Poetry
W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins.
New York: Random House, 1947. 1st printing. Dust jacket in protective mylar cover; 1/2" at top of spine missing; 1" tear at top left cover; corners chipped; front cover has some soiling in spots; dark green cloth with gilt lettering over maroon on spine; first 8 pages creased at top left; binding tight. G/G-
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+
Laura Grace Weldon was the Ohio Poet of the Year in 2019 for this collection of nature filled poems. This collection casts an uncommonly bright glow. In clear language, these poems explore themes of connection and healing through subjects as unusual as cow pastures, dictionaries, to-do lists, and astrophysics. Beauty is revealed in what one reviewer calls "sacraments of the ordinary." Perfect for poetry lovers and those who haven't read a poem in years.
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).
At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years.
Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before.
To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.
"Directed by Desire . . . is a powerful addition to the entire canon of American poetry."--Booklist
Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan's -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan's ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in Jordan's lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.
As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value."
From "These Poems"
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
The cloth edition of Directed by Desire was selected as a Library Journal Poetry Book of the Year and received the Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.
June Jordan taught at UC Berkeley for many years and founded Poetry for the People. Her twenty-eight books include poetry, essays, fiction, and children's books. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive and a prolific writer whose articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Nation. After her death in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor.
The Associated Publishers Inc, 1941, nod. Blue boards, library markings. Good-
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.
"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-
"How do we live when our pain does not dissipate? Is the heart a vector, or is it woven by swift hands on the night before we are born? Have you ever loved someone so deeply that you changed species to become a flower? Reading Ankur Kalra's Ibadah, poems of love, desire, loss and passion, new and stirring questions about the soul's journey as a beloved arise, perhaps, in the reader's being. That these poems are written by an interventional cardiologist, someone who has touched what for so many of us is a vocabulary, a set of sensations, brings another dimension to the insights developed here. Who are we when we are not alone? Who are we when we are not with each other? I am honored to write in support of this mystical and visceral book."
- Bhanu Kapil
About the Author
Dr. Kalra is an interventional cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, a university professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and founder of the non-profit startup, makeadent.org. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Radcliffe Cardiology's US Cardiology Review, a peer-reviewed medical (cardiology) journal, and host of the medical (cardiology) podcast show, Parallax. He has presented late-breaking science at national and international scientific cardiovascular platforms, and has published over 130 scientific manuscripts in various peer-reviewed medical journals. Educated at Indira Gandhi Medical College (Shimla, India), Dr. Ankur Kalra completed medical and cardiology training at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (New Delhi, India), Cooper University Hospital (Camden, NJ), and Hennepin County Medical Center and Minneapolis Heart Institute (Minneapolis, MN). He served as a clinical and research fellow in interventional cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, MA), and a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) in 2015-16. He then completed a year of advanced interventional and structural cardiology fellowship in 2016-17, at Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center (Houston, TX). In addition to certifications, awards, and accolades, Dr. Kalra is board-certified in Internal Medicine (2012), Cardiovascular Disease (2015) and Interventional Cardiology (2016) from the American Board of Internal Medicine.
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
A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more.
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.
