An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selvesHonest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voi...

Before recovery comes the preparation to recover. In City of Slow Dissolve, John Chávez takes readers through this journey—the “slow dissolve,” the unpacking and re-packing of self that must take place before healing can begin. Fusing language poetry, lyric, and narrative, Chávez uses syntactical play, rhythm, and repetition of key words and lines to lend immediacy to emotions and actions. He tips words and images on their heads and invites readers to reexamine people and places...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A guide to the art of journaling—and a meditation on the central questions of life—by the bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms, with contributions from Hanif Abdurraqib, Jon Batiste, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, and many more“The Book of Alchemy proves on every page that a creative response can be found in every moment of life—regardless of what is happening in the world.”—Eliz...

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and strik...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

A groundbreaking meditation on sexual politics, love, and human tenacity from the world-renowned pioneer of feminist writing and prophetic author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here A...

A simple guide to the transformative power of reading and writing poems, from two acclaimed spoken-word artists.How can a poem transform a life? Could poetry change the world? In this accessible volume, spoken-word stars Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley roll out the welcome mat and prove that poetry is for everyone. Whether lapsed poetry lovers, aspiring poets, or total novices, readers will learn to uncover verse in unexpected places, find their way through a poem w...

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and f...

It's easy for people to write about their feelings in a journal. It's more difficult, however, to convert personal experiences into stories worthy of publication-fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Filled with engaging exercises, Write from Life guides writers in identifying story-worthy material and transforming their raw material into finished pieces, through conquering fears associated with personal exposure, determining a story's focus, shaping the material into a cohesive whole,...

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New YorkerSeamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh ...

The National Book Award–winning author compiles a "thought-provoking volume" of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others ( Publishers Weekly).As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 "was whether an author had taken a risk." The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of r...

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...