A New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2024Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared withi...

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

"Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift---the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings."---James LongenbachA highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modern...

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony.The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humour, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energy - sometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and danger - public and private - illuminate one another...

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

This seventh collection by acclaimed poet Susan Stewart offers a meditation on difficulty and the powers of nature.In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle t...

Here are poems with music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” Evans, writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what ...

"Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each."—John L. Koethe

A new collection of poetry by the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2000. "Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's new work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in THE LEDGE are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. The...

"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering." -- Library JournalWith an astonishing grasp of language and detail, Julia Levine enacts a visceral, lyric experience that slips wildly between and within tragedy and grace. In Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, her fourth collection, Levine offers far-ranging subjects, including poems about a friend's suicide and the poet's ...

A treasure trove of collected works from the legendary author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceQueen Gertrude gives Hamlet a piece of her mind.An ugly sister and a wicked stepmother put in a good word for themselves.A reincarnated bat explains how Bram Stoker got Dracula hopelessly wrong.Bones and Murder is a bewitching cocktail of prose and poetry, fiction and fairytales, as well as some of Atwood's own illustr...

'A source of uncompromising elemental warmth' Ali SmithBy turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in flux, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.