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Poetry

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed : Poems

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed : Poems

Espada, Martín
$15.95

In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in "Vivas to Those Who Have Failed," a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet's father. "El Moriviví" uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father's return to a bay in Puerto Rico: "May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands." Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: "Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World" urges us to "melt the bullets into bells." Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean "actor," finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada's poems show us the faces of Whitman's "numberless unknown heroes."

Sonnets for a Missing Key

Sonnets for a Missing Key

Everett, Percival
$16.95

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES - AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION - Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY


"One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time."-Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry - "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."--Library Journal - "Your favorite writer's writer."--Entertainment Weekly - "Percival Everett is poised for a big year."--The Wall Street Journal - Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets."--Pasadena Star-News - "Wry and epigrammatic."--Publisher's Weekly - "A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry."--Amsterdam News


Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett's sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.


Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.


Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

Ordinary Life

Ordinary Life

Fairchild, B. H.
$16.99

In this stirring volume, award-winning poet B. H. Fairchild seeks the ironic, haunting presence imbuing each ordinary life with beauty, power, and meaning. By turns polyphonic and deeply personal, these poems range from Kansas highways and sunbaked baseball fields to secondhand memories of a World War II foxhole. They zoom in on a welder's truck, a Walmart on Black Friday, and a record store, where a chance encounter offers radiant kindness in the face of grief. In a suite of prose poems written in the returning persona of the machinist and philosopher Roy Eldridge Garcia, "a watcher of things," Fairchild finds sacred meaning in domestic scenes and expansive imagined narratives. Throughout, the poet evokes the brutal beauty of the American heartland, a morning's "sheet-metal sky" and a grandfather's farm, with its "dusty creek, damp / only when the winter wheat was bogged / in snow."

Elevating blue-collar work and scenes from small towns in clear-eyed, reverent poetry, Fairchild proves himself once again "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times).

Ordinary Life

Ordinary Life

Fairchild, B. H.
$26.95

In this stirring volume, award-winning poet B. H. Fairchild seeks the ironic, haunting presence imbuing each ordinary life with beauty, power, and meaning. By turns polyphonic and deeply personal, these poems range from Kansas highways and sunbaked baseball fields to secondhand memories of a World War II foxhole. They zoom in on a welder's truck, a Walmart on Black Friday, and a record store, where a chance encounter offers radiant kindness in the face of grief. In a suite of prose poems written in the returning persona of the machinist and philosopher Roy Eldridge Garcia, "a watcher of things," Fairchild finds sacred meaning in domestic scenes and expansive imagined narratives. Throughout, the poet evokes the brutal beauty of the American heartland, a morning's "sheet-metal sky" and a grandfather's farm, with its "dusty creek, damp / only when the winter wheat was bogged / in snow."

Elevating blue-collar work and scenes from small towns in clear-eyed, reverent poetry, Fairchild proves himself once again "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (New York Times).

Granny Cloud

Granny Cloud

Fathi, Farnoosh
$16.00
Farnoosh Fathi's poetry has been admired for its "riot of associations and sonic improvisations" (Christine Hume, Boston Review); its commitment to fathoming language as what it is--an unfathomable depth. Granny Cloud, Fathi's second book of poems, showcases her gifts both in short works of prodigious concentration and in a long poem, "Anyone's Don'tanelle," composed of the drafts and do-overs that led to "Fontanelle"--a wild reimagining of the dispirited court tumbler said to have inspired St. Francis's "Jugglers of God." Granny Cloud is a portrait of ecstatic decisions and revisions, constantly reversed, constantly renewed.
Journeys

Journeys

Ferguson, Vicky
$11.95
Imagine a 12-year-old girl being told by society that she is displeasing to God and to the world because of who she is. This is where her journey begins. She grew up in the 1960s when being queer was, well, queer. Amidst the clamor of the voices of society, she learns to turn her collar to the wind and keep moving. She is determined to flee the dust and dampness of the closet which becomes her safe, albeit lonely, haven. In spite of closet dwelling, she manages to create a face to meet the faces that she meets along the way. Slowly cracking the door of the closet and peeping out becomes an ongoing endeavor. Finally, in defiance, she is able to throw open the closet door and walk out into the sunshine. The journey is scary and exciting and freeing.Although we all have a journey from cradle to grave, they are all different as they reflect our individual beings. Won't you journey with me for a space of time?
Water / Music

Water / Music

Filkins, Peter
$19.95

A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.

Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid talismans at twilight, the whir of birds.

Daywork

Daywork

Fisher, Jessica
$16.00
A meditation on art's longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.Jessica Fisher brings "the faraway close," through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata-the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each "day" is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time is also a tether, rendering violence, beauty, grief, and art separate merely by a matter of days. "So you see once again," she writes, "violence is to beauty / as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath."Like the fresco itself, Daywork is committed to a time- and site-specific art, and to the daily work of creation. At once an elegiac meditation and a brave unearthing, this book expertly discerns the monumentalizing portrayals of history and its violences, while boldly illuminating other crucial accounts of everyday existence.
Poems for Christmas

Poems for Christmas

Flanders, Judith
$14.99

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Poems for Christmas
is an exquisitely produced gift anthology which is guaranteed to get anyone in the festive spirit.

Through the generations, poets from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy and from John Donne to Christina Rossetti have been inspired to celebrate the Christmas season in verse. Just as we cherish our Christmas traditions now, so many of the great poets wrote beautifully about the Christmas story, magical wintry landscapes, festive traditions and making merry. And then, of course, there are the much-loved songs and carols from around the world that we still sing today, many of which are included in this enchanting anthology.

I Will Destroy You

I Will Destroy You

Flynn, Nick
$16.00

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose "songs of experience hum with immediacy" (The New York Times)

Beginning with a poem called "Confessional" and ending with a poem titled "Saint Augustine," Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. "Begin by descending, " Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.