Poetry

How can you say goodbye to the love of your life?

In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like to have to say goodbye.

All I can do, in what remains of my brief time,
is mention, to whoever cares to listen,
that a woman once existed, who was kind
and beautiful and brave, and I will not forget
how the world was altered, beyond recognition,
when we met.

The most original, new work on Hesse in many years and the definitive study of the young Herman Hesse, offering much previously unknown material such as his "neo-Romantic" poetry of which two dozen are published here for the first time in the original.

Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own

Whitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves. To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply.
from the Preface by Gary David Comstock

Walt Whitman was the most innovative and influential poet of the nineteenth century. The self-proclaimed American Bard, Whitman challenged his contemporaries to resist conforming to society and shocked them with his embrace of the sensual. But beneath his manifesto for social revolution lies a vigorous call for spiritual revolution as well.

This beautiful sampling of Whitmans most important poetry from Leaves of Grass, and selections from his prose writings, offers a glimpse into the spiritual side of his most radical themeslove for country, love for others, and love of Self. Whitman seeks to tear down the belief that the spiritual resides only in the religious and embraces the idea that nothing is more divine than humankind, nothing greater than the individual soul.

Rich with passion, reverence, and wonder, this unique collection offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world. Though seemingly personal, his verse speaks to universal harmony and universal love, optimism and joy, and celebrates the outwardly mundane details of life through words electrified with love and spirit.

Discover How Tagore’s Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own

"Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcend all limits of language, culture, and nationality. In his writings, the poet and mystic takes us on a spiritual quest and gives us a glimpse of the infinite in the midst of the finite, unity at the heart of all diversity, and the Divine in all beings and things of the universe."
—from the Preface bySwami Adiswarananda

Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most influential mystic poets and teachers of the last century. Deeply spiritual and profoundly sensitive, his verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of self, country, creation, God, and love.

This beautiful sampling of Tagore’s two most important works, The Gardener and Gitanjali, offers a glimpse into his spiritual vision that has inspired people around the world. Poems from The Gardener explore youth and earthly love, while excerpts from Gitanjali express divine love and Tagore’s difficulty in satisfying it.

Overwhelmingly mystical and lovely in its simplicity, this unique collection offers insight into Tagore’s heavenly desires, his ongoing quest for Brahama Vihara, the joy eternal, and illuminates the remarkable diversity that made him the most important bridge between the spirituality of the East and West in the first half of the twentieth century.

Discover How Hopkins's Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own

"Poetry and art and music seize upon the human experience in ways that reveal new possibilities of intimacy with the Divine. In the way they reach out and grab us by the heart at unexpected times, they reaffirm that the Holy will meet us when it chooses.…"
—from the Preface by Rev. Thomas Ryan, CSP

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christian mystical poet, is beloved for his use of fresh language and startling metaphors to describe the world around him. Beneath the surface of this lovely verse lies a searching soul, wrestling with and yearning for God. Hopkins writes from a Christian background, and yet his themes speak to people of all faiths who seek a deeper understanding of the presence of God in all of life.

This beautiful sampling of Hopkins's poetry offers a glimpse into his unique spiritual vision that continues to inspire readers throughout the world. The poems unite his two devotions, presenting mystical images of Christ in the natural world, which serve as a window through which you might also begin to see the Divine Presence in the world around you.

Discover How Hafiz's Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own

Hafiz is known throughout the world as Persia’s greatest poet, with sales of his poems in Iran today only surpassed by those of the Qur’an itself. His probing and joyful verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who long to taste and feel divine love and experience harmony with all living things.

This beautiful sampling of Hafiz’s works captures his deep spiritual understanding, offering a glimpse into the vision that has inspired people around the world for centuries. Considered by his contemporaries as an oracle and often referred to as "Tongue of the Hidden" and "Interpreter of Secrets," Hafiz followed Sufism’s inner path on a quest to discover the hidden meaning of the universe, and shares his experiences and desire for union with the Divine in symbolic language that borders on magical.

Infused with the spirit of love and joy, this unique collection offers insight into Haiz’s spiritual philosophy and carefree mysticism that addresses the earthly beauty, pain, ecstasy and longing that define human nature, and the divine adoration that promises to set the spirit free.

"Ambiguity is a major characteristic of Persian poetry, and Hafiz was one of the greatest masters of this artistic quality: each reader tends to see his or her own experiences reflected in the poems. As a result, it is usually unclear whether in a given verse he means actual wine or spiritual wine, a male or a female beloved, a human beloved or God, and so forth…. But after reading the same images over and over in ever-changing contexts, one gradually leaves behind the ordinary material world and enters into a realm in which everything symbolizes the beautiful qualities of the beloved, who ultimately is God and the source of Love."
—from the Preface by Ibrahim Gamard, annotator and translator, Rumi and Islam: Selections from His Stories, Poems, and Discourses—Annotated & Explained

Thirteen Hundred Years of Christian Praise

This collection of Christian poetry in English is compiled from a spectrum of poets who span thirteen centuries. Beginning with Caedmon (ca. 658–680), the poetry is from the ancient, medieval, Reformation, and modern church periods and from Anglican, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox poets, as well as mainline and evangelical traditions. Because poetry is a vehicle of praise and exhortation, mediation and understanding, these selections include every form and style of reflection and psalm, from private, personal devotion to hymns and epic forms with godly themes.

