In this savage yet beautiful book length poem Michael Lieberman captures the rage of men in modern society. He reimagines the characters of Homer's Iliad, recasts them, and sets them in conflict in today's Houston. Unflinching is its descriptions of violence, The Houstiliad implicitly contrasts the rage of Homer's Achilles which was specific and focused with the free-floating rage of contemporary men. Though unsparing in its descriptions, Lieberman's portrait is leavened by lovely lyric pa...

Michael Lieberman’s Some Dark Fire, New and Selected Poems is a generous sampling of an exceptional poet’s mature work, written over almost thirty years—since Lieberman moved to Houston in 1988. His poems offer a perspective on our world that is in turn celebratory, somber, joyous, dark, tender, and, most of all, doubt-plagued. He offers no easy answers, but his questions will enrich and reward the reader. This deeply felt book is the work of a gifted poet and research physician a...

Res ipsa loquitor—the thing speaks for itself—as the lawyers say. But does it? Not in Michael Lieberman’s new book of poems, Bonfire of the Verities. What speaks here is doubt and the commitment to cast aside the apparent truths we all accumulate. Those verities are what are tossed onto Lieberman's bonfire:It is here I heapthe platitudesI cannot keep.He grounds his struggle precisely:The coordinates of the country of doubtare 2...

Bill Morgan had everything—or at least he did until, as chair of the board of Travis College of Medicine, he severed a seventy-year relationship between the College and its principle teaching hospital and touched off a blood feud between them. He and Dean Dan Maffit provoke a struggle with the hospital's board chair, Jimmie Rutherford, and its CEO and ex-Israeli operative, Sandy Wechsler, in which the two institutions vie for prestige and dominance and for the physicians who serve the...

The women of Harvard Square are smart, sassy, and sexy. There's Agnes, who with her boyfriend Maynard provides the inspiration for her best friend Diana’s new play that turns into a steamy, boundary-bending sendup. As for Agnes and Diana, don't even try to imagine their shenanigans. You'll want to meet Agnes's grandmother Abigail, who at eighty-seven is still feisty and more than a little naughty—and Adriana, her daughter and Agnes’s mother, who receives a shocking gift from her old R...

The Lobsterman's Daughter is a tale of murder and deceit in five generations of a Maine family, the Markhams. The story's narrator, Henrietta Markham, is a recent Harvard graduate, who submits an early version as her honors thesis and claims her work is an actual history of her family. She tells the story in her own voice and the conjured voices of her relatives, both living and dead. After graduation, in Barcelona she faces her own deceit in omitting her sins from the chronicle and adds a...

Songs of Innocence and Experience brings together two books of poetry by William Blake that delve into these two opposing states of the human soul. His Songs of Innocence are often cheerful and sweet and always demonstrate the purity of youth, as Blake explores themes of freedom, happiness, loss and religion. The optimism of innocence is keenly contrasted by Blake’s Songs of Experience, which feature a more realistic and often darker view of the world.Ori...

The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in Pop Sonnets**, a collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets.**All yourfavorite songs are here, includinghits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash,Katy Perry, Michael Jackson,Talking Heads, and many others.With stirring sentiments on everythingfrom love and despairto wanton women, Pop Sonnetsoffers inspirational verse forevery occasion.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATUREA remarkable, graceful collection from one of Europe’s most prominent and celebrated poets.In these 100 poems, Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty."Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the fi...

The collected works of Adrienne Rich, whose poetry is "distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity" (New York Times). A Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both sel...

The final volume of poems by America’s most powerful and distinctive poetic voice.Later Poems: Selected and New brings together a remarkable body of work by the celebrated poet. Included are Adrienne Rich’s own selections from twelve volumes of published works, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, An Atlas of the Difficult World, and her final volume, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, along with ten powerf...

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the ac...