Poetry

Come full circle with 180 new, exciting poems selected and introduced by Billy Collins.

Inspired by Billy Collins's poem-a-day program for American high schools that he began through the Library of Congress, the original Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry was a gathering of clear, contemporary poems aimed at a wide audience. In 180 More, Collins continues his ambitious mission of exposing readers of all ages to the best of today's poetry. Here are another 180 hospitable, engaging, reader-friendly poems, offering surprise and delight in a wide range of literary voices-comic, melancholy, reflective, irreverent. If poetry is the original travel literature, this anthology contains 180 vehicles ready to carry you away to unexpected places.

With poems by
Robert Bly
Carol Ann Duffy
Eamon Grennan
Mark Halliday
Jane Kenyon
David Kirby
Thomas Lux
Donna Masini
W. S. Merwin
Paul Muldoon
Carol Muske-Dukes
Vijay Seshadri
Naomi Shihab Nye
Gerald Stern
Ron Padgett
Linda Pastan
Victoria Redel
Franz Wright
Robert Wrigley
and many more

Envisioning Brazil is a comprehensive and sweeping assessment of Brazilian studies in the United States. Focusing on synthesis and interpretation and assessing trends and perspectives, this reference work provides an overview of the writings on Brazil by United States scholars since 1945.
"The Development of Brazilian Studies in the United States," provides an overview of Brazilian Studies in North American universities. "Perspectives from the Disciplines" surveys the various academic disciplines that cultivate Brazilian studies: Portuguese language studies, Brazilian literature, art, music, history, anthropology, Amazonian ethnology, economics, politics, and sociology. "Counterpoints: Brazilian Studies in Britain and France" places the contributions of U.S. scholars in an international perspective. "Bibliographic and Reference Sources" offers a chronology of key publications, an essay on the impact of the digital age on Brazilian sources, and a selective bibliography.

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A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present

Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry

The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché

When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what
the current gives. When we reach the camp,

there will be thousands like us.
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads
and waiting pastures of America.

We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo
as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage
for the sweetest mangoes.

I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.

--from "Transmigration"

Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture's ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.

Poetry. AIR POCKET is Kimiko Hahn's first book, a collection rooted in the actual and emotional geography of California. Kimiko Hahn is so good in so many different ways, it would be impossible not to wish her well--Vijay Seshadri.

National Book Award winning poet/author Clayton Eshleman's 14th collection of poetry and prose poems.

Total magnificence. Multi-sensory voyager - sculptor of love and painter of concept and delirium, a choreographer of space and a duende-splicer between Baudelaire, Lorca and Strauss. Angela is somewhere in there, cinematic; a Casanova pin-stripe suit, then a fl aring thigh, then a topaz sari. I fi nd Penaredondo a most accomplished poet, a devouring mind and most of all, a deep, intimate observer touching the big bright, dark worlds - their wounds and miracles. She says, "I want to be that kind / who walks through a wall of fi fty lives." Indeed she possesses this kind of power. A genius at work. - Juan Felipe Herrera Poet Laureate of the United States Angela Penaredondo's powerful debut, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, is a luminous and timely book of migratory poetics that gathers in the body, no matter how impossibly marooned, the mouth of the lyric I. Drawn from the compression of loss, ..".beyond the clenched doors, the perfume / of starved fl owers." Penaredondo's speaker seeks in the ..".web of wetness, what...has been written out." The poet's collapsing of cultural dimensions into the weight of traveling through an embodied history and present reveals an urgent landscape (of war, of art, of nature, of people) of the inevitable and the incommensurable: "I'd rather be whoever bathes / in the monsoon, knees swaying- / unequaled. Wanting allows gospel..." Penaredondo's truth brilliantly explores precariousness, revealing the need to move at its edges, and to escape, into "husk" and "crystalline pictograph"-"I came back not to regret / or ask the particulars why I left. / When a tree falls, its roots / aim jagged, pointing / in all directions..." - Ronaldo Wilson Author of Farthest Traveler The poems in All Things Lose Thousands of Times aptly tell a transnational coming of age story, a becoming from the savage and the fertile, the urban and the fantastic, where "heaven comes after collision." This is a stunning debut for Penaredondo, poems that shimmer with dense and riveting lyricism. - Carmen Gimenez Smith Author of Milk and Filth"

A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.

Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.

Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People's Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

"The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure-all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen's poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live"--

Self-made poet and social media sensation Pierre Jeanty has triumphed once again with his most recent collection, Apologies That Never Came. From words that never left your mouth to feelings you held on to, these words explore an unspoken space in heartbreak and pain, providing solace to the wounded soul.

With massive social media followings and a loyal fan base, Jeanty is poised for great success for his sixth poetry collection entitled Apologies That Never Came. In this series of prose and poetry, both the words and sentiment are simple, uninterrupted by excess flair or complexity.

Apologies That Never Came dissects the agony of heartbreak and loss through the unexpressed words and feelings; what is left over at the end. While his poems and prose delve into pain, they ultimately transcend that heartbreak, awakening everyone's preexisting strength and capacity for growth. Much like in his previous collections, Jeanty has successfully created a tool for unity and healing out of the torment of his experiences.

Thorpe Moeckel's trilogy of long poems are as rich, lush, and organic as the soil of his Virginia Blue Ridge homestead. In a mode both contemporary and as old as Hesiod, Moeckel sustains a cosmic and earthbound incursion into essential techniques and textures of life.

Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us radical new poems of intimate life and political conscience, of race and class and a mother's violence.

The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, Rasputin, the cervix, her mother's return from the dead: the peerless Sharon Olds once again takes up subject matter that is both difficult and ordinary, elusive and everywhere. Each aria is shaped by its unique harmonics and moral logic, as Olds stands center stage to sing of sexual pleasure and chance wisdom, and faces the tragic life of our nation and our planet. "I cannot say I did not ask / to be born," begins one aria, which considers how, with what actions, with what thirst, we each ask for a turn, and receive our portion on earth. Olds delivers these pieces with all the passion, anguish, and solo force that make a great performance, in the process enlarging the soul of her reader.