Book Displays

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 voice their passionate resistance to slavery. This volume captures the power and beauty of this diverse tradition and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

Contains over 1500 poems by more than 200 well-known American poets, including Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens.

American War Poetry spans the history of the nation. Beginning with the Colonial Wars of the eighteenth-century and ending with the Gulf Wars, this original and significant anthology presents four centuries of American men and women-soldiers, nurses, reporters, and embattled civilians-writing about war.

In this unprecedented anthology, acclaimed poets from around the world select poems from their countries of origin to share with a wider audience. Readers will find eloquence, urgency, and idiosyncrasy, poems all in English but springing from drastically varied voices, geographies, and histories.

This exciting anthology of work by up-and-coming writers is the first to profile a new generation of Asian American poets.

This important collection synthesizes and presents broad swaths of work from poets of all races and backgrounds, as only Reed can, ranging from Gertrude Stein to Ai, from Bessie Smith to Askia Toure, from W.C. Handy to the little-known poetry of Ernest Hemingway. Through his unique position in American letters, as writer, teacher, and even publisher, Reed has an unparalleled working knowledge of many of the more marginalized voices in American poetry. This collection will reflect that unique access by including acknowledged masters as well as lesser known talents in greater variety than any previous anthology. From Totems to Hip Hop will cover American poetry from its pre-Columbian origins to the hip hop lyricists of today and, with the guidance of Reed's thoughtful and provocative introduction and headnotes, trace the remarkably rich cross-pollination which has continually occurred across racial and cultural lines.

Presents thirty-five pairs of haiku poems and images, organized seasonally.

A collection of poems from more than seventy-five twentieth-century poets from Illinois.

This anthology encompasses all the major Japanese women poets, over one hundred, arranged chronologically and all the major verse forms: choka, tanka, haikai (haiku), kanshi (verse written in Chinese), and free verse.

This is the first modern anthology of Gothic verse. It traces the rise of Gothic in the late eighteenth century and follows its footsteps through the nineteenth century. Gothic has never truly died as it constantly reinvents itself, and this lively, illustrated and annotated anthology offers students the atmospheric poetry that originally studded terror novels and inspired horror films.

Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott.

An engaging preface by editor-translator Ming Di and interviews with the poets frame translations that render not only the gist and pith but also the spirit and emotional tone of the originals.

This work illuminates today's Black experience through the voices of transformative and powerful African American poets. Included in this volume are the poems of 43 African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith.

Editor Anne Schultz presents a collection of works by the best of Illinois's young poets.

Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world. Editors Cecilia Vicuna and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, later revolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today.

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty--and sheer variety--leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline making urgency of Claudia Rankine's Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of J.F. Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D.A. Powell.

A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins's poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back-in this case, to poetry.

The poets considered in this volume provide useful information about women's lives and vital understanding of a major area of African-American cultural history. The 148 poems by 34 black women are organized around four major themes: protest, heritage, love and passion, and nature.

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable. Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works, finding intense verbal music, wild imagination in matter-of-fact language, surrealist aplomb, and subtlety in meter.

Collects over one hundred poems, which are presented along with essays describing the importance of poetry being heard aloud and the changes the form has undergone in recent years.

From Edith Södergran to Gunnar Ekelöf to Nobel Prize-winning Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world.

This volume of seasonally-arranged poems is a guide to the appreciation and enjoyment of the great variety of modern Japanese haiku. From turn-of-the-century masters to poets of the twenty-first century, 300 of Japan's best modern haiku are introduced by the author, a leading contemporary haiku poet and critic.

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.

This volume is the first comprehensive overview of poetry written by Cubans in the more than six decades since 1944. Presented in a Spanish-English en face edition, The Whole Island makes available the astonishing achievement of a wide range of Cuban poets.

Discusses the literary and poetic dimensions of rap and hip-hop music, describing the shared elements of rap and poetry--imagery, texture, flow, and more--and analyzing several examples of works from various artists.

This writer's guide provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, he explores the complex relationship between writers and their work.

A Poet's Glossary was an extraordinary achievement, a definitive source for poets and poetry lovers alike. Now, The Essential Poet's Glossary gleans the fundamentals from that extraordinary volume. Edward Hirsch's sparkling new work compiles poetic terms spanning centuries and continents, including forms, devices, movements, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore. Knowing how a poem works is crucial to unlocking its meaning--entries will deepen readers' relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter.

This volume presents an exploration of poetry and feeling, introducing poems selected by the author as emblematic because they suggest something crucial about the nature of poetry itself, and offering his insights on how the poems should be read. In this guide, the author reaches out to all those who may be disaffected by the mere mention of poetry and instructs the reader to focus on a personal, emotional response.