We who speak English have thirteen centuries of Christian poetry behind us. It is a deep and broad stream of praise, frequently poured out by men and women who died for the faith in the midst of persecution. While the glory of God may have been diminished by sectarian motives at times, the channel of the stream has always been the faith and an unbroken succession of men and women who have praised God in verse.

Most of Xi Xi’s animal poems featured here are new works written during the past few years. Full of whimsical ideas, they embody the notion of “all humans are siblings, and all things are companions,” brimming with warmth and compassion. These poems could be described as bright and cheerful, approachable, clever and fluid, humorous, and deep with meaning, written as though the author is able to directly communicate with animals. Overall, they serve as a voice for animals, showing that they are able to coexist equally and peacefully, resulting in a “carnival of animals.” More than twenty young Hong Kong artists and illustrators have been invited to join this project, with each poem accompanied by different illustrations, their styles of illustration totally distinct, not limited to any particular form, presenting multiple heterogeneities.

This book is suitable for young readers, as well as adults who appreciate literature and art.

A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery.

In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the ship Creole. 135 people escaped chattel slavery that day. The event was recounted in US Senate documents, including letters exchanged between US and British consulates in The Bahamas and depositions from the white crew on the ship. There is no known record or testimony from the 135 people who escaped. Their story has been lost to time and indifference. Quenton Baker’s ballast is an attempt at incomplete redress.

With imagination, deep empathy, and skilled and compelling lyricism, Baker took a black marker to those Senate documents and culled a poetic recount of the Creole revolt. Layers of ink connect readers to Baker’s poetic process: (re)phrasing the narrative of the state through a dexterous process of hands-on redactions.

ballast is a relentless, wrenching, and gorgeously written book, a defiant reclamation of one of the most important but overlooked events in US history, and an essential contribution to contemporary poetry.

A collection of poetry that moves from family history and the heartbreaks of navigating a predominantly white high school into adulthood, exploring the ways the speaker’s experiences echo those of an expansive and intricate history of Black girls and women.

In this beautiful debut from an exciting new poet, Alexa Patrick’s Remedies for Disappearing memorializes Blackness in its quiet and unexpected forms, bringing the peripheral into focus. These poems muddy Black life and death, observe lineage and love stories, and question what “disappearing” teaches about Blackness and bodies.

Remedies for Disappearing is gritty, sharp, and formally inventive, demonstrating Patrick’s imaginative curiosity, lyrical restraint, and confidence in her handling of language. Moments of aphoristic confession are balanced with imagistic precision as the speaker recounts the ways her aunties, sisters, and even herself have disappeared in order to survive.

Patrick’s poetry is haunting and hopeful, striving to provide readers with the tools and context to acknowledge, define, and honor the complexity of Black girl/womanhood. Remedies for Disappearing connects Black girls and women to each other and to their own histories, and insists that they be fully and wholly seen.

In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.

“I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community.

Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods.

Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.

Compiled in the early tenth century, the Kokinshū is an anthology of some eleven hundred poems that aimed to elevate the prestige of vernacular Japanese poetry at the imperial court. From shortly after its completion to the end of the nineteenth century, it was celebrated as the cornerstone of the Japanese vernacular poetic tradition. The composition of classical poetry, other later poetic forms such as linked verse and haikai, and vernacular Japanese literary writing in its entirety (including classic works such as Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book) all draw from the Kokinshū.

This book offers an inviting and immersive selection of roughly one-third of the anthology in English translation. Torquil Duthie focuses on rendering the poetic language of the Kokinshū as a whole, in such a way that readers can understand and experience how its poems work together to create a literary world. He emphasizes that classical Japanese poems do not stand alone as self-contained artifacts but take part in an ongoing intertextual conversation. Duthie provides translations and interpretations of the two prefaces to the Kokinshū, which deeply influenced Japanese literary aesthetics. The book also includes critical essays on various aspects of the anthology and its history. This translation helps specialist and nonspecialist readers alike appreciate the beauty and richness of the Kokinshū, as well as its significance for the Japanese literary tradition.

The collected poems dispel the notion that there is one correct way to be a Muslim by holding space for multiple, intersecting identities while celebrating and protecting those identities.

Halal If You Hear Me features poems by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Warsan Shire, Tarfia Faizullah, Angel Nafis, Beyza Ozer, and many others.

