Collection: Poetry

In his debut chapbook of poetry, Saeed Jones walks on the periphery of the South, those places on the outskirts of town, in bars after midnight, and on dangerous backroads where most people keep their heads down or look the other way. Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames. D. A. Powell says of Saeed's work, "Like Aeneas carrying his father from the ruined city of Troy, Saeed Jones brings all of his beginnings--the roots and tendrils of the kudzu vines, the 'sky burned to blazing, ' the lore and pain and wisdom of salvation--into a new space where art and beauty stagger the mind; where the story of transformation becomes part of the cultural body of who we are. I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness and outright joy; they are the birth of a new poetry that baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

In 1855, Walt Whitman published -- at his own expense -- the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary volume of twelve poems. Showing the influence of a uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, which eschewed the general society and culture of the time, the writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter. Exalting nature, celebrating the human body, and praising the senses and sexual love, the monumental work was condemned as "immoral." Whitman continued evolving Leaves of Grass despite the controversy, growing his influential work decades after its first appearance by adding new poems with each new printing.
This edition presents the original twelve poems from Whitman's premier 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass. Included are some of the greatest poems of modern times: "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There Was a Child Went Forth" (which in the first editions of Leaves of Grass were still nameless), works that continue to upset conventional notions of beauty and originality even today.

While You are Healing is a moving collection of poetry and prose depicting the emotional journey from heartbreak to healing. This is a collection centered around themes of love, loss, grief, healing, and the path back to self-love. While You are Healing will be the empathy your pained heart is seeking and the catalyst to drive you towards a whole and healed version of yourself.

Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian's debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies--the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran.

In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars--but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian's magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art's reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

The astonishing second collection by the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize

Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal's lingering scars, the border itself--great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?

In the sequence "Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels," with Corral's seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral's place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.

"Crossing the Water, a collection of poems written just prior to those in Ariel, . . . is of immense importance in recording [Plath's] extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, triumphant shape." -- Kirkus Reviews

Sylvia Plath's extraordinary collection pushes the envelope between dark and light, between our deep passions and desires that are often in tension with our duty to family and society. Water becomes a metaphor for the surface veneer that many of us carry, but Plath explores how easily this surface can be shaken and disturbed.

This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time - they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. "Do not read me as a vanished ndn," they ask, "read me as a ghastly one."

full-metal indigiqueer is influenced by the works of Jordan Abel, Tanya Tagaq, Daniel Heath Justice, Claudia Rankine, Vivek Shraya, Qwo-Li Driskill, Leanne Simpson, Kent Monkman, and Donna Haraway. It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story - the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms - if reconciliation is a means of "burying the hatchet," Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a séance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space - they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. This project follows in the tradition of the aforementioned authors who, Whitehead believes, utilize deconstruction as a means of decolonization. This is a sex-positive project that tirelessly works to create coalition between those who have, as Haraway once noted, "been injured, profoundly." Zoa stands in solidarity with all qpoc folk who exist as ghosts with intergenerational and colonial phantom pains - they sing with Donna Summer, RuPaul, Effie White, and Trixie Mattel. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization - a world where making love is akin to making live.

Kaveh Akbar's exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf

With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar's second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body's question, "what now shall I repair?" Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance--the infinite void of a loved one's absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation--teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.

Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell's linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives--resonant, revelatory, and holy.

A glorious boxed set featuring Robert Fagles's award-winning translations of the three great epics of Western literature

ONE OF THE PREEMINENT translators of our time, Robert Fagles's interpretations of these epic poems give new life to three seminal works in the Western canon. The Penguin Classic Deluxe Editions of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid are collected here for the first time in a specially designed gift box. Each volume contains a superb introduction by renowned classicist Bernard Knox.

about The Odyssey

Welch engages with the edges of the United States in these biographic poems about their kidnapping, their difficulties as a gay/trans individual, and their alliance with Witchcraft. Among unstable poems and juxtaposition, Welch searches for the poetic body just beyond the physical one, "That I am challenged to embody my own Nature, othered by forces outside myself, to reassert a peace, my peace, that was dirtied for the benefit of privileging males is an undertaking I revisit and resent daily. This act of returning to myself, by rejecting the world, is dark and is the source of my power as a Witch. These practices speak throughout my poetry."

