When Michael Palma's translation of the Inferno appeared in 2002, it defied the conventional wisdom of literary commentators who had long argued that Dante's intricate terza rima form simply could not be rendered in "rhyme-poor" English. But Palma's achievement in rhyming tercets was quickly received as a spectacular feat of poetic artistry. Now, more than two decades later, Palma has applied the same virtuosic attention to the form and flow of the Purgatorio and Paradiso, attending to both the tiniest details and the grand design of the entire Commedia and offering a fluid and readable English version that reveals to contemporary readers the sound, sense, and awe-inspiring beauty of Italian literature's greatest poem.

Details

• Author: Dante Alighieri
• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 624
• ISBN-13: 9781324098522

Barnett's sophomore collection considers the question of how we become who we are.
The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language.
Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina.

A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”


Print length: 98
Publisher: Autumn House Press
ISBN-13: 978-1637680872
Print Type: Paperback

William Blake is one of England’s most fascinating writers; he was not only a groundbreaking poet, but also a painter, engraver, radical, and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by his contemporaries, his powerful and richly symbolic poetry has been a fertile source of inspiration to the many writers and artists who have followed in his footsteps. In this collection Patti Smith brings together her personal favorites of Blake’s poems, including the complete Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, to give a singular picture of this unique genius, whom she calls in her moving introduction “the spiritual ancestor” of generations of poets.

About The Author
William Blake was born in London in 1757. He was educated at home and then worked as an apprentice to the engraver James Basire before joining the Royal Academy in 1779. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, and a year later began his career as a poet when he published Poetical Sketches. This was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), which he also designed and engraved. His other major literary works include The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1793), Milton (1804–8), and Jerusalem (1804–20). He produced many paintings and engravings during his lifetime. Blake died in 1827.

Author: William Blake
Publisher: Vintage
Publish Date: 2016
Page Count: 192
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1101973141
ISBN-13: 978-1101973141

By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.

This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Details

• Author: Gwendolyn Brooks
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 144
• ISBN-13: 9780063484238

"O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be!"

One of the major figures of English Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge created works of remarkable diversity and imaginative genius. The period of his creative friendship with William Wordsworth inspired some of Coleridge’s best-known poems, from the nightmarish vision of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the opium-inspired "Kubla Khan" to the sombre passion of "Dejection: An Ode" and the medieval ballad "Christabel." His meditative ‘conversation’ poems, such as "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-Tree Bower Mr Prison," reflect on remembrance and solitude, while late works, such as "Youth and Age" and "Constancy to an Ideal Object," are haunting meditations on mortality and lost love.

This volume contains the final texts of all the poems published during Coleridge’s lifetime and a substantial selection from those still in manuscript at his death, arranged in chronological order of composition to show his development as a poet. Also included are an introduction, table of dates, further reading, extensive notes, and indexes of titles and first lines.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About The Author
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He and William Wordsworth published the Lyrical Ballads in 1799, marking a conscious break with 18th-century tradition.

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publish Date: 1997
Page Count: 656
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0140423532
ISBN-13: 978-0140423532

In Our Bruises Keep Singing Purple, Afro-Jamaican-Boricua poet, Malcolm Friend, has gifted us with a collection that is politically charged and culturally woke.
Crafted in rhythmseasoned Latinx dialect, emerging from ancestral roots, replanted in the urban spectrum of hip-hop and rap, Friend's voice is heart-inspired, soul-empowered, new-wave griot, a fearless weapon forged from South End Seattle, Puerto Rico, and Pittsburgh.
Friend creates personal and family stories that connect communal tragedies and national consciousness in expressions of rage, affirmation and self-determination, confronting the brutal realities of being Black and young while caught in the colonial grip of America, enlisting the vibrations of sound masters like Ismael Rivera, Cheo Feliciano, Tato Laviera and Bob Marley.
Friend chases ghosts that emerge from living scars and painful realizations experienced by people of color happening in the barbershop, the bar, the dining table, college, on the 7, in between a mofongo of jazz, blues, calypso, rumba, bomba, plena and dembow celebrations, where his heart is. --Sandra María Esteves

In Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple, Malcolm Friend coasts the curvature of the blue note, revealing in his brooding, songful, and formally masterful verse heritages that pull from the ancestral into the vibrancy and violence of this moment.
He guides us carefully through the intricacies of his landscape and identity as Afro-Latino, all while flexing his linguistic and literary dexterity.
The balance of beauty and punch is maintained in English and Spanish with meaning and metaphorical integrity upheld.
From the haunting resonance of Orpheus' lament to the allure of the sultry bolero, from the soul that soothes a man when his mother fears the robbing of his blood far from home to the tension of bomba and blues in the bones, here are the poems that bring us back to the purity of sound in their careful and studied composition.
Friend shows us the terrible, delicate, beloved, ever-shifting truths; he guides us to hear beyond the stopping of our own ears.

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. This timeless classic brings readers Nikki Giovanni's poems from her books Black Feeling Black Talk; Black Judgement; Re: Creation; My House; The Women and the Men; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day; and Those Who Ride the Night Winds.

When Nikki Giovanni’s poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, she immediately took a place among the most celebrated and controversial artists of our time. More than 50 years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America’s political and poetic landscape.

Details

• Author: Nikki Giovanni
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 496
• ISBN-13: 9780063482258

When Nikki Giovanni's poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately took a place among the most celebrated and controversial poets of the era. Finally, here is the first compilation of Nikki Giovanni's poetry. It is the testimony of a life's work from one of the commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century.

From the revolutionary "The Great Pax Whitie" and "Poem for Aretha" to the sublime "Ego Tripping" and the tender "My House," these 150 mind-speaking, truth-telling poems are at once powerful yet sensual, angry yet affirming. Arranged chronologically, they reflect the changes Giovanni has endured as a Black woman, lover, mother, teacher, and poet. Here is the evocation of a nation's past and present -- intensely personal and fiercely political -- from one of our most compassionate, outspoken observers.

About The Author
One of the most popular and influential poets of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Giovanni was raised in Knoxville and Cincinnati but made a name for herself in New York City by drawing a standing-room-only crowd to her first poetry reading at the jazz club Birdland in 1969. A genius at self-promotion whose work struck a responsive chord with blacks and whites, she was able to sell 10,000 copies of her first book, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) -- a self-published volume -- in less than a year.

She has been, at times, a controversial political figure--she opposed the boycott of South Africa during the 1980s, for instance, and has continued to make a name for herself with public and TV appearances, numerous volumes of poetry, prose, and children's verse, and as a teacher and doyenne of the literary world. Her distinctive lower-case "I" ("sometimes/ when i wake up/ in the morning/ and see all the faces/ i just can't/ breathe") is a recognizable trademark, and her poems have been a potent force for young and old.

Author: Nikki Giovanni
Publisher: William Morrow
Publish Date: 1996
Page Count: 304
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0688140475
ISBN-13: 978-0688140472

In this collection, a jubilant testimony to the joys and hardships of the Black queer experience, poet Nicholas Goodly explores language that venerates the saints of their life—those people in cultures and communities who are not often seen as the powerful, brave, and heroic figures that they are. An ode to endurance, love, and play, Star Power carves out a place of pleasure and solace, a personal pantheon of legends from the Wonder Twins, Thundercat, and Tiffany Pollard to Venus Xtravaganza, the Olsen Twins, and Grace Jones. Defiant and unapologetic, Star Power charts a path of joy and wonder, cutting through caustic history and an oppressive present to speak directly to these vibrant lives, which have long been overlooked.

Details

• Author: Nicholas Goodly
• Publisher: Scribner
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 112
• ISBN-13: 9781668080764

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's Odyssey is the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies, and has long been the standard translation for generations of students and poets. Picador is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work with a new cover, an attractive, collectible package, and a new scholarly introduction and afterword that will connect Fitzgerald's Homer to ever more students and general readers. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus's long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory. Of the many translations published since World War II, only Fitzgerald's has won admiration as a great poem in English. The noted classicist Laura Slatkin explains the depth of his engagement with the complex and timeless themes of Homer, while the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings expounds on the gift of his lyrical, ageless poetry that has brought Homer and Odysseus to life for millions of readers of every age. This edition also features a map, a glossary of names and places, a list for further reading, and Fitzgerald's postscript.