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence.

Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem.

A guide to the writing of poetry and a defense of the art, for writers and readers who wish to understand why and how poetic technique matters. When Maxwell states, "With rhyme what matters is the distance between rhymes" or "the line-break is punctuation," he compresses into simple, memorable phrases a great deal of practical wisdom.

This book takes a snapshot of a moving target: the ever-shifting conversation about today's poetry. The ten essays in this collection offer reflections and insights, practical advice for craft matters, and provocative points of departure for those who read and write poetry.

In six insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues.

A companion for poets from novice to master, The Book of Forms has been called "the poet's bible" for more than fifty years. Filled with both common and rarely heard of forms and prosodies, Turco's engaging style and apt examples invite writers to try their hands at exploring forms in ways that challenge and enrich their work. Revised for today's poet, the fifth edition includes the classic rules of scansion and the useful Form-Finder Index alongside new examples of terms and prose that are essential to the study of all forms of poetry and verse.

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information— a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, “originality” begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other people’s words—framing, citing, recycling, and otherwise mediating available words and sentences, and sometimes entire texts. Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of “unoriginal” writing.

All too often, the history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is told as a tale of two sides. While "Lit crit" pored over the author's every line, "Theory" stood on the shoulder of texts to gaze into the metaphysical mists.
Drawing on the key insights of both Lit crit and Theory, On Modern Poetry tries to get beyond the opposition between them, proposing instead a "total criticism" that draws on all resources available.

In this work, the author describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so. By linking these utterly singular poets and their work, verse connected by shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty, he illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands of a changing nineteenth century.

Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part.

The untold story of the mother and daughter who opened the door to Emily Dickinson's poetry. Emily Dickinson may be the most widely read and beloved of all American poets, but the story behind her work's initial, posthumous publication in 1890 and the mother-and-daughter team most responsible for her enduring legacy are barely known. After Emily recounts the extraordinary lives of Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, and the powerful literary legacy they shared. Mabel's complicated relationships with the Dickinsons--including her thirteen-year extramarital affair with Emily's brother, Austin--roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Mabel and Austin's love led to her work with Emily Dickinson's poetry, which inspired both Mabel's life and her daughter's, and fed controversies over the poetry's promotion, editing, and ownership.

In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Lucille Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts - personal, political, and literary - as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific work.

Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. This volume represents the first attempt to set Levertov's poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.

The Age of Auden takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden’s influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden’s midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry.

Explores how poems have been used as autobiographies throughout time. In this groundbreaking collection, some of our best contemporary poets contemplate the legacy of the confessional poets such as Plath, Sexton, and Lowell. They also tackle such fiery topics as the nature of authorial responsibility in telling the truth, the focus on issues of self in relation to others and to the natural world, the very essence of craft as transformation, and the role female poets have played in breaking the code of silence.

This volume offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century, in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define modern American poetry. The Companion stretches the narrow term of 'literary modernism' - which encompasses works published from approximately 1890 to 1945 - to include a more capacious and usable account of American poetry's evolution from the twentieth century to the present.

W. Jason Miller investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Langston Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture. In this work, Miller initiates an important dialogue between America's neglected history of lynching and some of the world's most significant poems.

The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased.

The poetic manifesto has a long, rich history that hasn't been updated until now. What does a poetic manifesto look like in a time of increased pluralism, relativism, and danger? How can a manifesto open a space for new and diverse voices? Forty-seven poets at different stages of their careers contribute to this new anthology, demonstrating the relevance of the declarative form at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The contributors also have chosen their own poems to accompany their manifestos--an anthologizing act that poets are never permitted.

Jazz Griots studies how four representative African American poets of the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and black history. In so doing they narrate--using jazz as meta-language--genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and black (hi)stories.

Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and ’60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort.

The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries, and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period. This book investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium - its characteristic rhythms, its phonetic qualities, its deployment of syntax - to write verse that continues to move and delight.

To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem - a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style - is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.

Heuston analyzes the ways the works of each writer represent and explain a country or region (Ireland for Yeats, New England for Frost, the American South for Warren, and Northern Ireland for Heaney) as if the writers were anthropologists or ethnographers. This project argues provocatively that literary critics can benefit greatly from the insights and theories of anthropology and ethnography.

With a rare blend of grace, warmth, and scholarship, Leslie Stainton raises the stakes of our appreciation for the greatest of Spain's modern poets, Federico Garca Lorca. Drawing on fourteen years of research; more than a hundred letters unknown to prior biographers; exclusive interviews with Lorca's friends, family, and acquaintances; and dozens of newly discovered archival material, Stainton has brought her subject to life as few writers can.

Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse.