Poetry

This volume of verse displays the undeniable legacy June Jordan left on both our literature and culture. Collected here are blazing examples of poetry as activism, stanzas that speak truth to power and speak out against violence against women and police brutality. But Jordan also speaks on the significance of hope, mixing, as Brown puts it, 'the doom and devastation made mundane through media with the hard decision to love anyway.'--O, The Oprah Magazine

A selection of poems published between 1971 and 2001, this posthumous volume reflects Jordan's view of poetry as 'a political action' that can 'build a revolution.' Her own work is filled with love and delight as well as revenge and justice.--New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan's generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades--from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001---Jordan's poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages. Introduced by Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry.

Exit-Sky is a 50-poem poetry collection, the first to be published by Warren Woessner in a decade. While living an extraordinarily unique life as lawyer, scientist, and poet, Woessner has created an effecting style based on understatement and influences from Chinese poets like Han Shan and Li Po. These short poems may appear understated on the surface, but they are meditations that open up whole worlds via keen observations of the natural world and people. "Prairie Grass" Almost touching the snow banks, the thin stalks are bent down like old women, walking home from a country market, empty early. They are holding just a handful of seeds-- shopping baskets full of wind.

A beautifully illustrated anthology of poetry celebrating babies, children and childhood - from the magical times and memories of childhood, through to the unconditional love a parent has for a child.

Some of our best-loved poets are featured, such as William Blake, John Betjeman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Adrian Mitchell and WH Auden.

The poems begin in infanthood, with the joys that babies and toddlers bring as they learn to move and speak, and progresses to playtime, friendships, holidays, trips and school days.

The wonderful, endearing illustrations throughout make this the ideal book for anyone who celebrates a child in their life.

From Richmond. Virginia, to Madison, Wisconsin, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this new collection by Robert Alexander spans both physical and emotional distances. Comprising prose poems and flash fiction written over the course of a 45-year career, Finding Token Creek reveals an imaginative and deeply felt connection both with other human beings and with the natural world. Jim Harrison called Alexander's work "lucid and lovely."

Composed as he lost his eyesight, W.S. Merwin's final and exquisite book brims with longing, loss, and unanswerable questions. In Garden Time, Merwin's luminous, ethereal voice gently interrogates mortality; at the very end of his life, he sings lovingly to a tireless world--although not without trepidation. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated his poems to his wife, Paula. The result is a book contemplative and delicate, tender and melancholy. In this gorgeous, mindful, and life-affirming book, our greatest poet channels energy from his memories and deep connection to the world so as to remind us that "The only hope is to be the daylight."

"This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." --NPR

National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions--employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species--Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

"To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment." --Time

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of Keep Moving and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her "meditations on kindness and hope" (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life--a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son's pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road--she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone "doesn't observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands."​

Slate called Smith's "superpower as a writer" her "ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty." The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

The poems in Heart on a String feature acute observations and tender reflections. They explore the mysteries of love and the end of love, of life and mortality. With clear language and vivid images, Tom Boswell takes the reader on a poetic journey not soon to be forgotten.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey and the sun and her flowers comes her greatly anticipated third collection of poetry.

rupi kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself - reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.

i dive into the well of my body
and end up in another world
everything i need
already exists in me
there's no need
to look anywhere else

- home

An Indie Poetry Bestseller!

What the world needs now

- featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more.

More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

In these poems drawn from a lifetime of experience, Richard Merelman writes of the aspirations and disappointments of his youth--women, ambition, and escape from a difficult childhood; a middle age coming to terms with the horrors of war, Jewish identity in America, and the vicissitudes of love; and the difficulties and accomplishments of old age. He writes in a variety of forms--sonnets, sestinas, rondeaux, free verse, and syllabics--with humor, music, clarity, and irony about his lifelong struggle with himself and an unforgiving God.

A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Selection.

"A moving testament to the creative act of enduring.--Foreword Reviews, starred review

What bounty to have Glancy's great art erupt once more. --Spencer Reece, author of The Clerk's Tale and The Road to Emmaus

Every classic text should be so fortunate. --Mark Larrimore, author of The Book of Job: A Biography

There is much mystery surrounding the Book of Job. Who was he? Where was he? What prompts Job's comforters to accuse him of wrong-doing as the cause of his suffering? When were Job's words written? How did Job's wife endure her husband's ordeals? And who is innocent among us?

Island of the Innocent's narrative dramatizes how the way one looks at something shapes and changes what is seen. Voices of the trials of the Native American interject themselves into the text. There is Custer riding toward the Little Bighorn. There is a Native American doll in a museum, taken from a battlefield in western Nebraska after the massacre of Ash Hollow. There is Job, sitting in his yard chair in discomfort, among the falling leaves and his three friends.

And finally, Jehorah. Only Diane Glancy could create the missing story of Job's wife, unsilencing this biblical character and endowing her suffering with meaning. Here is Jehorah in Job's Wife:

What next? What next?--I wrote
in my book of sorrows. I keep a journal asking
God what he is doing. Once I start it's hard to stop.
I was expecting more boils on Job. More death--
more ever-ready friendly visits. But after them--
who was left?-- I ask you. where is my broom?
My head? My battle-ax?