Fatimah Asghar is the creator of the Emmy-Nominated web series Brown Girls, now in development for HBO. She is the author of If They Come For Us and a recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman fellow. In 2017, she was listed on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC and a Cave Canem fellow, she holds an MFA from the New School. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

What is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing?

Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency.

This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.

Marshall’s poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness, and love. With an unflinching seriousness she interrogates womanhood, meditates on race and queerness, and considers the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.

This visceral and revelatory poetry collection tells the story of a family’s journey to flee the murderous reign of Uganda’s Idi Amin only to land in a racist American landscape. Wabuke digs deeply into a personal and ancestral history to bring these poems to life, articulating what it means to live in a Black female body navigating a diaspora haunted by British colonization and American enslavement.

There are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience.

With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba.

El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

The long form poem is a practice of poetics in joy, gratitude, sadness, resilience and pain. This literary work serves as a practice of self-reflection and accountability in the wake of the prison system. This poem is dirge work acknowledging unjust atrocities, but reveling in our human resilience.

Smoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.

Based on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, and the poet’s experiences as a doctor and journalist, If God Is A Virus charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of Ebola survivors, outbreak responders, journalists and the virus itself. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumor can travel faster than microbes.

These poems also give voice to the virus. Eight percent of the human genome is inherited from viruses and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from a virus. If God Is A Virus reimagines viruses as givers of life and even authors of a viral-human self-help book.

Dopplegangbanger, rendered as the A- and B-sides of an album of poems, re-imagines and remixes American politics of the 90s, the Obama era, and today via a hip-hop blerd's investigation of a hi/lo culture of American crime.

Pioneering Iraqi-Canadian rapper Yassin ‘Narcy’ Al Salman is a founding member of WeAreTheMedium, an international multi-media artist collective of Arab, African, and Indigenous artists and creators. ‘Text Messages’ is his survival guide, a multi-media collection about finding one’s self in the anxious intersections of a post-9/11 world, through a combination of poetry, rap verse, short stories and comic book illustrations. Text Messages is multi-form written exploration of the imminent crisis in technology, the pressures of self-awareness, and the meaning of Judgement Day. 

Krista Franklin draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation. 

Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body’s lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad.  Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space.  Like Hip-Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what's next.

“Can I kick it?”
“Yes you can!”
—A Tribe Called Quest

Situated squarely in the oral traditions of hip-hop and BreakBeat Poetry, Idris Goodwin’s work bridges the divide between the reader and the poet. Combining the tongue-in-cheek and the irreverent with the melancholy and incisive, Goodwin’s poetry samples and re-purposes pop-culture—from Back to the Future to Prince, Missy Elliot to Dominique Wilkins—in order to reflect and remix the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to live.

Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990’s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.

Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

“Citizen Illegal is right on time, bringing both empathy and searing critique to the fore as a nation debates the very humanity of the people who built it.” —Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches

In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. A winner of fellowships from Poets House, The Bronx Council On The Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and The Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets and elsewhere. He is the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors.

Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Button Poetry, Seven Scribes, and many other outlets, and anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She is a contributor to Black Nerd Problems, a Pink Door Retreat Fellow, and a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.

“[The BreakBeat Poets is] one of the most diverse and important poetry anthologies of the last 25 years.”—Latino Rebels

Black Girl Magic continues and deepens the work of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology by focusing on some of the most exciting Black women writing today. This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys’ club, and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form.

Poet and vocalist Jamila Woods was raised in Chicago, and graduated from Brown University, where she earned a BA in Africana Studies and Theatre & Performance Studies. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, much of her writing explores blackness, womanhood, and the city of Chicago.

Mahogany L. Browne is a Cave Canem and Poets House alumna and the author of several books including Smudge and Redbone. She directs the poetry program of the Nuyorican Poets Café.

Idrissa Simmonds is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, The Caribbean Writer, Fourteen Hills Press, and elsewhere. She is the 2014 winner of the Crab Creek Review poetry contest, and a New York Foundation for the Arts and Commonwealth Short Story Award Finalist.

