A Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2024In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard blazes the incandescent work of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang (1924–56), the American poet and playwright whose name has been all but erased from literary history. The fiery nerve centre of the literary scene around mid-century Harvard, and best friend of the iconic New York School poet Frank O'Hara – who referred to her as 'one of our finest poets' – Lang herself has langu...

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems whic...

Staying Alive is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves. The Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.Many people turn to poet...

A collection of two of Robert Frost’s most celebrated poems in their original form: A Boy’s Will and North of Boston.The publication of A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) marked the debut of Robert Frost as a major talent and established him as the true poetic voice of New England. Four of his volumes would win the Pulitzer Prize before his death in 1963, and his body of work has since become an integral part of the A...

This warm and lyrical semi-autobiographical first novel by singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen charts the coming of age of Lawrence Breavman, the only son of a Jewish Montreal family.‘Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the world is made flesh.’Lawrence Breavman seeks two things: love and beauty. Beginning with the innocent games of delicious misadventure with first love Lisa and the absorbing wanders through Montre...

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZEWINNER OF THE 2024 HEARTLAND BOOKSELLERS AWARD FOR POETRYDiane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry...

When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: 'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.'Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkin's unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urb...

"If readers would like to sample the genius and diversity of American poetry in the last century, there's no better place to start." — World Literature TodayWhen Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at ...

Sylvia Plath was, for both English and American poetry, one of the defining voices of twentieth-century, and one of the most appealing: few other poets have introduced as many new readers to poetry. Though she published just one collection in her lifetime, The Colossus, and a novel, The Bell Jar, it was following her death in 1963 that her work began to garner the wider audience that it deserved. The manuscript that she left behind, Ariel, was published in 1965 u...

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...

Michael Schmidt’s anthology includes the work of more than a hundred poets from every part of the English-speaking world. What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new.The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times. They have been chosen because they are exceptional, profound and unique in what the...

The Velveteen Rabbit is a first children's book and a heart-warming tale by Margery Williams, an English-American author, primarily of popular children's books. It is about a stuffed rabbit who longs to become real, and the magic that makes his dream come true.Christmas morning, the room filled with the hustle and bustle of preparation, a rabbit stitched of velveteen sits perched on top of the little boy's stocking. But like most children, the boy is fickle and eas...