The Republic of Poetry: Poems

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1932195122

Poetry. Winner of the 2002 Dorset Prize, and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Ilya Kaminsky is a recent Russian immigrant and rising poetic star. Despite the fact that he is a non-native speaker, Kaminksy's sense of rhythm and lyic surpasses that of most contemporary poets in the English language....

Author

Patricia Smith

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling...

Author	Yusef Komunyakaa
ISBN	0819567396

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished...

Author	Wisława Szymborska
ISBN	0151012202

From a writer whom Charles Simic calls "one of the finest poets living" comes a collection of witty, compassionate, contemplative, and always surprising poems. Szymborska writes with verve about everything from love unremembered to keys mislaid in the grass. The poems will appear, for the first...

Author	Adrienne Rich
ISBN	0393319849

"Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move." In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures—the midnight salvage—we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work...

Author	Frank Bidart
ISBN	0374269734

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete.

Throughout his work,...

Author	Grace Paley
ISBN	0374527245

A longtime teacher, activist, feminist, and masterful writer of short fiction and essays, Paley is also an accomplished poet. Combining her two previous collections with unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of a direct, attentive, and always unpredictable poet. Whether describing...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0252022106

A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. Particularly moving is "Days of 1981," in which he recalls the memory of his first gay lover--a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained/or lethal offered....

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740562

In ‘New and Selected Poems’, readers will find a real master craftsman at work. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0618224971

Pulitzer Prize winner Galway Kinnell's first new collection of poetry in more than a decade, with a bound-in CD of poems read by the author

Here is the eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell, whom the New York Times has called "one of the true master poets of his generation." In this striking...

Author	Jean Valentine
ISBN	0819567132

Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers...

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1889330612

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially...

Author	Heather McHugh
ISBN	0743299736

Yes, I know I'm a little bit behind in my reading...
Okay, so every year in Best American, without fail, one will find a good number of big names and at least a few poems from The New Yorker, Poetry, and other major publications. Some past guest eds leaned more in this direction than others, but there...

Author	Helen Vendler
ISBN	0312257066

“Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor.” It didn't take me long while reading Helen Vendler's introduction to poetry to remember this quote from Wallace Stevens, as so much of the best poetry deals with the flouting of conventions and the subverting of cliches. Perhaps the formulaic...

Author	Lucille Clifton
ISBN	1880238888

Lucille Clifton: Ave Atque Vale

Lucille Clifton is gone but her legacy of simple, honestly felt, seemingly spontaneously written poems about the live of ordinary people who become icons almost by accident will live on, especially through the collection of her works in this award winning...

Author	Pablo Neruda
ISBN	1556591675

Facing death from cancer, Neruda wrote no book more direct and passionate in its language, and this translation—the first time these poems appeared in English—was cited by Bloomsbury Review as a Book of the Year and called one of the "most valuable Neruda books we have today." In this lyrical suite,...

Author	Terrance Hayes
ISBN	0142001392

The second collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award

Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson,...

Author	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN	1932195459

The astonishing second book by a lively and inventive American poet of Filipina-Indian descent. Naomi Shihab Nye says of this book, "Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poems are . . . ripe, funny and fresh. They're the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve, rich with sources and elements-animals,...

Author	A. Van Jordan
ISBN	0393327647

MacNolia by A. Van Jordan is a wonderful poetry collection worth reading many times. It reads like a novel because the author provides a fairly integrated story imagined by Jordan but based on a real life event. He doles out the background information in hints and pieces from several viewpoints throughout...