Poetry

Aard-vark to Axolotl, an eclectic series of tiny essays, is a collection of prose poems disguised as imaginary definitions, and a collaboration of text + image based on a set of illustrations from an old dictionary. Sometimes sneaky mysterious, sometimes downright weird, these small stories work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities.

All the Year Round contains 12 poems, one for each month, written by Riley, who was popularly known as the “Hoosier Poet." The poems focus on rustic subjects and are written in a 'countrified' dialect. This edition includes twelve beautiful color woodcuts by the American painter Gustave Baumann, one of the leading figures of the color woodcut revival in the United States.

White cloth over navy blue with gilt lettering on cover; some foxing on white cloth; corners bumped; covers lightly scuffed, some soiling and fading; endpapers lightly tanned and foxed; lightly foxed throughout; pages uncut; illustrations bright. G

Maya Angelou's unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Thus begins "Phenomenal Woman," just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou's third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh--and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it.

"It is true poetry she is writing," M.F.K. Fisher has observed, "not just rhythm, the beat, rhymes. I find it very moving and at times beautiful. It has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity. . . . It is astounding, flabbergasting, to recognize it, in all the words I read every day and night . . . it gives me heart, to hear so clearly the caged bird singing and to understand her notes."

Lord John Press, Northridge, California, 1981. First edition limited to 300 numbered copies and 50 deluxe copies, all signed by each poet. This book is a presentation copy and is not numbered. Blue cloth spine lettered in glit, boards blue with overall gilt decorations.  VG+

 

Published by The Gehenna Press, Northampton, Mass., 1965. Limited edition, no. 293/500. Drawings by Leonard Baskin. Dust jacket in protective cover; spine and eges tanned; 1/2" at head of spine chipped away; covers lightly soiled; green cloth with gilt lettering on spine; binding tight; text clean and bright; page from The Massachusetts Review, volume 1, no. 2, February 1960, containing two poems by author laid in. VG/G

Love resides within all of earth and knows no limits. It is an entity that holds those within its reach captive. To be enraptured by love is to surrender all sensibility. In Blackheart Hideaway, M. Lauren explores the depths, darkness and overwhelming insatiability of love through poetry, prose and short stories. Whether it be the betrayal of a lover in "Telling Him," the indisputable answer to "Love's Call" or the hope & promise of newfound love, Blackheart Hideaway explores and endures it all.

In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature.

Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.

At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.

Rita Dove's Collected Poems 1974-2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of U.S. poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove's fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America's kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove's mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the "precise, singing lines" for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove "has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental" (Poetry magazine).

"To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma." --Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur'an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection's themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti's remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti's journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Two hundred copies of this privately published collection of romantic verse by Ralph Pulitzer (1879-1939), writing under the pseudonym John Burke, were printed and bound by Pynson Printers in 1927. This gorgeous volume is no. 164/200 and is signed by Rockwell Kent; quarter brown morocco over marbled boards; morocco corners; some wear to spine; corners bumped and scuffed; decorated endpapers; former owner's bookplate on front pastedown; owner's sticker on rear pastedown; deckled edges; binding tight; text clean and bright. G+

Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich's singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

"I tripped on my shoelace"
"And I fell up --"

Irreverent poet, whimsical artist and bestselling author -- Shel Silverstein is back! "Falling Up," the brand-new collection of more than 140 Silverstein poems and drawings, is the long-awaited companion to the bestselling classics "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "A Light in the Attic."

Poor Screamin' Millie is just one of the unforgettable characters in this wondrous new book. You also will meet Allison Beals and her 25 eels; Danny O'Dare the Dancin' Bear; the Human Balloon; Headphone Harold; and more!

So come, wander through the Nose Garden, ride the Little Horse, eat in the Strange Restaurant and let the magic of Shel Silverstein open your eyes and tickle your mind.

New York: Random House, 1944. 1st printing.

One Volume contains two of Auden's long poems: "For the Time Being - A Christmas Oratorio" and "The Sea and the Mirror - A Commentary of Shakespeare's The Tempest." Previous owner has laid in "Christmas 1958" poem by Auden.

