Organized into ten sections with each devoted to a poetic concept, The Practicing Poet begins with "Discovering New Material," "Finding the Best Words," "Making Music," "Working with Sentences and Line Breaks," "Crafting Surprise," and "Achieving Tone." The concepts become progressively more sophisticated, moving on to "Dealing with Feelings," "Transforming Your Poems," and "Rethinking and Revising." The final section, "Publishing Your Book," covers manuscript organization, book promotion,...

The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft focuses on the craft of poetry and is based on the belief that craft can be taught and the best teacher of craft is a good poem. This book assumes a knowledgeable reader, that is, one who already knows the language of poetry and already practices the craft. This book is organized into thirteen sections, each one devoted to a specific poetic strategy. While only thirteen strategies are used for organizational purposes, the reader will find many additiona...

In these sparkling poems, Diane Lockward takes life as it comes and finds nourishment in it all: succulence of the peach, redolence of the pear, the "green grape of sorrow." I love these poems for their craft, sensuality and energy. Like high-wire acts of language and imagination, they almost leap in the air and come down again on the wire, balancing between witty and dark, personal and invented, idea and emotion.—Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire

The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop is a poetry tutorial designed to inform and inspire poets. It includes model poems and prompts, writing tips, and interviews with poets. Organized into ten sections, the book covers such concepts as Diction, Sound, Voice, and Imagery. It is geared towards the experienced poet as well as those just getting started and is ideal for individual use at home or group use in the classroom or workshop. Contributors include fifty-six of our nation's finest poets...

Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab of sunset before it disappears. The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, with its cryptic title, invites us to join her in nothing less than a poetic banquet where we are seduced by the "Red ...

Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham selected fifty-four poems by fifty-one poets, happily including Denise Duhamel, Jack Bedell, Mira Rosenthal, Martha Silano, Julian Stannard, Charles Harper Webb, and others. With all poets singing together, we have a rainbow of words—alive, nourishing, rich—that clearly define the range and power of the once humble doughnut. Poetry and confection make for a delicious marriage. And who knew we’d live to see sugar, fat, and dough connected to the div...

The Crafty Poet II is organized into ten sections, beginning with "Revising Your Process." That section is followed by one on "Entryways into Poems" which considers how a poet might get going with a poem and how a poet might pull in a reader with humor and enticing titles. There is in-depth discussion of the importance of choosing the right words; using syntax, line breaks, and spacing to advantage; and enhancing the music of poems. There is a meaty section on how to add complication to yo...

"Cognizant of loss but always celebratory, Lockward's poems are irreverent, ravenous for the world, and unabashedly female. When. 'In Losing the Blues,' she writes, 'I could burn / the hands off a man,' you have no doubt that she is singing a true song." --- Kim Addonizio

A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You’ll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union … Kisses in this anthology may be romantic or funny or comforting or erotic or mournful—and more … We...

Like “sunlight stroking the birds’ throats so it comes out as song,” Ann Fisher-Wirth’s graceful and sturdy lines unsettle the seemingly familiar. A writer of moral gravity, her distilled attentiveness presses against our all-too-common ambivalence and detachment from the ordinary world. Whether set in Mississippi, California, the Ozarks, or France, the poems in The Bones of Winter Birdsexhibit an abundance of compassion and civility. As Fisher-Wirth praises, laments, lets go, lan...

Why do dolls compel us so much? What are their meanings? What lessons do they have to teach us? The Doll Collection explores these questions. This wonderful anthology of poems asks us to rethink dolls. Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood. Dolls shape our thinking about the female body, about race and class. Dolls influence our understanding of childhood. Symbols of perfection, they both comfort and terrify. Dolls represent, as Freud would say, the “uncanny.” They...

How can I—or anyone—not adore David Graham’s new collection? The tone throughout is hospitable, wry, and affirming even while acknowledging that loss and suffering are ever present. The honey of earth “comes and goes at once,” Wallace Stevens wrote, and these poems embody that paradox in vivid detail and compelling language. The sweetness that life offers—love, art, music, family, nature—exists simultaneously with the bitterness it guarantees—pain, grief, death. Both coming and going, ...