Poetry

The heroic deeds and words of a warrior poet of northern Arabia

An epic hero and a poet, the semi-legendary Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ was a prominent ancestor of the Shammar tribal confederation that stretches across the Great Nafūd desert in the northern Arabian Peninsula. Shāyiʿ’s corpus of extant poems are preserved in narratives about his chivalrous exploits transmitted orally for centuries. In this volume, Marcel Kurpershoek vividly translates the deeds and verses of this compelling poet, based on recordings of late-twentieth century reciters, a testament to Shāyiʿ’s prominence as an embodiment of Bedouin virtue, courage, wiliness, and generosity.

Born with one eye, Shāyiʿ presents himself as unattractive and unassuming, only to reveal a hero’s strength, sagacity, and wiliness. In a number of stories, he is shown hiding his identity, whether in disguise as an impoverished Bedouin or on a camel deliberately made to look mangy and weak. In the oral culture of the Bedouin, the epic cycle of Shāyiʿ al-Amsaḥ delights and instructs listeners through its unmasking of false appearances and its revelation of the hero’s true character.

Translated into English for the first time, these engaging tales and poems tell of dangerous desert travel, warlike exploits, chivalrous conduct and its opposite, feats of hospitality that defy belief, and convey nuggets of wisdom from the Bedouin manual of survival, making this collection a colorful compendium of the manners and customs of the tribes of northern Arabia.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A classic textbook on the study of logic

In the Muslim East, logic was an integral part of the syllabus of schools and found to be especially helpful for legal studies. It was at this time that The Rules of Logic was composed by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school of law.

The Rules of Logic is the most widely read introduction to logic in the Arabic-speaking world. It has probably enjoyed a longer shelf-life than any other logic textbook ever written, having been in use by madrasah students from the early eighth/fourteenth century up until the present day. Building on the theories of Avicenna, al-Rāzī, and other pioneers of logic, al-Kātibī discusses the many pitfalls of building arguments and setting out unambiguous claims in natural language. The enduring nature of the text is a testament to al-Kātibī and his impact on concepts of formal discourse and argument. This new translation of The Rules of Logic brings to both an Arabic and English readership an influential text that has shaped the work of scholars of logic for centuries.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Poems of love and battle by Arabia’s legendary warrior

From the sixth-century highlands of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, on the eve of the advent of Islam, come the strident cries of a legendary warrior and poet. The black outcast son of an Arab father and an Ethiopian slave mother, 'Antarah ibn Shaddad struggled to win the recognition of his father and tribe. He defied social norms and, despite his outcast status, loyally defended his people.

'Antarah captured his tumultuous life in uncompromising poetry that combines flashes of tenderness with blood-curdling violence. His war songs are testaments to his life-long battle to win the recognition of his people and the hand of 'Ablah, the free-born woman he loved but who was denied him by her family.

War Songs presents the poetry attributed to 'Antarah and includes a selection of poems taken from the later Epic of 'Antar, a popular story-cycle that continues to captivate and charm Arab audiences to this day with tales of its hero’s titanic feats of strength and endurance. 'Antarah’s voice resonates here, for the first time in vibrant, contemporary English, intoning its eternal truths: commitment to one’s beliefs, loyalty to kith and kin, and fidelity in love.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Verses on hunter and quarry from a giant of Arabic poetry

Arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language, Abū Nuwās was renowned for his innovations in poetic genre and style and was a larger-than-life figure even among his contemporaries in Abbasid Baghdad. In A Demon Spirit, prize-winning translator and scholar James E. Montgomery renders this literary giant’s hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt, translated for the first time in vivid English.

Abū Nuwās’s poems radiate brilliance, ingenuity, and lyrical attentiveness to both nature and body. These hunting poems convey the crackling energy of ruthless predators and wily prey, the worryingly uncertain outcome of perilous pursuits, and the mythic perfection of warriors both human and animal—all the while overturning genre structures and power dynamics with unforgettable imagery expressed in smooth, natural language.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

A rich anthology of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry on the beauties and perils of the hunt

In the poems of Fate the Hunter, many of them translated into English for the first time, trained cheetahs chase oryx, and goshawks glare from falconers’ arms, while archers stalk their prey across the desert plains and mountain ravines of the Arabian peninsula. With this collection, James E. Montgomery, acclaimed translator of War Songs by ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, offers a new edition and translation of twenty-six early works of hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt. Included here are poems by pre-Islamic poets such as Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Shanfarā, as well as poets from the Umayyad era such as al-Shamardal ibn Sharīk. The volume concludes with the earliest extant epistle about hunting, written by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, a master of Arabic prose.

