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...

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 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...

"Packed with inspirational, useful, and thought-provoking essays on the craft of writing from some of the best writers around." — Minneapolis Star TribuneTeachers, exercises, mentors, critiques, humor, and inspiration: these form the fuel all writers need when they get down to work every day. For decades the Loft Literary Center has provided this fuel to an enormous community of writers. Views from the Loft brings together the collected wisdom of t...

This all-new book, by the co-author of Companion, invites you to discover and enjoy your poetic self.Inspired by the gratifying success of Companion, Kim Addonizio presents exciting new insights into the creative process, craft, and the lessons of her own creative subjects--love, loss, identity, community--are here, along with a heady variety of writing exercises (and innovative ways to use the Internet). Chapters on gender, race, and class challenge readers to ex...

Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthologyis a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. The authors map out more than 25 key elements of poetry including image, lyric, point of view, metaphor, and movement and use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts. The book guides the reader through a range of poetic modes including:- Elegy- Found poems- Nocturne- Ode- Protest poems- Ars Poetic...

2019 National Book Award Longlist: "Centering on black, female identity, [this is] an exquisite and thoughtful collection." — BustleThis is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.A finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through...

In this engaging and provocative book, Lee Eisenberg, bestselling author of The Number, dares to tackle nothing less than what it takes to find enduring meaning and purpose in life.He explains how from a young age, each of us is compelled to take memories of events and relationships and shape them into a one-of-a-kind personal narrative. In addition to sharing his own pivotal memories (some of them moving, some just a shade embarrassing), Eisenberg present...

The highly anticipated second collection from the Irish-Canadian poet whose work has garnered international attention.Poems of stringent aesthetic demands and volcanic emotional release make up Stevie Howell's wondrous I left nothing inside on purpose. These poems--bewildering in their linguistic beauty--verge on prayer in their intense plea to be truly seen by another, a sort of devotional sequence addressing the psychological construct of attachment. Can...

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides w...

Let the Crazy Child Write! grew out of hundreds of creative writing workshops that Clive Matson has led during his career as poet and writer. Here he guides readers — as individuals or in groups — through twelve seminars designed to overcome inhibitions, locate hidden originality, and find a true creative writing voice. Let the Crazy Child Write! links the playful energy of the creative unconscious — essential to strong writing — to a solid, in-depth course of writing bas...

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper'sJohn D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscuri...