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Poetry

Fortune for Your Disaster

Fortune for Your Disaster

Abdurraqib, Hanif
$16.95
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside--from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs--to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.
Past Lives

Past Lives

Adams, V Joshua
$18.00
In Past Lives, each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability, forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams, we have competitive knitting, beer commercials, cabriolets, and mandolin players breaking ukulele players' fingers. To employ a Pavement title, Adams's poems are "slanted and enchanted" their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit, inquiry, and sonic vigor that examine issues of being, textuality, and the imaginative act. Past Lives is "swift-winged and sharp" and "darkly bright" as its sentences spin with wryness: "Even the language of ruin gets run-down," "The question filled me with dread, / which was better than nothing," and the following excerpt, from which the title Past Lives arises: "A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example, I was once an Episcopalian." Though Adams's poems aren't overtly emotional, he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or, to use a phrase from Mark Doty, they are a "logarithm of decay and rekindling." -Simone Muench


Art of Haiku

Art of Haiku

Addiss, Stephen
$29.95
In the past hundred years, haiku has gone far beyond its Japanese origins to become a worldwide phenomenon--with the classic poetic form growing and evolving as it has adapted to the needs of the whole range of languages and cultures that have embraced it. This proliferation of the joy of haiku is cause for celebration--but it can also compel us to go back to the beginning: to look at haiku's development during the centuries before it was known outside Japan. This in-depth study of haiku history begins with the great early masters of the form--like Basho, Buson, and Issa--and goes all the way to twentieth-century greats, like Santoka. It also focuses on an important aspect of traditional haiku that is less known in the West: haiku art. All the great haiku masters created paintings (called haiga) or calligraphy in connection with their poems, and the words and images were intended to be enjoyed together, enhancing each other, and each adding its own dimension to the reader's and viewer's understanding. Here one of the leading haiku scholars of the West takes us on a tour of haiku poetry's evolution, providing along the way a wealth of examples of the poetry and the art inspired by it.
Now We're Getting Somewhere

Now We're Getting Somewhere

Addonizio, Kim
$15.95

Kim Addonizio's sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We're Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit--drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet's characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.

Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.

Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar.

A poet whose "voice lifts from the page, alive and biting" (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, "if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming."

Akhmatova: Poems

Akhmatova: Poems

Akhmatova, Anna
$14.95

A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova--denounced by the Soviet regime for her "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference"--is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century.

 

Before the revolution, Akhmatova was a wildly popular young poet who lived a bohemian life. She was one of the leaders of a movement of poets whose ideal was "beautiful clarity"--in her deeply personal work, themes of love and mourning are conveyed with passionate intensity and economy, her voice by turns tender and fierce. A vocal critic of Stalinism, she saw her work banned for many years and was expelled from the Writers' Union--condemned as "half nun, half harlot." Despite this censorship, her reputation continued to flourish underground, and she is still among Russia's most beloved poets.

 

Here are poems from all her major works--including the magnificent "Requiem" commemorating the victims of Stalin's terror--and some that have been newly translated for this edition.

Scott says: A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova—denounced by the Soviet regime for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference”—is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. 


Selected Poems

Akhmatova, Anna; Thomas, D. M.
$15.00
Charting the Lost Continent: Poetry and Other Discoveries

Charting the Lost Continent: Poetry and Other Discoveries

Albert, Linda
$12.00

Poetry has the power to help us deeply connect with others while accessing our higher selves. At its best, poetry can act as a reflective mirror and catalyst for personal growth and societal change. Charting the Lost Continent comes at a time in history when its message is more important than ever as both men and women collectively work toward female empowerment, self-acceptance, and gender equality. The author has arranged this collection in sections that reflect the universal themes and life passages of women, taking readers along on a courageous journey of navigation and discovery.

Linda Albert is an internationally published award-winning poet, essayist, and former theater director. A certified Jungian Archetypal Pattern Analyst and communication coach with a Master Certification in Neurolinguistics, Linda's poetry is influenced by her interest and academic training in those areas as well as by the changing roles of contemporary women and her personal joys, struggles, and insights. Her awards include the Olivet and Dyer-Ives Foundation Poetry Prizes and the Atlanta Review's International Merit Award for poetry.

Love Life Laughter, Today's Poetry for Today's People

Love Life Laughter, Today's Poetry for Today's People

Alexander, John M
$19.95
Writing was always good for me, thanks to Mrs. McGowan, my 10th grade English teacher. She said that she liked them and that I should keep writing. As a teenager, I'd climb to the top of a favorite tree and write poems. Yep. Up in the tree with a pen and paper. The birds were scared but the squirrels didn't mind. Writing was a big part of my law practice, too. And after my divorce in 1990, tsunami of poetry came rushing out. With my girlfriend-wife, Sue, I learned what really deep, abiding love feels like. Most of the Romantic poems were written about/for Sue. Granite-strong fatherly pride was provided by my three adult kids: Mat (only 1 "t" because I didn't know how to spell Matthew when the nurse asked me: "What's the baby's name?") and two lovely identical twin daughters, Bethany and Kelly (by order of appearance).Along with the poetry came singing, from church choir to Clevland Opera in four years; then, songwriting to add deeper meaning to some of the poems. Poetry and music have taught me that if you can touch one person's spirit, soul, heart it's all worth it. Smiles are free. God has provided you with a lifetime of love. Pass it around.


This Is the Honey

This Is the Honey

Alexander, Kwame
$35.00

A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander.

In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, "each incantation," as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is "a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly."

This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall's The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller's In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens "Black woman joy" to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of "home" through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a "jewel in the hand" (Patricia Spears Jones) to "butter melting in small pools" (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists.

Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time.

World

World

Amaral, Ana Luisa
$16.95
World--Ana Luísa Amaral's second collection with New Directions--offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement, and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, "humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams--and stars." Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral's peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: "What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary--seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonization, slavery, and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness." These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvelous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.