"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

With these words, Elena Ferrante bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian newspaper. For a full year, she wrote an article each week, the subjects of which had been suggested by Guardian editors, making the writing process a form of prolonged interlocution.

"The 20th century was a time of great change, particularly in the arts, but seldom explored were the female poets of that time. Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp have put together a comprehensive anthology of poetry featuring the poems of Gertrude Stein, Lola Ridge, Amy Lowell, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Mina Loy, Hazel Hall, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, and Hildegarde Flanner....

The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay--dearly, with both money and conscience--to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: "$20 for five minutes. I'll hold your hand in my own," one ghost says. "I'll tell you you were good to me." Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines...

"The best of ancient Greek literature retains a freshness and immediacy that reaches far beyond its time and place of creation and speaks to readers and audience members today. In these 36 lectures, we discuss selections from that group of masterpieces, starting in every case with the cultural and historical background of each, then focusing on close readings of the works themselves"--P. 1 (guidebook).

"Philly native Roberta Forest is a precocious rebel with the soul of a poet. The thirteen-year-old is young, gifted, black, and Catholic--although she's uncertain about the Catholic part after she calls Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite for enslaving people and her nun responds with a racist insult. Their ensuing fight makes Roberta question God and the important adults in her life, all of whom seem to see truth as gray when Roberta believes it's black...

"In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers asked back in 1954--'Why Do Fools Fall in Love?' Duhamel's poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the 'crazy wisdom' of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love...

"I'm still alive and now I'm in Bratislava," says the speaker of one of Salter's poems, as she travels with her unlikely late-in-life love, a military man. She never expected to be here, to know someone like him, to be parted from her previous life; how did it happen? Time is hurtling, but these poems try to slow it down to examine its curious by-products--the prints of Dürer, an Afghan carpet, photographs of people we've lost. The title poem, a...

Collects five plays spanning Ibsen's career, with general introductions, explanatory annotations, criticism, and selections from his correspondence and other writings.

Gathered from nine collections representing three decades of work, these poems - newly available in a rich and varied volume celebrate the growth of a major artist. Since the publication of her first book of poetry, Halfway, Maxine Kumin has been powerfully and fruitfully engaged in the "stuff of life that matters": family, friendship, the bond between the human and natural world, and the themes of loss and survival.