National Poetry Month 2024

Jelaluddin Rumi was born in the year 1207 and until the age of thirty-seven was a brilliant scholar and popular teacher. But his life changed forever when he met the powerful wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, of whom Rumi said, "What I had thought of before as God, I met today in a human being." From this mysterious and esoteric friendship came a new height of spiritual enlightenment. When Shams disappeared, Rumi began his transformation from scholar...

" ... Olivia Gatwood is a thrilling new voice in contemporary feminist poetry. In Life of the Party, she weaves together her own coming of age with an investigation into our culture's romanticization of violence against women. In precise, searing language--at times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant--she explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. How does one grow from a girl...

Seamus Heaney's Nobel Lecture, captured here in Crediting Poetry, is a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive politics and "world-sorrow." Beginning with the "creaturely existence" of his childhood in a thatched farmstead in rural County Derry, Heaney traces his path in "the wideness of language." It is a way forged by listening: to the "burbles and squeaks" of BBC and Radio Eireann...

"A collection of poems addressing how every kind of love--self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural--is birthed, shaped, and complicated by the invisible forces of gender, capitalism, religion, migration, and so on. Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, [the book] explores many forms of love and how 'a promise made isn't always a promise kept,' as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American...

"From Shakespeare to Blake to Rosetti to Wordsworth. Cats have been celebrated in poetry for as long as they have been warming laps and shedding fur on our freshly cleaned laundry. Mysterious, adorable, finicky, and cherished, cats are beloved muses for poets, writers, and artists. This inspired collection presents treasured poems and nursery rhymes illustrated with the whimsical, irresistible art of Yasmine Surovec of CAT vs HUMAN."--Page 4 of cover....

"With the same brilliant wit and biting realism that made Love Poems for Married People, Love Poems for People with Children, and Love Poems for Anxious People such hits, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection that tackles the hilarity of life in the office. From waiting in line for the printer and revising spreadsheet after spreadsheet, to lukewarm coffee, office politics, and the daily patterns of your most annoying--and lovable--coworkers,...

""America's favorite poet" (the Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither Haiku nor limmerick, and certainly not a gimmick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual content into small spaces. Taken together the...

A collection of poems describing the curious menagerie of guests who arrive at William Blake's inn.

"This one-of-a-kind collection of poems about the American South ranges over four centuries of its dramatic history. The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating,...