Poetry

A beautiful new addition to a bestselling poetry anthology series that guides readers in dark times, both personal and societal

For decades, Roger Housden has curated poetry collections that offer solace, strength, and perspective when they’re needed most. In this powerful volume, he brings together poems that speak directly to the human experience of suffering — reminding us that we are not alone in our grief, our fear, or our uncertainty.

Housden reflects on each poem in ways that gently guide us toward clarity and comfort. These are not poems that avoid the truth — Jack Gilbert reminds us there is “sorrow everywhere,” and Maggie Smith observes that “the world is at least fifty percent terrible” — yet within these lines are glimmers of resilience, beauty, and even joy.

This is poetry as a lifeline, transforming pain into perseverance, despair into meaning, and heartbreak into healing.


Ten Poems for Difficult Times

“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
“The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass
“The Quarrel” by Conrad Aiken
“Cutting Loose” by William Stafford
“Rain Light” by W. S. Merwin
“How the Light Comes” by Jan Richardson
“Now You Know the Worst” by Wendell Berry
“A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert
“It’s This Way” by Nazim Hikmet
“Annunciation” by Marie Howe

In his bestselling Ten Poems series, Roger Housden has shown an uncanny ability to choose and discuss poems that strike at the core of readers’ concerns and needs. In this new volume, ten extraordinary poems, along with Housden’s incisive essays, bring heartfelt insight and broad perspective both to our personal challenges and to our cultural and collective malaise. Ten Poems for Difficult Times is the perfect gift for oneself or for anyone in need of solace and inspiration.

Ten Poems for Difficult Times

“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
“The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass
“The Quarrel” by Conrad Aiken
“Cutting Loose” by William Stafford
“Rain Light” by W. S. Merwin
“How the Light Comes” by Jan Richardson
“Now You Know the Worst” by Wendell Berry
“A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert
“It’s This Way” by Nazim Hikmet
“Annunciation” by Marie Howe

From the editors of Mala of the Heart: 108 Sacred Poems comes a true gift to the lover in all of us. Love sustains our passions and yearnings, holds us in times of joy and loss, nourishes our hearts, and melts our fears. It opens us to our deepest self and releases us into the embrace of the infinite.

This powerful, reflective collection is filled with mystical insights into love. In these 108 poems, great poets, saints, sages, mystics, and artists across cultures give voice to the eternal presence of love. Together, the poems reveal a fuller story, inviting us to discover the inner essence of love within us. Over the ages, the number 108 has symbolized our hidden connections with the sacred. In Mala of Love, 108 poems reveal that love is the path to greater unity and peace.

“Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”
— from the preface

I was born to grow,
alongside my garden of plants,
poems
like
this one

So writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved ones, war, the deliciousness of love, environmental devastation, the sorrow of rejection, greed, poverty, and the sweetness of home. The poems embrace our connections while celebrating the joy of individuality, the power we each share to express our truest, deepest selves. Beloved for her ability to speak her own truth in ways that speak for and about countless others, she demonstrates that we are stronger than our circumstances. As she confronts personal and collective challenges, her words dance, sing, and heal.