As the title nails down, Welch also impugns upon the intentions that capitalism harbors against us, the living. "For Capitalism to work, it teaches us, on many levels, to disconnect from our natural empathy, from the homeless, from the countries we're calmly bombing, and from the other beings sharing our world. The narrative of laziness turns connection to cruelty, and poetry exposes such fictions. Poetry furthers our empathy with one another, including our empathy with everyday objects. Poetry isn't lazy-it never rests."

Goodreads Choice Award-winning poet and USA TODAY bestselling author Amanda Lovelace presents the mermaid's voice returns in this one -- the third and final installment in her "women are some kind of magic" series, featuring a foreword from Lang Leav and 13 guest poems from leading voices in poetry such as Nikita Gill, KY Robinson, and Orion Carloto.

The mermaid is known for her siren song, luring bedroom-eyed sailors to their demise. However, beneath these misguided myths are tales of escapism and healing, which Lovelace weaves throughout this empowering collection of poetry, taking you on a journey from the sea to the stars. They tried to silence her once and for all, but the mermaid's voice returns in this one.

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night--the book that launched the career of one of our most important young American poets--is back in print.

The debut collection from award-winning poet Morgan Parker demonstrates why she's become one of the most beloved writers working today. Her command of language is on full display. Parker bobs and weaves between humor and pathos, grief and anxiety, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jay-Z, the New York School and reality television. She collapses any foolish distinctions between the personal and the political, the "high" and the "low." Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night not only introduced an essential new voice to the world, it contains everything readers have come to love about Morgan Parker's work.

Finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker

"Paul Tran's debut collection of poems is indelible, this remarkable voice transforming itself as you read, eventually transforming you." --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"This powerful debut marshals narrative lyrics and stark beauty to address personal and political violence." --New York Times Book Review

A profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse, from a poet both "tender and unflinching" (Khadijah Queen)

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran's debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran's poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

This authoritative edition brings together all of Hopkins's poetry and a generous selection of his prose writings to explore the essence of his work and thinking.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was one of the most innovative of nineteenth-century poets. During his tragically short life he strove to reconcile his religious and artistic vocations, and this edition demonstrates the range of his interests. It includes all his poetry, from best-known works such as "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover" to translations, foreign language poems, plays, and verse fragments, and the recently discovered poem "Consule Jones". In addition there are excerpts from Hopkins's journals, letters, and spiritual writings. The poems are printed in chronological order to show Hopkins's changing preoccupations, and all the texts have been established from original manuscripts.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In Orphic Hymns Grimoire, Sara L. Mastros transforms the devotional hymns of Orpheus, the oracular hero of ancient Greece, into a functional, working grimoire for contemporary magicians. The Orphic Hymns have inspired generations of poets, musicians, and playwrights as exemplars of archaic mytho-poetry. In her bold translations, Mastros stays true to the original intent and beauty of the hymns while adding her own contemporary flair. In addition to the new translations, this book also contains fascinating historical and social commentary on the hymns from a feminist, pagan viewpoint, as well as spells and devotional practices for votaries of the Greek gods, and brilliant color-your own-ikons. This second edition includes new commentary and more than eighty ikon illustrations. Additionally, Mastros provides many ideas for deploying the ikons in spellcraft as well as spells that use the ikons themselves.

W. Todd Kaneko's The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle. There's nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment, and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. More than a pack of wild horses, more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons, more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you. -MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK

When the lights in the arenas go out, the poems and Kaneko's stunning visual work in The Dead Wrestler Elegies honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko's fierce but tender elegies, we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all. -OLIVER DE LA PAZ
Sheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity's glory and gory days, where the body's currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability, transcendence and decay, Kaneko's lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon, kitsch and myth, the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief. -LEE ANN RORIPAUGH

These larger-than-life portraits are, more deeply, elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother, for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood, of masculinity, desire, and loss, a landscape of fantasy and dreams. -TIMOTHY YU