Through the eyes of the poet, the hunter’s pursuit of the quarry mirrors Fate’s pursuit of both humans and nonhumans and highlights the ambiguity of the encounter. With breathtaking descriptions of falcons, gazelles, and saluki gazehounds, the poems in Fate the Hunter capture the drama and tension of the hunt while offering meditations on Fate, mortality, and death.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.

Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today; how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic language and how (or whether) to present art's claim to moral, spiritual, or epistemological seriousness within representations of modern phenomena.

For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there has never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative selected poems—the current Selected Poetry, first published in 1938, contains no work from the last three volumes published during Jeffers' lifetime or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers' completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition.

The first three volumes of this four-volume work, will present chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The present volume consists of poems written from 1939 to Jeffers' death in 1963, including the dramatic poems The Bowl of Blood, Medea, and The Double Axe byt were eventually omitted for reasons that are unclear; and those poems from his last years, which appeared posthumously in The Beginning and the End, that seem to be completed drafts.

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

“Few writers pay more rapt attention to the fact that history is, fundamentally, storytelling . . . A pebble in every shoe. It’s the Everett way.”—New York Times

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett’s sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

“A witty, sultry, and thoughtful new collection."—Ron Charles, Washington Post

Obsessive love has never been so much fun! What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria is a powerful tribute to the intensity of obsessive love, told through the trademark humor and heartbreak of bestselling poet Kim Dower.

Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release.

From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,” the painfully funny, “His Other Girlfriend,” to the longing in “Visiting Baudelaire,” and the sad, sweet final poem, “Fish’s Lament,” Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone—even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.

Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today; how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic language and how (or whether) to present art's claim to moral, spiritual, or epistemological seriousness within representations of modern phenomena.

For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there has never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative selected poems—the current Selected Poetry, first published in 1938, contains no work from the last three volumes published during Jeffers' lifetime or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers' completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition.

The first three volumes of this four-volume work, will present chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The present volume consists of poems written between 1928 and 1938—the narratives Dear Judes, Thurso's Landing, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, Solstice, and Such Counsels You Gave to Me, as well as shorter verse dramas and lyric poems.

AUTHOR OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, JAMES

AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION

Featured in the New York Times!

Percival Everett’s The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843, Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun, is poetry within the harsh confines of a mock historical document—a guidebook for the American slave owner. The collection features lists of instructions for buying, training, and punishing, equations for calculating present and future profits, and handwritten annotations affirming the brutal contents. The Book of Training lays bare the mechanics of the peculiar institution of slavery and challenges readers to place themselves in the uncomfortable vantage point of those who have bought and enslaved human beings.

NATIONALLY-HONORED POET • POET LAUREATE OF SOUTH PASADENA, CALIFORNIA • PUSHCART PRIZE WINNER 

Ron Koertge explores human fragility throughout history in his poetry collection, PANDORA’S KITCHEN

“Moral certainties and stereotypes vanish in these sly/subversive, satiric/tender, achingly funny/humane poems.”–Amy Gerstler • “They are poetry at its best, causing his readers to laugh, think, and feel anew.”–Billy Collins, former US poet laureate. 

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives.

The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING I WAS A BELL

M. Soledad Caballero explores the complexities of the body, delving into themes such as cancer, memory, and love in a lyrical collection of poems you won’t want to miss.

“This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.”–Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder

“Masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land.”–Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without Altar

In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation.

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner brings together, for the first time, all of the approximately 3,072 published and unpublished poems composed by Larry Eigner (1927-1996), a prominent American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the influential Black Mountain School. Scrupulously edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville from the extensive archives of Eigner typescripts at the University of Kansas and Stanford University, this monumental, four-volume, 8 1/2 by 11 inch edition sets forth in chronological sequence the story of Eigner's achievement, from his modest beginnings as the boy-author of traditional rhymes to his highly original (and often profoundly moving) constructions made of letters in the space of his typewriter page, which have gained him widespread recognition and placed him in the forefront of the literary avant-garde.

For over 40 years, beginning in the early 1950's, Larry Eigner's writing was a wonder and a delight to readers of contemporary poetry, appearing in countless little magazines and in over 75 books and pamphlets. With the publication of The Collected Poems—faithfully reproducing the precise visual and aural relationships envisioned by the author in an equivalently spaced Courier computer font which preserves typewriter spacing—the fact of Eigner's amazing accomplishment can finally be known, appreciated and appraised by a much-better-informed, wider audience.