The Emily Dickinson Collection (2021) compiles some of the best-known works of an icon of American poetry. Out of nearly two-thousand poems discovered after her death, less than a dozen appeared in print during Dickinson’s lifetime. Drawn from such influential posthumous volumes as Poems (1902) and The Single Hound (1914), The Emily Dickinson Collection captures the spiritual depths, celebratory heights, and impenetrable mystery of Dickinson’s poetic gift. “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate, / Whose table once a Guest, but not / The second time, is set.” Deeply aware of the fleeting nature of fame, Dickinson—whose reputation in life was as a lonely eccentric who rarely, if ever, left home—seems to provide some clarity as to why publication so often eluded her. Having published just ten poems in her lifetime, Dickinson continued to write in solitude until her final years. Her final word on fame is a warning, perhaps, for poets whose fate would differ from her own: “Men eat of it and die.” Despite her admonishing tone, she found space elsewhere to muse on the nature of literary achievement, recognizing that obscurity could incidentally produce the conditions for a poet to produce their most vital work: “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” Throughout her life, Emily Dickinson showed a profound respect for the mysteries of worldly existence. In her poems, this creates an atmosphere of prayer and contemplation, a search for something beyond the simple answers: “Some things that fly there be, — / Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: / Of these no elegy.” Amid such fleeting things, she catches a glimpse of eternity. This edition of The Emily Dickinson Collection is a classic of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) is a collection of poems by Toru Dutt. Compiled after her death and published in London, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is an invaluable work of art from a pioneering figure in Indian history and Bengali literature. Born in Calcutta to a family of Bengali Christians, Toru Dutt was raised at the crossroads of English and Indian cultures. In addition to her native Bengali, she became fluent in English, French, and Sanskrit as a young girl, eventually writing novels and poems in each language. Despite her limited body of work, Dutt’s legacy as a groundbreaking writer remains firm in India and around the world. “Savitri was the only child / Of Madra's wise and mighty king; / Stern warriors, when they saw her, smiled, / As mountains smile to see the spring.” In rhyming English verse, Bengali poet Toru Dutt presents some of the oldest and most sacred stories from ancient India. Translated from Sanskrit into the popular ballad form, Dutt introduces an English audience to the story of Savitri, originally from the epic Mahabharata, as well as the tale of Lakshman, which comes from the Hindu epic Ramayana. Alongside these poems appear Dutt’s versions of Bengali folklore—“Joghadhya Uma”—and poems written during her stay in Europe. “Near Hastings” is a particularly beautiful example of her original verse depicting an otherworldly encounter along the English seacoast: “Near Hastings, on the shingle-beach, / We loitered at the time / When ripens on the wall the peach, / The autumn's lovely prime.” This edition of Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan is a classic work of Bengali literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that the poetry of the new American democratic state, free from the staggering weight of centuries of European aristocracy and tradition, would focus on "man alone... his passions, his doubts, his rare properties and inconceivable wretchedness."

For hundreds of years, American poets have presented their various images of the land and its people. But what is "American poetry?" Is there truly such a thing as an American poetic tradition, spanning over nearly four centuries from colonial times to the turn of the millennium? In The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, Jay Parini, a respected American poet and critic in his own right, offers an authoritative survey of the elusive category that is the poetry of the American people.

The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry covers all of the canonical American poets, from the colonial to the contemporary-Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Adrienne Rich are all included.

But Parini has also selected a broad sampling of poetry from voices that have been heard as widely over the years. Here, for the first time, is a thorough collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry by women, Native American, and African Americans. Within these pages readers will find the many different traditions that make up the expansive collage of American poetry. Here are the Transcendentalists-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau; and the Imagists-William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, H.D., and Carl Sandburg.

Readers will discover also the early twentieth-century movement of African-American poetic expression, known as the Harlem Renaissance-James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Langston Hughes are all solidly represented in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.

Jay Parini's introduction deftly guides us into the rich tradition of poetry in our country. Whether in search of a well-known classic or a poem that is not yet considered part of the American poetic tradition, readers will find much to enjoy in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry.

It is the rare individual who has not, at one time or another, been kept awake for hours on end—as the rest of the world, maddeningly, appears to be comfortably lost in the nocturnal world of dreams.

Here is a treasury of verse on the rich subject of insomnia—meditations by poets who have sought to describe their own moments of solitude in darkness, when the world's regular bustle of activity and distraction falls away and they are left to contemplate in silence.

Acquainted with the Night brings together Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Rimbaud and Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley—the great poets of the Western literary heritage—on a theme with which each one has been acutely familiar. Lisa Russ Spaar has also unearthed ruminations on the sleepless nights of poets the world over: in a fascinatingly diverse anthology, she has harvested verse from Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Vietnamese, Tamil, Yiddish, and Romanian poets, who together present an illuminating display of insomnia's extraordinary and enduring legacy in widely different cultures through the centuries.

As these exquisite poems chart a course from solitude, through anxiety, to epiphany, the reader truly learns what it means to be acquainted with the night.

For the first time God is the subject of a poetry anthology in English. Among the classic poets represented in this collection are Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Emerson, E. B. Browning, Tennyson, Dickinson, and Hopkins; among the twentieth-century poets, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Countee Cullen, Jessica Powers, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Anne Sexton, Alicia Ostriker, and Kathleen Norris. From the chorus of these many poetic voices come stunning words, images, and insights—from Paul Murray's depiction of "that needle's eye / through which all the threads / of the universe are drawn" to Gwendolyn Brooks's touching rumination on God as someone lonely, who "tires of being great / in solitude. Without a hand to hold."

Invisible Light is divided into three sections: "From God" (in God's voice, in the first person), "To God" (generally prayers, addressed to God, in the second person), and "About God" (in the third person).

