Poetry
ALPHABET
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America A History in Verse 1962-1970
"Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!" Poet Edward Sanders tells the story of America in incandescent verse.
Bold, sweeping, investigative, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rendering, thought-provoking, Edward Sanders' three-volume, America: A History in Verse uniquely and brilliantly tells "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds." It is by turns angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. Volume 3, 1962-1970 begins with "the time of a randy young president with a bad back / who attracted the squint-eyed scorn / & even the hatred of the / National Security Grouch Apparatus," of "a strange man named Johnson / & then the reappearance of an even stranger man named Nixon." It was the time of Vietnam, civil rights, space shots, and evil--"the only word for some of it." But it was also the time of the poet's youth and Oh! what bliss to be young, alive, and high in those excruciatingly interesting times, those days "when we searched for meaning / in the sawdust floors of rebel cafés / or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze." What a whirling hurry of years it was, what a flash of time! And what a necessary, twenty-first-century Whitman Sanders is, channeling Clio for our great nation, "where so many sing without cease / work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every / bell tower, biome & blade of grass." Long may Sanders sing us the 1960s, and long may his America "dwell in peace, freedom & equality / out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way."- Please log in to review this product
APPROACHING ICE
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Blue Horses: Poems
Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.
At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.
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Bright Dead Things: Poems
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."
A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and "effortlessly lyrical" (New York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
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Burn Lyrics
All that remain to us of Sappho's poems are fragments, some only a handful of words. Burn Lyrics incorporates these extant fragments into fully-fleshed poems in entirely contemporary voices, underscoring the flexibility of language and the ways we make compelling meanings out of our limited experiences of the world.
Burn Lyrics is an entirely original accomplishment. Benjamin Landry has reached into the past and its erasures, and brought into our time and place something new and strange. This collection transforms poetry into lived experience-full of atmosphere and physicality and mysterious specificity and music. Landry is a poet of uncommon gifts, one who has uncovered or discovered an entirely unexpected path for this art form. Burn Lyrics began as a remarkable urge, and it is now a spellbinding and transformative reading experience for the rest of us.
Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Infinitesimals
Benjamin Landry crafts an eco-lyric voice that celebrates everyday life yet remains "realistic about the future of the coastline." Throughout Burn Lyrics, the speaker walks barefoot amongst family and strangers, wolves and goats, hummingbirds and pigeons, greenswards and dandelions, storms and fires. At the end of this journey, the old lyric self sheds its skin and the book becomes a new self to call and return the body home.
Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory
You might think that a poem housing a fragment of sacred text-Sappho's incandescent shards-would be a thing relatively inert in itself: at best a reliquary, at worst a golem. But Benjamin Landry splendidly shatters such preconceptions in this brilliant collection. The landscapes are so captivating, the perspectives so enticing, the emotional currents so swift and strong that you notice, only in passing, that a text you thought long dead has quickened, miraculously, into breathing, exuberant life.
Monica Youn, author of Ignatz and Blackacre
Benjamin Landry's Burn Lyrics both fleshes out the mystery of and satisfies the desires awakened by Sappho's fragments. We are sated at every turn. He is a master not only of the line but also of the heart. Landry offers a new lens through which to view the world; "it's the sort of thing that colors your personal heaven," and, as a reader, I'm left to wonder if this is possible, can the poem curate so much emotion in a world filled with so many distractions, but then I turn another page and realize, "Sometimes, it happens this way."
A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
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Call Us What We Carry: Poems
The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
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Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once." Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
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Drinking Girls and Their Dresses
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Essential Rumi
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