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Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, poetry category. Winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, poetry category.Finalist for the 2015 NAACP Image Awards in Poetry. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away - loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it - that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all - death, sorrow, loss - is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
Hands Washing Water by
"Chris Abani's poetry resonates with a devastating beauty which cuts through to the heart of human strength."--Pride Hands Washing Water is Chris Abani's fourth poetry collection--a mischievous book of displacement, exile, ancestry, and subversive humor. The central section, "Buffalo Women," is a Civil War correspondence between lovers that plays on our assumptions about war, gender, morality, and politics. Sweetest Henri, I know we promised to be honest, one to the other, but your recent missive, though welcome as any epistle from you, filled me with a dread that clung like dampness to wet wood. I am terrified for your immortal soul, dear sweet Henri. This mad war of Lincoln is infecting you with a sickness too depraved to even address. . . Abani's writing is ruthless, at times traumatic, and consistently filled with surprising twists and turns.
Indigo by
"Bass's work--about marriage and parenting, illness and recovery, small daily pleasures--cultivates an exuberance that's born of, and balanced by, close watchfulness." --The New York Times "A bold and passionate new collection... Intimacy is rarely conveyed as gracefully as in Bass's lustrous poems." --Booklist Indigo, 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 watchingher 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.
Leaves of Grass by
Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems by Walt Whitman originally published in 1855 at the poet's own expense. Criticized when first released for Whitman's use of free verse and his rather racy depictions of sexual love and the senses, Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the human form, the material world and nature.
Obit by
The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 NPR's Best Books of 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living. "When you lose someone you love, the world doesn't stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother's death, each one an ode to her mother's life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time."--Time Magazine
Of Gravity and Angels by
A precise and passionate collection by a brave new voice in poetry.
Poems by
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was an eccentric, reclusive poet, though born to a family of good standing within their Massachusetts community. She had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime, though posthumously her sister found a cache of nearly eighteen hundred, all of which have now been published. Emily's style was broke with the common forms of poetry at the time, and foreshadowed what was to come. Her work was harshly criticized when first published, but she is now considered one of the American greats.
Sonnets to Orpheus by
Sonnets to Orpheus is Rainer Maria Rilke's first and only sonnet sequence. It is an undisputed masterpiece by one of the greatest modern poets, translated here by a master of translation, David Young.Rilke revived and transformed the traditional sonnet sequence in the Sonnets. Instead of centering on love for a particular person, as has many other sonneteers, he wrote an extended love poem to the world, celebrating such diverse things as mirrors, dogs, fruit, breathing, and childhood. Many of the sonnets are addressed to two recurrent figures: the god Orpheus (prototype of the poet) and a young dancer, whose death is treated elegiacally.These ecstatic and meditative lyric poems are a kind of manual on how to approach the world – how to understand and love it. David Young's is the first most sensitive of the translations of this work, superior to other translations in sound and sense. He captures Rilke's simple, concrete, and colloquial language, writing with a precision close to the original.
The Tiny Journalist by
"A moving testament to the impact one person can have and the devastating effects of occupation." --Washington Post Best Poetry Books of 2019 Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye places her Palestinian American identity center stage in her latest full-length poetry collection for adults. The collection is inspired by the story of Janna Jihad Ayyad, the "Youngest Journalist in Palestine," who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation protests using her mother's smartphone. Nye draws upon her own family's roots in a West Bank village near Janna's hometown to offer empathy and insight to the young girl's reporting. Long an advocate for peaceful communication across all boundaries, Nye's poems in The Tiny Journalist put a human face on war and the violence that divides us from each other.
The Tradition by
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award "100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review "By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" for NPR "A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019) "Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019" One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On" The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner" One of BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019" Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
A Treasury of Rumi by
There are many sides to Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī - scholar, preacher, saint, mystic, love poet, didactic poet, and spiritual master - but the version of him that became the best-selling poet in North America lacks authenticity: 'Everyone has, in their view, become my close friend; but they have not sought out the secrets within me.' -- From Rūmī's Masnavī This new anthology is freshly translated and supplemented with commentaries, and also includes selected texts in Persian. The aim is to bring readers a full appreciation of the true, traditional nature of his work- and to the man himself as a great Muslim teacher and spiritual guide. Besides illustrating the traditional basis of Jalāl al-Dīn's teachings, this Treasury displays his unique literary genius as well as his profundity as one of the world's greatest religious writers, whose voice speaks as clearly and compellingly today as it did in the 7th/13th century. A Treasury of Rumi has been used as teaching material in courses and lectures by at least four university professors and/or leading imams in North America.
The Undertaker's Daughter by
"Poems that stick with you like a song that won't stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart."--Washington Post on Captivity