"Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death." These are the demands Chase Twichell has made of her poems for over half a century.One of America’s most prominent poets and a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell seeks to perceive what Shunryu Suzuki called "things-as-it-is". These two books, published here in tandem, confront fundamental questions about the nature of the self: childhood trauma, the fate of a damaged planet, marriage and widowhood. Twichell’s...

An elegiacal collection looks unflinchingly at the degradations of the planet and the human body with an urgent appeal to live fully and presentlyWritten in the wake of the COVID pandemic lockdown, mass ecological tragedy, a chronic illness diagnosis, and the death of Twichell's husband, The World It Was turns its gaze upon loss with unflinching lucidity. “Language is a door,” Twichell writes—yet she circles that door warily, questioning whether words can ...

A distinctive collection of more than 90 effective poetry-writing exercises combined with corresponding essays to inspire writers of all levels.The Practice of Poetry is the first handbook for poets to combine poetry-writing exercises with illuminating personal essays by each contributor. The editors, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, who are themselves poets and teachers of creative writing, have collected more than ninety tested and proven exercises intended...

“[Twichell’s] poems generate the requisite heat with the poet’s precise, original and frequently brilliant use of language. . . . A major voice in contemporary poetry.” —Publishers Weekly“[Twichell’s poems] track the inner movements of one life with an unexpected freshness.” —The Washington PostPublishers Weekly called Chase Twichell “a major voice in contemporary poetry,” and this long overdue retrospective supports the claim. Selected from six a...

"Poems of balanced wildness and instinctual grace."—New York Journal of Books“[Twichell’s poems] open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity.” —The Washington Post“Suppose you had Sappho’s passion, the intelligence and perspicacity of Curie, and Dickinson’s sweet wit . . . then you would have the poems of Chase Twichell.” —Hayden Carruth“A major voice in contemporary poetry.” —Publishers WeeklyChase Twichell’s eighth collec...

Tagore's supressed book now available in an English-Bengali editionFor the first time in English, here is the sequence of poems Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) worked on his entire life-the erotic and emotionally powerful dialogue about Lord Krishna and his young lover Radha.These "song offerings" are the first poems Tagore ever published, though he passed them off as those of an unknown Bengali religious poet. As the first and last poems Tag...

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science.A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this gui...

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”— Los Angeles TimesFrom the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise on the poet’s craft from h...

'Among the best poems that Collins has ever written' – NPRIn Water, Water Billy Collins writes with joy and wonder about the beauties and ironies of everyday life. The best poems, he believes, begin in clarity and end with a hint of the sublime: A cat learns to drink from a swimming pool. An astronaut recites Emily Dickinson in space. Here is a writer devotedly in love with the world around him, fascinated by its pleasures but generously sensitive...

From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles.No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the...

Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that Anything Goes.Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book ReviewPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture w...