Witty, passionate, melancholic, sanguine, and ecstatic, the poems approach their single subject from the most diverse attitudes and perspectives. "The doubters, believers, lovers and philosophers, the anguished and flippant, submissive and prayerful, speak for us and about us," Diana Culbertson writes. "Through their words, we may possibly see God anew."

For over a hundred years, The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies has been the preeminent index for answers to questions about the world of poetry, identifying the author of a poem or the anthologies in which it can be found when only a title, first line, or last line is known. This latest edition-a "must have" for libraries-brings its index up to date as of May 31, 2006.

This latest version features 85,000 classic and contemporary poems by 12,000 poets. Also included are works in translation and for the first time poetry in Spanish, Vietnamese, and French. The subject organization of the poems is especially useful. Hundreds of new subjects have been added, indexing poems on highly relevant topics such as Osama bin Laden, the war in Iraq, Dick Cheney, the Internet, and Rosa Parks, as well as timeless subjects like the Bill of Rights, unspoken love, faith, and inspiration.

Our impressive team of consultants includes J. D. McClatchy, Harvey Shapiro, and former poet laureate Mark Strand. From The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005 edition) to Poetry after 9/11 and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, this new edition puts readers in touch with the best of the latest anthologies and the lasting favorites.

I Speak of the City is the most extensive collection of poems ever assembled about New York. Beginning with an early piece by Jacob Steendam (from when the city was called New Amsterdam) and continuing through poems written in the aftermath of 9/11, this anthology features voices from more than a dozen countries. It includes two Nobel Prize recipients, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, and many other recognizable names, but it also preserves the work of long-neglected poets who celebrate the wild possibilities and colossal achievements of this epic city.

Poets capture New York's major moments and transformations, writing of Hudson's arrival, Stuyvesant's prejudice, and the city's astonishing growth and gentrification. They speak of the thrills of a skyscraper's observation deck and the privations of teeming tenements. They portray the immigrant experience at Ellis Island and the decay, fear, and unexpected kindness on a subway ride. They take place on sidewalks, bridges, and docks; in taxis, buses, and ferries; and even within nature. The Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, Broadway, the Statue of Liberty, and other familiar landmarks are recast through the prism of individual experience yet still reflect the seeming invincibility of New York and its status as a cultural magnet for the freethinking and experimental.

While certain subjects and themes can be found in all urban verse, poems about New York have their own restless rhythm and ever-changing style, much like the city itself. Whether writing sonnets, epics, or experimental or imagistic verse, each of these poets has been inspired by the marvels and madness, humor and heartbreak of an enduring city.

In this "guided" anthology, experts lead students through the major genres and eras of Chinese poetry from antiquity to the modern time. The volume is divided into 6 chronological sections and features more than 140 examples of the best shi, sao, fu, ci, and qu poems. A comprehensive introduction and extensive thematic table of contents highlight the thematic, formal, and prosodic features of Chinese poetry, and each chapter is written by a scholar who specializes in a particular period or genre. Poems are presented in Chinese and English and are accompanied by a tone-marked romanized version, an explanation of Chinese linguistic and poetic conventions, and recommended reading strategies. Sound recordings of the poems are available online free of charge. These unique features facilitate an intense engagement with Chinese poetical texts and help the reader derive aesthetic pleasure and insight from these works as one could from the original.

The companion volume How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook presents 100 famous poems (56 are new selections) in Chinese, English, and romanization, accompanied by prose translation, textual notes, commentaries, and recordings.

Contributors: Robert Ashmore (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Zong-qi Cai; Charles Egan (San Francisco State); Ronald Egan (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); Grace Fong (McGill); David R. Knechtges (Univ. of Washington); Xinda Lian (Denison); Shuen-fu Lin (Univ. of Michigan); William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Univ. of Wisconsin); Maija Bell Samei; Jui-lung Su (National Univ. of Singapore); Wendy Swartz (Columbia); Xiaofei Tian (Harvard); Paula Varsano (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Fusheng Wu (Univ. of Utah)

Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds.

Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers.

The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.

Dating from the early decades of the third century C.E., the Ainkurunuru is believed to be the world's earliest anthology of classical Tamil love poetry. Commissioned by a Cera-dynasty king and composed by five masterful poets, the anthology illustrates the five landscapes of reciprocal love: jealous quarreling, anxious waiting and lamentation, clandestine love before marriage, elopement and love in separation, and patient waiting after marriage.

Despite its centrality to literary and intellectual traditions, the Ainkurunuru remains relatively unknown beyond specialists. Martha Ann Selby, well-known translator of classical Indian poetry and literature, takes the bold step of opening this anthology to all readers, presenting crystalline translations of 500 poems dense with natural imagery and early examples of South Indian culture. Because of their form's short length, the anthology's five authors rely on double entendre and sophisticated techniques of suggestion, giving their poems an almost haikulike feel. Groups of verse center on one unique figure, in some cases an object or an animal, in others a line of direct address or a specific conversation or situation. Selby introduces each section with a biographical sketch of the poet and the conventions at work within the landscape. She then incorporates notes explaining shifting contexts.