Details

• Author: Homer
• Publisher: Picador
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 592
• ISBN-13: 9781250375445

An exuberant collection of two decades of Major Jackson’s passionately intelligent poetry.

A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes: his Cave Canem Poetry Prize–winning debut, Leaving Saturn (2002), which captures the spirit of resilience in the Philadelphia neighborhoods of the poet’s youth; Hoops (2006), which finds transcendence in the solemn marvels of ordinary lives; Holding Company (2010), which shifts away from narrative to explore the seductive force of art, literature, and music; Roll Deep (2015), which addresses human intimacy, war, and the spirit of aesthetic travel; and his vulnerable, philosophical latest, The Absurd Man (2020). The volume opens with over three dozen new poems that erupt into full-throated song in the face of indignity and invite us into a passionate experience of the world.

Taken together, these two decades of writing offer a sustained portrait of a poet “bound up in the ecstatic,” whose buoyant lyricism confronts the social and political forces that would demean humanity. Equally attuned to sensuous connection, metaphysical inquiries, the natural world, and ever-changing urban landscapes, Jackson possesses a sensibility at once global and personal, driven by an enduring conviction in the possibilities of art and language to mark our lives with meaning.

Whether addressing racial conflict and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in America, bearing witness to the plight of refugees, or grieving the contradictory nature of humankind, these dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice, and accountability.

About the Author
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry. A recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, and many others, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and more. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review and host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Author: Major Jackson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: September 5, 2023
Page Count: 288
Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1324064900
ISBN-13: 978-1324064909

"Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." – The New Republic

#1 New York Times bestseller milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

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Author: Rupi Kaur
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publish Date: October 2015
Page Count: 206
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1449474256
ISBN-13: 978-1449474256

KAUR RUPI SUN & HER FLOWE

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

• ISBN-13:9781324004615
• Release Year: 2020
• Publisher: W.W. Norton

The Doomy Poems challenges the notion that the blues embodies resignation: a self-imposed suffering in which one chooses to remain stuck at the crossroads of nostalgia and obsession.

Through persona poems written in the voices of three characters, Jonathan Moody illustrates that in both the South (Houston) and the North (Pittsburgh) the roads to love and integrity, although freshly paved, are strewn with nails and shards of glass.

The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton comprises the poet's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems from her last years.

From the joy and anguish of her own experience, Sexton fashioned poems that told truths about the inner lives of men and women.

"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter...Sexton has earned her place in the canon."—from the Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin

About The Author
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. One of the most popular poets of mid-20th century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike.

Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children. She died at age 46.

Author: Anne Sexton
Publisher: Ecco
Publish Date: 1999
Page Count: 656
Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0395957769
ISBN-13: 978-0395957769

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful societies the world has ever known. Unlike its Homeric predecessors, which arose from a long oral tradition, the Aeneid was composed by a singular poetic genius, and it has ever since been celebrated as one of the greatest literary achievements of antiquity.

This exciting new edition of the Aeneid, the first collaborative translation of the poem in English, is rendered in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the English meter that corresponds best, in its history and cultural standing, to Virgil's dactylic hexameter. Scott McGill and Susannah Wright achieve an ideal middle ground between readability and elevation, engaging modern readers with fresh, contemporary language in a heart-pounding, propulsive rhythm, while also preserving the epic dignity of the original. The result is a brisk, eminently approachable translation that captures Virgil's sensitive balance between celebrating the Roman Empire and dramatizing its human costs, for victors and vanquished alike. This Aeneid is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting, and affecting as the Latin original.

With a rich and informative introduction from Emily Wilson, maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, genealogies, extensive notes, and helpful summaries of each book, this gorgeous edition of Rome's founding poem will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.

Details

• Author: Virgil
• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 512
• ISBN-13: 9781324098553