"Through the eyes and stories of prominent Black female figures from Zora Neale Hurston to Riley Curry and Michelle Obama, and with an homage to Toni Morrison's Beloved, Breath Better Spent beautifully and trenchantly captures the culture of Black girlhood and its changing relationship to American culture, exploring the highly visible and invisible spaces that Black girls occupy, from school, to home, to others' imaginations, and proceeds to question...

"From "one of the essential voices in American poetry" (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerily morose poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present. The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in a relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics...

"The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences. In addition to exploring the ways language is...

"Represent[s] the very best work James has ever done in verse."--Jason Guriel, New Republic. In this new collection of "technically and emotionally heart-stopping poems" (Spectator)--including "Japanese Maple," which was published in The New Yorker to great acclaim--Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which--for all their grappling...

"Hapax is ancient Greek for "once, once only, once and for all," and "onceness" pervades this second book of poems by American expatriate poet A.E. Stallings. Opening with the jolt of "Aftershocks," this book explores what does and does not survive its "gone moment"--Childhood ("The Dollhouse"), ancient artifacts ("Implements from the Grave of the Poet"), a marriage's lost moments of happiness ("Lovejoy Street"). The poems also often compare the ancient...

"A masterful and moving new volume from a "peerless poet of the natural world" (New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier. In the exquisite,...

"Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers aspiring writers imaginative distance and perspective needed to tell their stories. Through a candid and generous account of his own story, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz reveals how his early struggle to find inspiration in his negative inclinations led to the idea of persona writing, the philosophy on which he founded the Writers Studio in 1987. Schultz...

Collects poems chosen by editor Denise Duhamel as the best of 2013, featuring 75 poets including Sherman Alexie, Daisy Fried, Elizabeth Hazen, and Noelle Kocot.

"A father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet. The poet's art is revealed in stages in this "making-of" book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem "Must We Mean What We Say," a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets...

"What is the price of a life, a stolen culture, a stolen heart? In formal and nontraditional poems, Reparations Now! asks for what is owed. Moving between voices and through intersecting histories, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones offers perspectives both sharp and compassionate, exploring the difficulties of navigating our relationships with ourselves and others. From the murder of Mary Turner in 1918 to a case of infidelity to the oppressive nationalist...