Dust jacket in protective cover; small tears at head and heel of spine; corners chipped; navy blue paper over white cloth; gilt lettering on spine; endpapers tanned; signature of former owner in ink on pastedown; bleed-through of glue from repair between pages 3-6;  G/G-

"In an era of rising nationalism and geopolitical instability, Megan Fernandes's Good Boys offers a complex portrait of messy feminist rage, negotiations with race and travel, and existential dread in the Anthropocene. The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging-just barely-on the trains and bridges and barstools of New York City. A child of the Indian ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the "hydrogen fruit" of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy"--

Tenth annual winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Haywire is a well-polished collection from a highly accomplished poet. With humor, compassion, and an unflinching eye, Bilgere explores the human condition in accessible lines and a magician's way with language. In images bright and dark, tangible and immanent, Bilgere brings us time after time to the inner reaches of a contemporary life. In subjects ranging from adolescent agony to the loss of parents to the comic pain of middle age, he finds no reason to turn away his gaze, and ultimately no reason not to define himself in joy

Haywire was chosen for the Swenson Award by poet Edward Field, winner of numerous awards and a personal friend of the late May Swenson. Field describes the book this way. "This poet, you knew from his very first lines, didn't fall for anything phony--his own language is irresistibly no-bullshit down to earth, even sassy."

The poems in How to Live in Ruins tell one couple's story of moving to Cleveland and raising a family there. This is a book for anyone who has ever loved a place that's a little bit rusty and tried to make it better.

New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1902; 31 illustrations in photogravure reproduced from the original designs of Gustave Dore; reprint of the original Moxon folio edition; Margaret Armstrong cover design in gilt on navy blue cloth; light shelf wear; corners lightly bumped; front hinge weak; text clean and bright. G

Not only was Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) one of the most important American poets of his generation, he was also intimately involved with the art world of the 1950s and 1960s, a time when New York had become the cultural capital of the world. As an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara organized a series of important exhibitions, notably of the work of Franz Kline and of Robert Motherwell. In Memory of My Feelings explores this key period in modern art by presenting artists who were associated with O'Hara and whose seminal works are reflected in his poetry.

Limited edition, number 981/2500; published by Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967; 30 poems illustrated by 30 artists, on gathered sheets in portfolio and slipcase as issued; top of slipcase soiled; front and top of slipcase lightly foxed; light foxing on cloth edge of front cover; inside is clean and bright. G+/G

Mary Quade, our lady of broken birds with still beating hearts, of the haunts within a covered bridge, is in love with things (empty dresses, sticks and branches, county fair food), with animals (a sick raccoon, moles, the last passenger pigeon), and because she is in love, she is both fiercely curious and deeply wary. These poems of great, imaginative empathy are sharpened with the understanding that, really, we are so greedy, "all unclean, all appetite." -- Katie Northrop

One of Mary Quade's poems, making an analogy with photographic depth of field, begins by observing that "The smaller the window / the more you will see / clearly." The whole of Local Extinctions, from the birthday party magician in the first poem to the American Legion pancakes at the county fair in the last, embraces that principle as an ideal. The infinite care Mary Quade takes in framing and focus results every time in perfect clarity, each poem revealing something that only Quade could show us, as only she could show it. -- H. L. Hix

With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Thomas Sayers Ellis's debut becomes a powerful argument against monotony

A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
and yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.
--from "Groovallegiance"

In one poem, Thomas Sayers Ellis prognosticates, "Pretty soon, the Age of the Talk Show / Will slip on a peel left in the avant- gutter." The result is The Maverick Room, the testing ground of determination and serendipity, where call-and-response becomes Steinian echo becomes Post-Soul percussive pleasure becomes a bootlegged recording hustled out of a D.C. go-go club.

Marking the end of Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove's two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States, this new collection again confirms her extraordinary power and grace as a poet. Mother Love calls upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to examine the tenacity of love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter; each daughter a potential mother.

The Dolmen Press, 1967. Limited edition; The New Dolmen Chapbooks, 2; published in the U.S. by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, PA. Sewn in card covers with attached dust jacket; covers rubbed and soiled; bottom of front flap clipped; former owner's name in ink on inside cover. G

Cats! Some are sane, and some are mad.
Some are good, and some are bad . . .

These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and continue to delight children and grown-ups. Eliot's beloved cat poems are a curious and artful homage to felines young and old, merry and fierce, small and unmistakably round.

Yellow cloth with red figures and printing, dusty yellow dj with black drawings and print, chips at top of spine and some darkening.  G/G

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."

Picnic, Lightning--one of the books that helped establish and secure Collins' reputation and popularity during the 1990s--combines humor and seriousness, wit and sublimity. His poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from jazz to death, from weather to sex, but share common ground where the mind and heart can meet. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this signed copy is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

For over a century the Boy Scouts of America has provided millions of American boys with the outdoor adventures of Scouting. At Scout camps across the nation, from early encampments to well-established Scout Reservations, summer camp has been the highlight building character while creating life-long memories. As America evolved so did the Boy Scouts and when the nation was at its best so was Scouting. Primitive Paradise is the story of Scout Camping, its evolution in the United States and impact on society as it unfolded in one community, Cleveland, Ohio. How out of the dreams of men and adventuring of boys a primitive paradise, Beaumont Scout Reservation came to be. How the powers of strong community built it and divided society facilitated its demise.

Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, Red Bird comprises sixty-one poems, the most ever in a single volume of her work. Overflowing with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog Percy, Red Bird is a quintessential collection of Oliver's finest lyrics.

In his newest collection, Robert Schumann is Mad Again, Norman Dubie explores human suffering in a narrative unlimited by time and space. From the fields of a fallen Jerusalem, to the sci-fi prison of the Ukraine's Crater Lviv, Dubie has crafted a kaleidoscope of reserved places and experiences throughout history. His ekphrastic work, a continual expansion of a legacy seeking to test "the limits of the lyric," spirals across the boundaries of nonfiction and the surreal, the artistic and the scientific. Norman Dubie reconciles the violence of cobbled streets and abandoned houses with the mysterious hum of the arts, "singing to nearly/ everyone who will listen." This collection pays homage to the voices of classic writers, artists, and scientists, where the likes of Francisco Goya, Paolo Uccello, and the collection's namesake evaluate this unnerving world, suspended in balanced chaos. Simultaneously solemn and experimental, Dubie's latest poems embrace his anxieties of aging and death, capturing a haunting sense of wonder that lingers like a cold touch and draws compassion for humanity's future.

James Dickey (1923-1997) was widely regarded as one of the major mid-century American poets, known for his sweeping historical vision and eccentric poetic style. "Dickey himself dubbed his style, which blurred dreams and reality in an attempt to accommodate the irrational, 'country surrealism.' However, one of Dickey’s principal themes, usually expressed through direct confrontation or surreal juxtaposition of nature and civilization, was the need to intensify life by maintaining contact with the primitive impulses, sensations, and ways of seeing suppressed by modern society." [Poetry Foundation] 

The Deerfield Press, Deerfield, MA, Gallery Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1980.  Printed by Harold McGrath at Hampshire in Northampton, MA, and bound by Museum Bookbindings in Dublin, limited to 300 copies signed by author. With two color woodblock illustrations by Timothy Engelland.  Additional inscription on title page by Dickey to Liz.  F/F

1st printing, March 1923. No dust jacket; original publisher's dark green cloth; gilt lettering and decoration on spine; corners bumped; original owner's signature in ink on ffep; endpapers smudged; front hinge weak; deckled edges. G

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibne. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. Heaney's translation not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

1st U.S. edition; dust jacket in protective mylar cover; previous owner signature on front pastedown; two lines of ink underlining on page iii of the introduction. G/VG

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913. 1st edition. No dust jacket; blue cloth with gilt lettering on cover and spine; t.e.g.; edges worn; corners bumped; covers scuffed; frontispiece with sepia portrait of poet; title page has shadow of portrait; hinges weak. G-

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY

Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award

"100 Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times Book Review

"By some literary magic--no, it's precision, and honesty--Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes."--Craig Morgan Teicher, "'I Reject Walls': A 2019 Poetry Preview" for NPR

"A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem."--Rita Dove, in her introduction to Jericho Brown's "Dark" (featured in the New York Times Magazine in January 2019)

"Winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown's hard-won lyricism finds fire (and idyll) in the intersection of politics and love for queer Black men."--O, The Oprah Magazine

Named a Lit Hub "Most Anticipated Book of 2019"

One of Buzzfeed's "66 Books Coming in 2019 You'll Want to Keep Your Eyes On"

The Rumpus poetry pick for "What to Read When 2019 is Just Around the Corner"

One of BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections of 2019"

Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar's Club and Lit.

Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs.

In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The squalor of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power--illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.

--The Millions

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States

Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

--from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical, and wry--turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

"WE WANT OUR BODIES BACK URGES BLACK WOMEN TO DEMAND BETTER FROM MEN." -ESSENCE

"MASTER POET JESSICA CARE MOORE GIFTS US THIS LATEST COLLECTION OF SHARP, SMART AND DEFIANT PIECES." -MS. MAGAZINE

BOOKS BY BLACK WOMEN WE CAN'T WAIT TO READ IN 2020 -REFINERY29

A dazzling full-length collection of verse from one of the leading poets of our time.

Over the past two decades, jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women's creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Fierce and passionate, Jessica Care moore argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats.

We Want Our Bodies Back is an exploration--and defiant stance against--these many attacks.

--Patricia Smith, poet, playwright, author of Incendiary Art

The dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet makes for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who until now had nothing to do with it.

First edition; signed by author, stamp of City Lights Bookstore on half title; dust jacket pristine. Fine/Fine