Excerpt:

He has gone off all by himselfbeyond the wasteswhere tigers used to prowland the toothbrush trees grow tall,their trunks parched,on the flinty mountains,

while the lovely folds of your loins, wide as a chariot's seat, vanish as your circlet worked from gold grows far too large for you.

In this beautiful collection of poems and paintings, Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, joins with David Allen Sibley, America's foremost bird illustrator, to celebrate the winged creatures that have inspired so many poets to sing for centuries. From Catullus and Chaucer to Robert Browning and James Wright, poets have long treated birds as powerful metaphors for beauty, escape, transcendence, and divine expression.

Here, in this substantial anthology, more than one hundred contemporary and classic poems are paired with close to sixty original, ornithologically precise illustrations. Part poetry collection, part field guide, part art book, Bright Wings presents verbal and visual interpretations of the natural world and reminds us of our intimate connection to the "bright wings" around us. Each in their own way, these poems and pictures honor the enchanting creatures that have been, and continue to be, longtime collaborators with the poet's and painter's art.

Poet and bird pairings include: Wallace Stevens and the Blackbird; Emily Dickinson and the Robin; Marianne Moore and the Frigate Pelican; Thomas Hardy and the Goldfinch; Sylvia Plath and the Pheasant; John Updike and the Seagull; Walt Whitman and the Eagle; Billy Collins and the Sparrow.

This selection of poetry and prose by Ghalib provides an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the preeminent Urdu poet of the nineteenth century. Ghalib's poems, especially his ghazals, remain beloved throughout South Asia for their arresting intelligence and lively wit. His letters—informal, humorous, and deeply personal—reveal the vigor of his prose style and the warmth of his friendships. These careful translations allow readers with little or no knowledge of Urdu to appreciate the wide range of Ghalib's poetry, from his gift for extreme simplicity to his taste for unresolvable complexities of structure.

Beginning with a critical introduction for nonspecialists and specialists alike, Frances Pritchett and Owen Cornwall present a selection of Ghalib's works, carefully annotating details of poetic form. Their translation maintains line-for-line accuracy and thereby preserves complex poetic devices that play upon the tension between the two lines of each verse. The book includes whole ghazals, selected individual verses from other ghazals, poems in other genres, and letters. The book also includes a glossary, the Urdu text of the original poetry, and an appendix containing Ghalib's comments on his own verses.

Sources show Qu Yuan (?340–278 BCE) was the first person in China to become famous for his poetry, so famous in fact that the Chinese celebrate his life with a national holiday called Poet's Day, or the Dragon Boat Festival. His work, which forms the core of the The Songs of Chu, the second oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, derives its imagery from shamanistic ritual. Its shaman hymns are among the most beautiful and mysterious liturgical works in the world. The religious milieu responsible for their imagery supplies the backdrop for his most famous work, Li sao, which translates shamanic longing for a spirit lover into the yearning for an ideal king that is central to the ancient philosophies of China.

Qu Yuan was as important to the development of Chinese literature as Homer was to the development of Western literature. This translation attempts to replicate what the work might have meant to those for whom it was originally intended, rather than settle for what it was made to mean by those who inherited it. It accounts for the new view of the state of Chu that recent discoveries have inspired.

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history.

Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu’s work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor’s introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet’s major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu’s oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

How to Read a Japanese Poem offers a comprehensive approach to making sense of traditional Japanese poetry of all genres and periods. Steven D. Carter explains to Anglophone students the methods of composition and literary interpretation used by Japanese poets, scholars, and critics from ancient times to the present, and adds commentary that will assist the modern reader.

How to Read a Japanese Poem presents readings of poems by major figures such as Saigyō and Bashō as well as lesser known poets, with nearly two hundred examples that encompass all genres of Japanese poetry. The book gives attention to well-known forms such as haikai or haiku, as well as ancient songs, comic poems, and linked verse. Each chapter provides examples of a genre in chronological order, followed by notes about authorship and other contextual details, including the time of composition, physical setting, and social occasion. The commentaries focus on a central feature of Japanese poetic discourse: that poems are often occasional, written in specific situations, and are best read in light of their milieu. Carter elucidates key concepts useful in examining Japanese poetics as well as the technical vocabulary of Japanese poetic discourse, familiarizing students with critical terms and concepts. An appendix offers succinct definitions of technical terms and essays on aesthetic ideals and devices.

Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English.

Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

Jennifer Clarvoe’s Invisible Tender is the first winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize for a book of poetry published each year by Fordham University Press in coordination with Fordham’s Poets Out Loud program. Poet J.D. McClatchy, the judge for the 1999 Prize, chose Invisible Tender from among nearly 500 manuscripts entered by poets from around the world. His introduction is included in the volume.

