Over the course of more than four decades, contemporary American poet Jean Valentine has written eleven books of stunning, spirit-inflected poetry. This collection of essays, assembled over several years by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler, brings together twenty-six pieces on all stages of Valentine's career by a range of poets, scholars, and admirers.Valentine's poetry has long been valued for its dreamlike qualities, its touches of the personal and the political, and its mesmeriz...

Home of the first settlement in the United States and known as Old Dominion and The Mother of Presidents, the state of Virginia’s artistic output proves among the most fecund in the nation, evidenced in this ninth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. This collection includes well-known, established, and celebrated poets such as Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Gregory Orr, Ellen Bryant Voigt, R. T. Smith, Forrest Gander, and Rita Dove, and the editors have dedicated equal focu...

Prayer is the master key. A key may fit one door of a house, but when it fits all doors it may well claim to be a master key. Such and no less a key is prayer to all earthly problems.

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life.The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the ide...

Seven years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith—responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition—might look like.Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, ...

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." —Ann PatchettGrowing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father...

"[When we read and write poetry,] it is as if a long-settled cloud in our mind suddenly dissipates, and we are divine once again." -- from the IntroductionPoetry is the language of devotion in prayer, chant, and song. Reading and writing poetry creates clarity, deepens and expands spiritual inquiry, and cultivates wisdom, compassion, self-confidence, patience, and love. In author Robert McDowell's words, poetry makes you into a tuning fork of the Divine.But...

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natur...

In his bestselling The Soul's Code, James Hillman restored passion and meaning to the concept of identity, arguing that each of us is born with an innate character, the "daimon" or "spirit" that calls us to what we are meant to be. Now, in The Force of Character, Hillman brings the idea of character full circle, offering a revolutionary new vision of life's most feared and misunderstood chapter: old age."Aging is no accident," Hillman writes. "It is necess...

NBCC Award Winner: "The narrative lyrics in this remarkable collection . . . could stand as compressed stories about anxiety and the body." — The New York TimesVulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry ...

What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around?In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement.A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in...

How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, and their bodies, to express ourselves?