The Book of Light

Author

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe (“a stolen people in a stolen land”), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0822953145

Poems examine life as a child, a woman, and a mother; death; and our relationship to the world. This book, Olds's first, was published when she was 37, and it launched her Pulitzer-winning career.

I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me...

Author	Naomi Shihab Nye
ISBN	1880238632

Hidden

If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in...

Author	Harryette Mullen
ISBN	0520231430

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions,...

Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
ISBN	0819512087

Komunyakaa vividly evokes his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity, and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts. He portrays a child's dawning awareness of the natural and social order around him, rhythms of life in the community, the constant struggle for survival in the...

Author	Bill Moyers
ISBN	0385479174

Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen."
In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets, "The...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	1929918089

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0060957956

Since, 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova -- like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence -- combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book...

Author

W.S. Merwin

Half Roundel

I make no prayer
For the spoilt season,
The weed of Eden.
I make no prayer.
Save us the green
In the weed of time.

Now is November;
In night uneasy
Nothing I say.
I make no prayer.
Save us from the water
That washes us away.

What...

Author	Gerald Stern
ISBN	0393319091

"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long /...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0060935405

This bold, wide-ranging collection -- his sixth book of poems -- demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made Mark Doty's poems special to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox...

Author	Patricia Smith
ISBN	1566891930

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders.


“What power. Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell


“I was...

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	0918526779

I think I ordered this for my birthday in July last year but I have only just read it. Poetry that excites me is hard to find so when I suspect that a recently found collection may be good I hoard it, until one day ... when I can bear the anticipation no longer ... I dive in. Which is what I did this morning. I made...

Author	Stanley Kunitz
ISBN	0393316157

"Winner of the 1995 National Book Award, Passing Through confirms that the venerable doyen of American poetry is still a poet in his prime."—Atlantic Monthly

Stanley Kunitz, one of the masters of contemporary poetry, presents his ninth collection, gathering a rich selection of his work,...

Author	Natasha Trethewey
ISBN	1555973094

Winner of the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award

In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken...

Author	Adrienne Rich
ISBN	0393038688

A new book of poems by one of America's most distinguished poets.

"When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment...

Author	Tracy K. Smith
ISBN	1555974756

Every poem is the story of itself.
Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
--from "History"
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060951699

Jane Hirshfield is coming to my village in a couple weeks so I thought I would read some of her work, on the suggestion of my friend and poet Jenn. This is my first experience of her work, and I thought it was bold to take on this subject (of love) and try to make something new of it. I very much liked the poems;...

Author	Nikky Finney
ISBN	0810152169

Winner of 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry
Winner of 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee for 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry

The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split...

Author	Ross Gay
ISBN	0822961350

It feels like I read this book very quickly even though I read most of the poems at least 3 times. Not because that's my way of doing things (it's not), but because when I reached the end of many of the poems I would scream out "WHAT!" as in "what did I just read?!" and go back to feel it all again. And there isn't...