This Great Unknowing: Last Poems

Author	Ilya Kaminsky
ISBN	1555978312

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political...

Author

Mary Oliver

‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?’

Despite owning Oliver’s two volume New and Selected Poems, I couldn’t resist snatching up this tiny collection when I stumbled upon it at a library book sale in the fifty cents bin. Although it was her American...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1933517409

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant...

Author	Louise Glück
ISBN	0880013346

I had a Creative Writing teacher who asked me once if I would like anyone other than myself to read my poetry. When I answered, “Yes,” she advised me to make the suffering in my poems more universal and less personal.

Poetry is obviously personal, but she explained to me that, if I had a husband...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0394715632

I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...

Author	Mary Oliver
ISBN	0807068799

The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in...

Author	Fiona Shaw
ISBN	0955647665

A spellbinding story of forbidden love in the 1950s, now a major movie starring Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger

A secret love which has a whole town talking ... and a small boy very worried.

Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes...

Author	Mary Oliver
ISBN	0807068926

Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit,...

Author	Nick Flynn
ISBN	1555973736

Award-winning poet Nick Flynn takes readers into the dangerous and irresistible center of the hive

I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens' hands, my words
make them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,
& his hands go in.
—from "Blind Huber"

Blindness...

Author	Jim Harrison
ISBN	1556591888

After Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser had exchanged letters and poems for years, Kooser was diagnosed with cancer. "Ted's poetry became overwhelmingly vivid," Harrison recalls. "Then we decided to correspond in short poems, because that was the essence of what we wanted to say to each other."

"Braided...

Author

Aracelis Girmay

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set...

Author	Charles M. Payne
ISBN	0520251768

"In the minds of untold numbers of Americans, for example, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was the civil rights movement. Thought it up, led it, produced its victories, became its sole martyr. Schoolchildren- including Black schoolchildren- are taught this."
-Fred Powledge

Charles...