Palsied from hard birth, growing up in a close-knit, nurturing household in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Eigner courageously overcame a series of physical obstacles and limitations to achieve a mastery over the material text, producing his typescripts on his 1940 Royal manual typewriter using only his right index finger and thumb to create shifting constellations of words in space whose musical and visual designs are realized in a language at once immediate and highly abstract.

Perhaps the best realization to date of the idea of "composition by field" proposed by Charles Olson in his landmark essay "Projective Verse," The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner is a literary event of the first order.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.

Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an “anti-modernist.” Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers’s completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five volumes.

The present volume is in four parts. An Introduction deals with the scope and principles of selection for the edition, including the decision to present the poems in chronological order, and gives a brief review of the textual evidence and commentary that form the bulk of this volume. The essay “Chronology” offers an overview of Jeffers’s career, the evidence for dating the poems, and the arguments drawn from that evidence.

The two parts that follow describe the rationale and evidence for establishing the texts of the poems for this edition, and present, in the form of extensive commentary and tabulations for each poem, the material (notes, preliminary workings, revisions, discarded passages, and variations in published versions) that both complicate and enrich the study of Jeffers’s poetry and prose. These commentaries also incorporate a number of additional selections from Jeffers’s previously unpublished writings.

There are three appendixes: tables of contents for original editions as well as some planned editions that were never published; poems (not included in this edition) that have appeared in posthumous compilations; and errata for the first four volumes. The book concludes with two indexes, of titles and of first lines.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.

Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today; how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic language and how (or whether) to present art's claim to moral, spiritual, or epistemological seriousness within representations of modern phenomena.

For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there has never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative selected poems—the current Selected Poetry, first published in 1938, contains no work from the last three volumes published during Jeffers' lifetime or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers' completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition.

The first three volumes of this four-volume work, will present chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The present volume consists of poems published between 1920 and 1928, and includes some of his greatest and best-known poems—Tamar,Roan Stallion,The Women at Point Sur, and Cawdor—as well as a recently discovered long poem, "Home." There is also an Editorial Note and a General Introduction.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE

From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation.

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

“Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek

Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, and devotion shape the story of home.

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we've almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.

Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California's Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie's baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple's first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.

Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR of CONFESSIONS OF A BAREFACED WOMAN

2022 ILLINOIS AUTHOR OF THE YEAR

Allison Joseph searches for home in her poetry collection, DWELLING

Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.

The years 1921 to 1927 were the most productive of Robinson Jeffers's career. During this period, he wrote not only many of his most well-known lyric poems but also Tamar, The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Roan Stallion, and The Women at Point Sur—the long poems that first established his reputation as a major American poet. Including an introduction, chronology, and critical afterword, the Point Alma Venus manuscripts presented here gather Jeffers's four unfinished but substantial preliminary attempts at what became The Women at Point Sur, which Jeffers believed was the "most inclusive, and poetically the most intense" of his narrative poems.

The Point Alma Venus fragments and versions shed important light on the composition and themes of The Women at Point Sur. Further, they likely predate other key work from this crucial period, making them a necessary context for those who wish to clarify Jeffers's poetic development and to reinterpret his practice of narrative poetry. Ultimately, they call on general and scholarly readers alike to reconsider Jeffers's place in the canon of modern American poetry.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.

Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today.

For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there has never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative selected poems—the current Selected Poetry, first published in 1938, contains no poems from the last three volumes published during Jeffers's lifetime or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers's completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five volumes.

The present volume is in three parts. "Poetry 1903-1920" consists of some of the poems published while Jeffers was a college student, two early collections (Flagons and Apples and Californians), and a number of poems that were never published or were recently rediscovered. "Introductions, Forewords, and Miscellaneous Prose, 1920-1948" gathers all the major prose works. "Unpublished Poems and Fragments, 1910-1962" is mostly material that Jeffers never published, and apparently never tried to publish. The fifth volume of commentary will contain various procedural explanations and textual evidence for the texts presented in the edition, as well as transcriptions of working notes for the poems and of alternate and discarded passages. The Collected Poetry is designed by Adrian Wilson.

