View your shopping cart.

Banner Message

Please note that online availability does not reflect stock in store!

Poetry

Water / Music

Water / Music

$19.95
More Info

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."

Water I Won't Touch

Water I Won't Touch

$16.00
More Info
Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won't Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body's healing from a double mastectomy--in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction--these ambitious poems put new form to what's been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.
Waterbaby

Waterbaby

$16.00
More Info
In her astounding third collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger turns to water--the natural element of grief--to trace history's interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is a book about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system's crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that's pushed beyond exhaustion. Waterbaby sings the blues in every key, as Wallschlaeger uses her vibrant lexicon and varied rhythms to condense and expand emotion, hurry and slow meaning, communicating the profound simultaneity of righteous dissatisfaction with an unjust world, and radical love for what's possible.
Waterlight: Selected Poems

Waterlight: Selected Poems

$14.00
More Info

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.

Waving At Trains

$5.95
More Info
We Call to the Eye & the Night

We Call to the Eye & the Night

$22.00
More Info
We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets --Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them--and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic--a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.
We Did Not Fear the Father

We Did Not Fear the Father

$24.95
More Info
We Did Not Fear The Father: New & Selected Poems contains the best of forty years of Charles Fort. Ranging easily through a dizzying array of forms--sonnets, villanelles, prose poems, sestinas, elegies, blank verse, haiku, and modular poems, for starters--Charles Fort here demonstrates, unequivocally, that he is a master of his craft. By turns surreal, tender, terrifying, absurd, and soulful, FortÆs work churns with passionate, forceful expression.
We Prefer the Damned

We Prefer the Damned

$22.00
More Info

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.

We Slept Here

We Slept Here

$12.00
More Info
We Slept Here is a case study in vulnerability and honesty. In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.
We the Jury

We the Jury

$16.00
More Info

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

We Want Our Bodies Back

$19.99
More Info

"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.

We Will Be Shelter

We Will Be Shelter

$16.95
More Info
We Will be Shelter, edited by poet and activist Andrea Gibson, is an anthology of contemporary poems that addresses issues of social justice. Unique to this anthology is its focus on creating positive social change through gorgeous, gutsy poetry. Alongside and embedded in these featured poems are concrete ways to address the social and political issues raised. The goal of We Will be Shelter is to raise awareness, encourage critical self-reflection, and call readers to action.
Weary Blues

Weary Blues

$26.00
More Info

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."

Weather Central

Weather Central

$14.95
More Info
"Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams." --Minneapolis Tribune "Kooser ranges over familiar territory, but maturity and full command of his craft now allow him to risk a wider scope, both in subject matter and form. . . . Weather Central forecasts the best of Ted Kooser's poetry: a steady voice, arresting and memorable images, and vigorous play in metaphor that can nourish the human soul." --Southern Humanities Review "Kooser's poems have the beauty and wisdom of something closely tied to the soil. . . . Perfect combinations of imagery and music, American Poetry, the real thing." --Bloomsbury Review Ted Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. He was educated in the Ames public schools, at Iowa State University, and the University of Nebraska. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia magazine, and the 1981 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry for Sure Signs. His poems have appeared in many magazines including the Antioch Reveiw, the Hudson Review, and the Kenyon Review.
Weather Of Words: Poetic Invention

Weather Of Words: Poetic Invention

$15.00
More Info
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a brilliant and witty collection of writings on the art and nature of poetry -- a master class both entertaining and provocative.

The pieces have a broad range and many levels. In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed.

Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences.

We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet.

Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

$25.00
More Info

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).

Weeds

Weeds

$15.95
More Info
"The Weeds" is a book of deserts, exiles, friendships, loves, militaristic hallucinations, and weeds. The poems, prose pieces, and collaborations that make up the collection ask questions ("Is this the right world / for our worldless curiosity?"), observe the mirage-like relationship between humans and their changing environment ("sparrows pecking black spots of gum"), and repel fears ("Adjectives, if they still exist, will include skulking, nasty, portable, blasted, cunning.") A book of metamorphic lostness and visionary geography, Jared Stanley's new book gets way down in "those inhuman gists, the weeds."
Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum

Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum

$17.95
More Info
This poetry collection is at turns surreal, pious, silly, and heartbreaking, but always true to its own logic, even as it creates and expands that logic as it goes. It's the most personal work Devendra Banhart has ever created.
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.