The poems collected in Invisible Tender chart the terrains of childhood recollection and adult loss, of meditation and celebration. Intensely lyrical, both employing and altering traditional poetic meters and forms, Clarvoe’s poems are rich in philosophical reflection in subjects ranging from art and, popular culture to the elusive languages of the natural world.

Composed of several distinct yet inter-woven long poems, On Generation & Corruption is structured around the conceits of location and dislocation, as it deconstructs a picture-postcard American town. Its title is a clue: in printer’s terms, each “generation” reproduced is more “corrupt” than the last. Through this metaphor, Chiusano alludes to the distance from confessional speech that the book embodies in its complex tales and Escher-like syntax.

from “daybook”


JULY 1
Bog. Spillway. River bank. Cow shit. Shade pools. Boot prints.
Tadpoles. Reed beds. Shallows. Eddies. Snags. Cottonmouths. Cobwebs.

JULY 2
The stare stares behind-the-back, bright, between butt-crack and
thigh. The stare widens into a paddle, wide and flat enough to make a
draft when it flaps. The stare picks its nose. The stare halfway wonders
why the closet door is only half-closed.

* * *

When ecstasy is parted from its practice, when rapture is forced to
choose, that’s me: the first efforts, independent principalities.

JULY 3
If I draw a hand, say, or a foot, I tow it into view. If I name, a slender
ankle, a napping neck, I pull it like a dove out of a derby, pigeon out of a
porkpie hat.

Julie Sheehan’s Thaw is the second winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize for a book of poetry published each year by Fordham University Press in coordination with Fordham's Poets Out Loud program. Marie Ponsot, the judge for the 2000 Prize, chose Thaw from among nearly 500 manuscripts entered by poets from around the world. Her introduction is included in the volume.

The landscape of Thaw is America but the vast field of language is bravely Shakespearian. Sheehan's poems roil through catalpa, maurade through familial and domestic brakes, and, ultimately, brim to the top of the old earthen pot. Everywhere the poems remind that the endless—were we truly able to grasp it—would astonish. Each poem celebrates the ingredients, practice, and serving up of the fugitive mortal banquet, from pudding to bone.

In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.

from "Women's Sanitary Corps"

Sister, I link arms with you
as we enter this log-steepled tent,
white on the outside,
but on the inside the deep maroon
of thick-spackled, internal things.
How can it be
so simple here? Bed,
man-- bed, man--
where the pain leaves
no room for anything else.
My mouth is dry.
No, stay with me,
these sheet-smoothed
boys need us
with their nocturnal eyes,
not predatory but grieving,
as good animals the body,
not ready, not able to be ready.
La, where did they put
their good body?

A world of history is a world of destinations and possibilities. In Tin Can Tourist Scott Hightower draws from a legacy larger than the limits of personal history, body, and brand. From the harsh Protestant landscape of his native central Texas to the pageantry of the historical architecture of St. Maria in Trastevere, Rome, he persues the limit of the poet. Where exactly does one begin and the world start? Hightower reflects a world containing AIDS and cancer, Caravaggio and van der Werff. Nature, interpersonal relationships, and the culture of the world—from simple to extraordinary—are all fair game. His partaking, erotic self, in search of its own truest and most urgent expressions, takes seriously Blake’s warning of error that could reduce the human heart to a dull cog of a machine (Blake’s exact words are “a mill with complicated wheels.”)

The breadth and mastery of this awaited debut volume is matched by the poet’s insistence on the healing and transforming power of the human imagination. These are not notes from an artless heart—but observations from a simmering world.

This Minute is a connected whole, in which the verse is driven by strong intellectual excitement, evident in the energetic movement of the lines and in a vocabulary that switches easily from the colloquial to the exact. There is an urgent voice, felt close at hand. And there is a skill in handling and matching the size of a poem to its subject that makes each invigorating to read—one arrives slightly out of breath. These poems convey a “metaphysical” meaning as well as a bodily intimacy. They are luminous, discovering rather than manufacturing their metaphors as the most exact way of speaking.

The Early History of Photography

The first photographer’s sister spent the summer
watching the leaf-imprints disappear.
Just like life, she wrote to him, but a little slower;
like a chemical recipe for gratitude.

Shhh, the first photographer said, hovering
over the silver salts arrayed like listening devices.
Don’t let the sun know what we’re doing.
This is a god we can capture and he’ll never know it,
never miss these little fistfuls of glitter, dumbed down.

Dear sister, you must know the miracle is in the stoppage.
Motion is cheap and plentiful;
standing still is what costs and costs.


Jean Gallagher is Associate Professor of English at Polytechnic University in New York City. She is the author of The World Wars Through the Female Gaze.

To read a sample of Jean Gallagher’s poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com

Hearsay celebrates a woman's life from childhood to middle age, including
the often-ignored subject of work, with a voice that is sometimes tender, sometimes whimsical, but always strong. The winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize, this collection "proffers craft and vision; it begins, one might say, in delight and ends in wisdom" (Robert Wrigley, judge).
To read a sample of her poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com.