Frank, eye-opening writing by "arts in corrections" educators

Poetry and prose by artists, writers, and activists who’ve taught workshops in U.S. criminal legal institutions, including acclaimed writers Ellen Bass, Joshua Bennett, Jill McDounough, E. Ethelbert Miller, Idra Novey, Joy Priest, Paisley Rekdal, Christopher Soto, and Michael Torres; the late arts in corrections pioneers Buzz Alexander and Judith Tannenbaum; and Guggenheim Award-winning choreographer Pat Graney. These educators demonstrate a diverse range of experiences. Among the questions they ask: Does our work support the continuation or deconstruction of a mass incarcerating society? What led me to teach in prison? How do I resist the “savior” or “helper” narrative? A book for anyone seeking to understand the prison industrial complex from a human perspective. All author royalties from this book will be donated to Dances for Solidarity, a project that brings arts opportunities to people incarcerated in solitary confinement.

A two-person memoir that explores education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the books core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art.

"A boy with no one to listen becomes a man in prison for life and discovers his mind can be free. A woman enters prison to teach and becomes his first listener. And so begins a twenty-five year friendship between two gifted writers and poets. The result is By Heart a book that will anger you, give you hope, and break your heart."
- Gloria Steinem

Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson met at San Quentin State Prison in 1985. For over two decades they have conferred, corresponded and sometimes collaborated, producing very different bodies of work resting on the same understanding: that human beings have one foot in darkness, the other in light.
In this beautifully crafted exploration, part memoir, part essay, Tannenbaum and Jackson consider art, education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book's core are two stories that speak for human imagination, spirit, and expression.

Judith Tannenbaum is a nationally respected educator, speaker, and author. Among her books are the memoir, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin; two books for teachers: Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades and (with Valerie Chow Bush) Jump Write In! Creative Writing Exercises for Diverse Communities, Grades 6-12; and six poetry collections. She currently serves as training coordinator with WritersCorps in San Francisco.

Born into a family of fifteen boys in Barstow, California, Spoon Jackson was sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole when he was twenty years old. Spoon discovered himself as a writer at San Quentin; played Pozzo in the prison's 1988 production of Waiting for Godot; and has written, published, and received awards for plays, poetry, novels, fairy tales, short stories, essays, and memoir during the more than thirty years he has been behind bars. His poems are collected in Longer Ago.

Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.

A Los Angeles Times "Most Anticipated"

A USA TODAY "Must Read Poetry"

“Startlement is a book of rare treasures. With lyrical mastery and intimate storytelling, Limón’s poetry reveals new ways of paying attention. This powerful collection is a gift.”—Amy Tan

An essential collection spanning nearly twenty years of emphatic, fearlessly original poetry from one of America’s most celebrated living writers.

Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work,  Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns—the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe—and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

“A poet of ecstatic revelation” (Tracy K. Smith), Limón encourages us to meet our shared futures with open and hungry hearts, assuring “What we are becoming, we are / becoming together.”

A hugely timely subject and a book for any fans of Dr Julie Smith, Philippa Perry and Dr Meg Jay

'Harry Baker's way with words is entirely fascinating' DONNA ASHWORTH
'A charming, fun, funny, revelatory, relatable wordsmith' RAYMOND ANTROBUS

Tender captures all the tiny, fragile, perfect moments of new life and, with it, new parenthood. Full of sleepless wonder and with his characteristic wit and warmth, Harry Baker offers snapshots into the intense first 100 days with his son as they get to know each other.

A yawn from a tiny pink mouth, a kind word from a stranger on a difficult day, the weight of a body sleeping against your chest - parents will recognise both themselves and their children in Tender and find consolation in this collection.

Carry Walt Whitman’s wisdom with you in this inspirational guide that features 60 selections from his most insightful poems.

Walt Whitman, the great American poet of the 19th century (1819–1892), celebrated his body, the land, the commonest of people, the plants and leaves, and the cosmos in Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855. Working variously as a printer, journalist, teacher, and Civil War nurse, Whitman traveled across the continent, soaking the ink of the wilds and the urban into his pen. His poetry is an invitation into the wilds of Nature and human nature.

In Meditations of Walt Whitman, editor Chris Highland pairs 60 short selections from Whitman’s poetry with a relevant quote from a historical or contemporary writer and thinker, from Aristotle to Alice Walker, Lord Byron to Arthur C. Clarke. Take this pocket-size guide with you on backpacks, nature hikes, and camping trips. Let Whitman’s words enrich your experience as you ponder the wilderness from riverbank, mountaintop, or as you relax beside your campfire.

Inside you’ll find:

• 60 inspiring selections of poetry from Walt Whitman
• Relevant text from other philosophical minds
• Short excerpts for convenient reading

This sampler from Whitman’s poems draws from the heart of each passage. Let Whitman’s words accompany you on your own trails of discovery and help you discover the earth, your likeness.