works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut—and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn is a modern classic that excites even seasoned poetry lovers—and continues to create generations of new ones.
£14.36
Random House USA Inc Sailing Alone Around the Room
Book SynopsisSailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.
£14.45
Random House USA Inc The Trouble with Poetry
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£12.80
Random House Publishing Group Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats
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£13.59
Random House USA Inc The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John
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£13.59
Random House USA Inc Paradise Lost
Book SynopsisEdited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. FallonJohn Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic poem on the clash between God and his fallen angel, Satan, is a profound meditation on fate, free will, and divinity, and one of the most beautiful works in world literature. Extracted from the Modern Library’s highly acclaimed The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, this edition reflects up-to-date scholarship and includes a substantial Introduction, fresh commentary, and other features—annotations on Milton’s classical allusions, a chronology of the writer’s life, clean page layouts, and an index—that make it the definitive twenty-first-century presentation of John Milton’s timeless signature work.
£9.49
Random House Publishing Group Odes With the Latin Text Modern Library
Book SynopsisTimeless meditations on the subjects of wine, parties, birthdays, love, and friendship, Horace’s Odes, in the words of classicist Donald Carne-Ross, make the “commonplace notable, even luminous.” This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by James Michie. “For almost forty years,” poet and literary critic John Hollander notes, “James Michie’s brilliant translations of Horace have remained fresh as well as strong, and responsive to the varying lights and darks of the originals. It is a pleasure to have them newly available.”
£14.24
Random House USA Inc The Waste Land and Other Writings
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£9.77
Random House USA Inc The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Book SynopsisAn indispensable collection of the groundbreaking poet’s most masterful and innovative work, celebrating a bold early voice of female liberation, independence, and queer sexuality—featuring a new introduction by poet Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation as one of the most critically acclaimed poets of the Modernist era. Her work pushed boundaries within the literary canon for its lyrical expression of female embodiment and progressive feminist politics, and she was honored as only the third woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay demonstrates Millay’s legacy and influence on contemporary poetry. Sometimes satirical, often sharp, and always striking, the poems in this collection span Millay’s remarkable career, from the success of Renascence and Other Poems to the sting of A Few Figs from Thistles, and Second April, as well as “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. Millay’s incandescent poetry continues to inspire today as broadly and deeply as during her lifetime. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
£13.99
Random House USA Inc Chekhov The Essential Plays
Book SynopsisBecause Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago. Gathered here in superb new renderings by one of the most highly regarded translators of our time—versions that have been staged throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain—are Chekhov’s four essential masterpieces for the theater.
£12.59
Random House Children's Books Amazing Peace
Book SynopsisHighlighting the promise of peace, this beautifully illustrated picture book unites families of different faiths and cultural backgrounds in a charming celebration of Christmas and the loving spirit of the season. 50,000 first printing.
£16.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Importance of Being Earnest
Book SynopsisThe full text of Oscar Wilde''s beloved comedy of manners, including exclusive commentary, selections from Wilde''s correspondence, and excerpts from the original four-act version.The Importance of Being Earnest shows a full measure of Oscar Wilde''s legendary wit, and embodies more than any of his other plays his decency and warmth. This edition contains substantial excerpts from the original four-act version which was never produced, as well as the full text of the final three-act version, selections from Wilde''s correspondence, and commentary by George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, St. John Hankin, and James Agate.“It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy and it has its philosophy; that we should treat all trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” -Oscar Wilde
£5.99
HarperCollins The Passionate Eye
£13.50
HarperTorch Color of Justice
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£7.59
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Love Poems Sonnets of William Shakespeare
Book SynopsisThe greatest sonnets ever written, by the greatest poet and playwright in the English language
£13.29
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Poems That Touch the Heart
Book SynopsisWith over 650,000 copies in print, Poems That Touch The Heart is America's most popular collection of inspirational verse.
£19.55
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Goodbye to All That Anchor Books An Autobiography
Book SynopsisIn this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that occurred as a result of the First World War. Written after the war and as he was leaving his birthplace, he thought, forever, Good-Bye to All That bids farewell not only to England and his English family and friends, but also to a way of life. Tracing his upbringing from his solidly middle-class Victorian childhood through his entry into the war at age twenty-one as a patriotic captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, this dramatic, poignant, often wry autobiography goes on to depict the horrors and disillusionment of the Great War, from life in the trenches and the loss of dear friends, to the stupidity of government bureaucracy and the absurdity of English class stratification. Paul Fussell has hailed it as ''the best memoir of the First World War'' and has written the introduction to this new edition that marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the
£12.34
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Rudyard Kipling
Book SynopsisWitty, profound, wildly funny, acerbic and occasionally savage, Rudyard Kipling''s poems continue to delight readers of all ages. Included are both the familiar favorites and Kipling''s lesser-known works. This is the only complete collection of Kipling''s poems available in paperback.