Whether

Aligned with the mechanism
whereby the spirit is borne aloft
through song comes again

the question: whether. And not soothed
so much as opened by the boy
soprano’s Sanctus, what moves

in the mind as the throat constricts
in sympathy, one note peeled
from the last, fine as paper slipped

from a garlic bulb, veined,
translucent, is whether—as if
wound through the spiraling

amplitude, purpled, fretted,
one voice suspended
in concentration of prayer or terror

wills itself above faltering,
more perfect since time must
soon break it. And made it.

Whether and by whatever impossible
arrangement of stars, harmonies,
correspondences through which

the music finds the spirit and like
a blade slits and releases,
circulates the question

through the phrase, the delicate
engine—as if it matters: the song
rises, everything goes with it.

The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and
memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes:

I like objects for company,

to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum
and
I amass details,
jade bracelet, her animal-print
dresses, an oval coral cameo.

How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave?

In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it.

And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn’t familiar after all?

I Will Whisper
it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it’s heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger.
stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that’s okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you.

In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate.

In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel’s poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

The Revolver in the Hive takes place in the aftermath of tragedy, where grief is recognizable but contorted into unsettling forms. In this remarkable debut, Nicolas Hundley’s poems chronicle with honesty—and often bitter humor—a harrowing journey through loss, death, and mourning. A widow “hauls a sack filled with the
limbs of statues,” and mourners become “familiar as a pet is familiar, returning years later, / stitched up from experimentation.”

Juxtaposing such incongruous images, Hundley creates uncanny worlds in which antiquated objects and characters coexist with those from a sinister future, in which wound-dressers and alchemists coexist alongside “heretical machines enacting misdeeds.” Religion, fatherhood, and masculinity are all explored in Hundley’s tales: A bicycle becomes the subject of worship, inventors act as parents to their machines, and an industrialized human reproduction takes place in factories.

In Hundley’s hands, words clang together in startling ways, and the repetition of phrases and images leads to unexpected transformations. The poems brilliantly use dream logic to fuel their imagery, even as they call upon a variety of poetic forms—from the prose poem to the sonnet—to evoke literary traditions that recall the gothic
and the surreal. Moving and strange, Hundley’s poems are unforgettable.

Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid—channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer—Carroll’s second collection of prose poems and wordimages contemplates the cost of living in an era of “cruel optimism.” Procedurally
formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian’s shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. “Cognative dissonance” meets “the rite to be a citizen.” “What is the difference between
neoliberalism and globalization?” tempers the countercultural question “And, me?” In Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography, Carroll muses, “Like Sammy and Rosie, Fannie and Freddie got laid.”

Off-grid, she mixes metaphors, criss-crossing the borders erected between the lyric and the conceptual “I.” She crosses out the dividing lines elected to maintain performance art, visual culture, and poetry as discrete, clairvoyant media of social engagement. She layers jokes, puns, riddles, platitudes, hackneyed phrases, adages, boilerplate, buzzwords, mottos, proverbs, rubber-stamp rhetoric, slogans, threadbare phrases, trite remarks, and truisms over one another to provide a portrait of the contemporary American landscape as experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. Carroll offers an elaborate palimpsest of text and images—text that is often shaded, crossed out, or printed over other text or images.

Claudia Rankine, who chose the volume for Fordham University’s 2011–12 Poets Out Loud Prize, succinctly sings its praises: “The intelligence, compassion, and dimensionality of this collection place it in a category all its own—it belongs to and is crafted out of the psychic anxieties of the twenty-first century. I, for one, was both
exhilarated and humbled by Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography.”

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent—a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born—and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. “Videos of Fish,” the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet’s late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysical
philosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. “How difficult it is to remain one person,” the poet claims, echoing Czesław Miłosz; in its progress between persons, the collection’s regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet,
the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and the miniature.

THE READER
Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field.


Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, like
an oar, its surface turned to the light.

Blacken now and lift your news into the air.

Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two poems spanning several decades. Like paintings that attempt to render visible the invisible, the poems reflect Wolfson’s interests in philosophy, the history of religions, and, in particular, the mystical dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

Although explicit references to the divine are rarely found in the poems, they issue from an encounter with the mystery of transcendence, performatively embodying the dialectic of concealment and disclosure.

Seeking to articulate the unsaying that makes possible all saying, a response always on the way, a word as yet unspoken, these poems can be imagined in liturgical terms. They do not utter words of conventional prayer but are a contemplative gaze at what eludes contemplation—a present that comes to be in the future awaiting its past. For Wolfson, the poem is an opening to time, which is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death.

friday’s hymn
pour oil on my head,
before the burning ends,
let us rise to count the minutes,
to dot the hours,
let us rise to wake the children
who must bury the dead.
night approaches day,
neither black nor white,
her sun is my moon.