Product Description: “The poems in Once illuminate and echo themes of loss and grief.”—Vanity FairThe incandescent poems in Once, the second collection by an astonishing and formidable poet, explore loss, violence, and recovery. Facing a mother’s impending death, O’Rourke invokes a vanished childhood of “American houses, wet / kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits; / inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off...read more

Product Description: A revelatory, indispensable collection of poems from Jane Hirshfield that centers on beauty, time, and the full embrace of an existence that time cannot help but steal from our arms. Hirshfield is unsurpassed in her ability to sink into a moment’s essence and exchange something of herself with its finite music—and then, in seemingly simple, inevitable words, to deliver that exchange to us in poems that vibrate with form and expression perfectly united...read more

Product Description: One of the world's most honored authors of imaginative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin is also the author of six acclaimed volumes of poetry.  Finding My Elegy distills her life's work, offering a selection of some of her best early poems, and introduces a gorgeous, moving group of new poems written over the last four years...read more

An inspiring memoir of a Pulitzer Prize winner’s triumph over disability.Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the "dummy class" in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition. In his moving memoir, Schultz traces his difficult childhood and his new understanding of his early years. In doing so, he shows how a boy who did not learn to read until he was eleven went on to become a prize-winning poet by sheer force of determination. His balancing act—life as a member of a family with not one but two dyslexics, countered by his intellectual and creative successes as a writer—reveals an inspiring story of the strengths of the human mind.

Product Description: Now in paperback: the superb selection from Marge Piercy's nine most recent books, the heart of her mature poems.This gathering of Piercy's poems is the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. These poems chart the milestone events and fierce passions of the poet's middle years: her Judaism, her deep connection with nature, her marriage, her cats, her politics, and in the face of the loss of time and people, her own legacy...read more

Henri Cole’s last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry. Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.  

The poems in Devin Johnston’s Traveler cross great distances, from the Red Hills of Kansas to the Rough Bounds of the Scottish Highlands, following weather patterns, bird migrations, and ocean voyages. Less literally, these poems move through translations and protean transformations. Their subjects are often next to nothing in several senses: cloud shadows racing across a valley before dusk, the predawn expectation of a child’s birth, or the static-electric charge of clothing fabric. Throughout, Johnston offers vivid glimpses of the phenomenal world: “He describes objects with his hands and his eyes, noting texture, heft, and fit” (Boston Review). Equally, one finds a keen attention to sound in the patterning of subtle rhymes and rhythms, demonstrating “care and precision with line and pause” (Poetry).

Product Description: A stunningly poignant sequence of poems tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.In this wise and intimate telling—which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending—Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband's smile to the set of his hip...read more

Product Description: Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in the Amistad rebellion.Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad, Ardency begins with "Buzzard," a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven...read more

Product Description: The second collection by Catherine Barnett, whose “poems are scrupulously restrained and beautifully made” (Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post) Everyone asks us what we're afraid ofbut children aren't supposed to say.We could put loneliness on the list...read more

Product Description: Robert Duncan (1919-1988), one of the major postwar American poets, was an adulated figure among his contemporaries, including Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked that Duncan "had the best ear this side of Dante...read more

Product Description: “Rich’s poetry itself is a mirror, reflecting the truths about humanity this discerning poet has come to understand.”—Booklist“Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century . . . attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she’s racked up...read more

Product Description: A cycle of pathbreaking poems about the history of a family set against the backdrop of the last century.An Individual History describes the fears, anger, and guilt—personal, familial, societal, political, and historical—that comprise a life...read more

Product Description: Winner of the 2011 Bakeless Prize for Poetry, the debut collection by Jo Sarzotti  I have learned three things in the north:The sea has a lung,The dead do not eat grass, norDo they return.--from “The Origin of Salt” In these poems, Jo Sarzotti portrays a personal geography ranging from the desert of the title to the far north, from the mother to the father...read more

Product Description: A luminous new volume from a National Book Award finalist and recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.Orphan Hours is a book of reconciliation, of coming to terms with time in its most personal and memorable manifestations, and of learning the wisdom of what cannot be changed...read more

Product Description: A masterful debut from a powerfully original poetic voiceA poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape...read more