£17.99
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc Happy Birthday Wanda June
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£12.31
Alfred A. Knopf Bicentennial
Book SynopsisFrom the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning. Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, / they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of Bicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boy
£21.56
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Weary Blues
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£17.65
Random House USA Inc Fires in the Mirror Crown Heights Brooklyn and
Book SynopsisDerived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on black-white tensions as it is a work of drama. In August 1991 simmering tensions in the racially polarized Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights exploded into riots after a black boy was killed by a car in a rabbi's motorcade and a Jewish student was slain by blacks in retaliation. Fires in the Mirror is dramatist Anna Deavere Smith's stunning exploration of the events and emotions leading up to and following the Crown Heights conflict. Through her portrayals of more than two dozen Crown eights adversaries, victims, and eyewitnesses, using verbatim excerpts from their observations derived from interviews she conducted, Smith provides a brilliant, Rashoman-like documentary portrait of contempo
£13.49
Penguin Random House LLC The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
£11.28
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc The Language of Life A Festival of Poets
Book Synopsis'Poets live the lives all of us live,' says Bill Moyers, 'with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen.'In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets, The Language Of Life celebrates language in its 'most exalted, wrenching, delighted, and concentrated form,' and its unique power to re-create the human experience: falling in love, facing death, leaving home, playing basketball, losing faith, finding God. Listening to Linda McCarriston's award-winning poems about a child trapped in a violent home, or to Jimmy Santiago Baca explaining how words changed his life in prison, or to David Mura describing his Japanese American grandfather's experience in relocation camps, or to Sekou Sundiata stitching the magic of his childhood church in Harlem to the African tradition of storytelling, or to Gary Snyder invoking the natural wonde
£19.55
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry From Nerval to Val Ery in English Translation
£17.09
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry
Book SynopsisUnmatched in scope and literary quality, this landmark anthology spans three thousand years, bringing together more than six hundred poems by more than one hundred thirty poets, in translations–many new and exclusive to the book–by an array of distinguished translators. Here is the grand sweep of Chinese poetry, from the Book of Songs–ancient folk songs said to have been collected by Confucius himself–and Laozi’s Dao De Jing to the vividly pictorial verse of Wang Wei, the romanticism of Li Po, the technical brilliance of Tu Fu, and all the way up to the twentieth-century poetry of Mao Zedong and the post—Cultural Revolution verse of the Misty poets. Encompassing the spiritual, philosophical, political, mystical, and erotic strains that have emerged over millennia, this broadly representative selection also includes a preface on the art of translation, a general introduction to Chinese poetic form,
£13.29
Rowman & Littlefield Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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£58.00
W. W. Norton & Company The Ring and the Book
Book Synopsis"With this book, M. H. Abrams has given us a remarkable study, admirably conceived and executed, a book of quite exceptional and no doubt lasting significance for a number of fields--for the history of ideas and comparative literature as well as for English literary history, criticism and aesthetics." -Harry Bergholz, Modern Language Journal
£23.75
W. W. Norton & Company TwentyFive German Poets A Bilingual Collection
Book SynopsisWhen this book was originally published, twenty poets were represented. For this edition, new material has been added, including additional poems by Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche, as well as five poets not previously included.
£19.95
WW Norton & Co Halfway to Silence
Book SynopsisPure lyric poems come rarely in any poet's life.
£12.50
W. W. Norton & Company Poems to Read
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£23.96
WW Norton & Co The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of
Book SynopsisA full-size photographic facsimile of one of the essential books of English literature and culture that has won the admiration of actors and scholars throughout the world.
£155.00
WW Norton & Co A Grain of a Mustard Seed Poems
Book SynopsisCompilation of intense, spirited verse which explores the realms of religion, politics, nature, violence, and old age.
£14.50
WW Norton & Co The Will To Change Poems 19681970
Book SynopsisThe Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments. -David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review
£13.50
WW Norton & Co The Divine Comedy
Book SynopsisThis single volume, blank verse translation of The Divine Comedy includes an introduction, maps of Dante's Italy, Hell, Purgatory, Geocentric Universe, and political panorama of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, diagrams and notes providing the reader with invaluable guidance.
£47.50
WW Norton & Co Singing School
Book SynopsisA bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past.Trade Review"Singing School is nothing like the usual anthology of safe and sane selections. Instead, it is a gathering of poetry designed to stimulate the young and startle the old practitioner, with a surprise around every corner. Where else might you find Sterling Brown's 'Harlem Happiness' next to Queen Elizabeth I’s 'When I Was Fair and Young,' and two poems away from Plath's 'Nick and the Candlestick'?…a book that will instruct and charm every reader." -- Alicia Ostriker"Robert Pinsky is, everyone knows, one of the great poetry teachers of our time. The tone of his discussion always combines patience and delight, and he is especially valuable to us because the knowledge he imparts is systematic—to read one of his explications of a poem is to understand something more about all the poems you'll read from that moment on." -- Tony Hoagland
£18.89
WW Norton & Co The Poets Laureate Anthology
Book SynopsisThe first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.
£28.79
WW Norton & Co The Undressing
Book SynopsisCelebrated poet Li-Young Lee returns with a breathtaking new volume about the violence of desire and the peace of love.Trade Review"Potent and mysterious. . . . [Lee] pivots confidently among registers, speakers, and languages. . . . Countless gorgeous details provide, in poem after poem, distinct delights." -- Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker"Few poets write like Li-Young Lee these days, facing the biggest and broadest questions head on. . . . Fewer still ask these questions so well, and so movingly. . . . Utterly true poetry." -- Craig Morgan Teicher - Los Angeles Times"Immediate, sensual, unrelentingly intense." -- NPR"Erotic. . . . Throughout this multilayered book, [Lee] challenges readers to think and feel more deeply." -- Elizabeth Lund - Washington Post"The poems emerge with their simplicity and complexity intact. In a word, they are heartfelt, without condescension. It’s the triumph of sincerity over authenticity. . . . Lee’s elegance transports us into the aspirations of yearning." -- American Poetry Review"A heart-rending collection of poems that tackle love and violence with equal curiosity." -- Chicago Review of Books"[Lee] presents breath-catching metaphysical equations in incantatory cadences that swing between earth and sky, flesh and holiness. . . . [An] exquisite, enthralling, and ringing call to wind, trees, sea, the beloved, and love, both human and sacred." -- Booklist, starred
£19.00
