A diverse display of formal dexterity, narrative power, and lyrical resonance, Peter Filkins's latest collection of poems explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and the human.
Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life's mystery and the soul's repose amid "talismans at twilight, the whir of birds."
The first U.S. publication of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, author of The Tree House, winner of the 2004 Forward Prize for best poetry collection
It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
--from "The Dipper"
For more than twenty years, Kathleen Jamie has been writing the poetry that has established her as "the leading Scottish poet of her generation" (The Sunday Times). Lyrical and meditative, her poems engage the natural world and human society with an authentic, earthly spirituality.
Waterlight at last makes Jamie's work available to American readers. Her poetry--rendered sometimes in the Scots dialect, sometimes in the descriptive bursts of a naturalist's field guide --confronts gender, sex, landscape, and nationhood with the vivacity of an essential poetic voice.
Poetry exploring bisexual relationships, erasure, and denial.
WE PREFER THE DAMNED, the 11th book from Carlo Matos, features poems exploring bisexual relationships, erasure, and denial. Matos, equally celebrated for his fiction, poetry, and prose-poetry, pushes toward a new grammar for intersectional identities as the poems in WE PREFER THE DAMNED weave his Portuguese-American heritage and bi+ lived experience. Through language turned and punctuated in fresh ways, Matos finds the structures and syntax to embrace past and present, old self and new self. His toughness as a former MMA fighter turns to the finessed strength of rigorous self-examination with these poems. The collection embraces the true complexities of the bi+/pan/poly experience, particularly false accusations of not being Queer enough or, simultaneously, of being too sexual and incapable of monogamy. These poems also trace the boundaries where such issues interact with a working-class, child-of-immigrants upbringing, in which the very words for describing bisexuality did not exist. With WE PREFER THE DAMNED, Carlo Matos creates that missing language.
Poetry.
Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Poetry
A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another's thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.
From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher's curiosity, a father's compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet's role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater-turned-lake "exploding with lilies," a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash--these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.
Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing--and inviting us--to "expand our relationship / with Death," and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.
"WE WANT OUR BODIES BACK URGES BLACK WOMEN TO DEMAND BETTER FROM MEN." -ESSENCE
"MASTER POET JESSICA CARE MOORE GIFTS US THIS LATEST COLLECTION OF SHARP, SMART AND DEFIANT PIECES." -MS. MAGAZINE
BOOKS BY BLACK WOMEN WE CAN'T WAIT TO READ IN 2020 -REFINERY29
A dazzling full-length collection of verse from one of the leading poets of our time.
Over the past two decades, jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women's creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Fierce and passionate, Jessica Care moore argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats.
We Want Our Bodies Back is an exploration--and defiant stance against--these many attacks.
With a new introduction by poet and editor Kevin Young, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes.
Hughes--who was just twenty-four at the time of The Weary Blues's first appearance--spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in American literature, beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race . . . Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal," and, he concludes, they are the expression of "an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is "celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream," and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American "I" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins "I, too, sing America," but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies," the young Hughes offers, "That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world."
Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her "warm, oracular voice" (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks "from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all" (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR). Her poems are musical, intimate, political, and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love.
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo's inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo's "poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times" (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).
It weaves together awed autobiographical sketches so that a distinct sensibility and experience emerge, while simultaneously setting the reader free to traverse an imaginative wilderness. The poems each stand on their own as distinct and bizarre singular shards, while also accruing resonance.
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be Devendra? Have you ever wondered what it's like to be yourself? This book.