One evening in the winter, some years ago, my brother came to my rooms in the city of Chicago bringing with him a book by Gertrude Stein. The book was called Tender Buttons and, just at that time, there was a good deal of fuss and fun being made over it in American newspapers. I had already read a book of Miss Stein's called Three Lives and had thought it contained some of the best writing ever done by an American. I was curious about this new book. My brother had been at some sort of a gathering of literary people on the evening before and someone had read aloud from Miss Stein's new book. The party had been a success. After a few lines the reader stopped and was greeted by loud shouts of laughter. It was generally agreed that the author had done a thing we Americans call "putting something across"-the meaning being that she had, by a strange freakish performance, managed to attract attention to herself, get herself discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried, harried lives. My brother, as it turned out, had not been satisfied with the explanation of Miss Stein's work then current in America, and so he bought Tender Buttons and brought it to me, and we sat for a time reading the strange sentences. "It gives words an oddly new intimate flavor and at the same time makes familiar words seem almost like strangers, doesn't it," he said. What my brother did, you see, was to set my mind going on the book, and then, leaving it on the table, he went away. - Sherwood Anderson about "Tender Buttons" written by Gertrude Stein

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"A timely new collection that sounds themes about the fragility of life and our duty to respect the planet in a time of climate change, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who work "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" (Carrie Fountain) The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its "integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry" (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species. The book succeeds in braiding together a recognition of our limits and of our responsibilities in ways that are deeply moving and revealing"--

In his latest laugh-out-loud book of political verse, Calvin Trillin provides a riotous depiction of the 2012 presidential election campaign. Dogfight is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other poems and occasionally by what the author calls a pause for prose (“Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough”). With the same barbed wit he displayed in the bestsellers Deciding the Next Decider, Obliviously On He Sails, and A Heckuva Job, America’s deadline poet trains his sights on the Tea Party (“These folks were quick to vocally condemn/All handouts but the ones that went to them”) and the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican nomination (“Though first-tier candidates were mostly out,/Republicans were asking, “What about/The second tier or what about the third?/Has nothing from those other tiers been heard?”). There is an ode to Michele Bachmann, sung to the tune of a Beatles classic (“Michele, our belle/Thinks that gays will all be sent to hell”) and passages on the exit of candidates like Herman Cain (“Although his patter in debates could tickle,/Cain’s pool of knowledge seemed less pool than trickle”) and Rick Santorum (“The race will miss the purity/That you alone endow./We’ll never find another man/Who’s holier than thou.”) On its way to the November 6 finale, Trillin’s narrative takes us through such highlights as the January caucuses in frigid Iowa (“To listen to long speeches is your duty,/And getting there could freeze off your patootie”), the Republican convention (“It seemed like Clint, his chair, and their vignette/Had wandered in from some adjoining set”), and Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded “47 percent” speech, which inspired the “I Got the Mitt Thinks I’m a Moocher, a Taker not a Maker, Blues.”

This collection of poems, told from the perspective of a young girl, celebrates family life throughout the yearly cycle of seasons.

"Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him. In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate year, he recounts how as a boy he composed little speeches walking in the night woods near his house and how he later realized these were his first poems. He wittily takes on the poets he studied with in the Iowa Writing Program: John Berryman, who was his great teacher and lifelong friend, and Robert Lowell, who was neither. His deepest influences--jazz, Spain, the working people of Detroit--are reflected in many of the pieces. There are essays on Spanish poets he admires, William Carlos Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, and others. A wonderful, moving collection of writings that add to our knowledge and appreciation of Philip Levine--both the man and the poet"--

Spring and All, a collection of poems and essays, was first published by William Carlos Williams in 1932. Williams was a true renaissance man - he was a doctor, an artist, and a poet. This collection contains many of his classics including Red Wheelbarrow. He wrote this while tending to a sick child. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Williams was well celebrated during his lifetime. He won the first National Book Award for Poetry. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Be inspired by his thought-provoking works! Note that Lisa Shea will also soon have an annotated and illustrated version, for those who would enjoy having notes on each poem.

Dorothy Parker ( 1893 to 1967) was an American poet and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. Parker went through three marriages (two to the same man) and survived several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. She published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies]and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-Cold-War tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" ( New York Times ). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals―doubles and triples and possibly quadruples―continues to multiply.

In pond, river, and ocean, as a solid, liquid, or gas, water is everywhere. But what does it evoke? What emotions are brought forth when we hear the crash of surf, see the rush of a stream, or feel the tickle of soap bubbles on our skin? In thoughtful poems, renowned author Jane Yolen takes a fresh look at water in all its forms, using photographer Jason Stemple's breathtaking pictures as inspiration. Waterfalls, steams, lakes, ocean waves, even bath water take on new meaning as poet and photographer examine these liquid landscapes through careful words and a camera's lens.

She was quiet and fiercely private. She was bold and fiercely creative. And it wasn't until after her death that the world came to know her genius. In The Emily Sonnets, Jane Yolen's beautiful sonnets and insightful biographical notes spotlight Emily Dickinson's schooling, seclusion, and the slant rhymes for which she became famous, while Gary Kelley's captivating artwork portrays the poet's 19th-century Massachusetts world, including her family, faith, and fears.

A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying. In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young―a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy―died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, “No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art.” An “inside” biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young’s story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the “sweet and isolate lovely other.”

Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Bollingen Prize-winning poet David Ignatow eschews ornamentation in favor of embracing the fierce, uncompromising truths of the human spirit in his eighteenth collection.

The drama of consciousness and maturation in the growth of a poet's mind is traced from Wordsworth's earliest poems to The Excursion of 1814. Mr. Hartman follows Wordsworth's growth into self-consciousness, his realization of the autonomy of the spirit, and his turning back to nature. The apocalyptic bias is brought out, perhaps for the first time since Bradley's Oxford Lectures , and without slighting in any way his greatness as a nature poet. Rather, a dialectical relation is established between his visionary temper and the slow and vacillating growth of the humanized or sympathetic imagination. Mr. Hartman presents a phenomenology of the mind with important bearings on the Romantic movement as a whole and as confirmation of Wordsworth's crucial position in the history of English poetry. Mr. Hartman is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. "A most distinguished book, subtle, penetrating, profound."--Rene Wellek. "If it is the purpose of criticism to illuminate, to evaluate, and to send the reader back to the text for a fresh reading, Hartman has succeeded in establishing the grounds for such a renewal of appreciation of Wordsworth."--Donald Weeks, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

In her book The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted historical account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the majority opinion that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favor of a secular, Romantic approach. She contends that Emerson's reinvention of the religion as a species of poetry is tested and found wanting by the very poetic innovators whom Emerson addressed and that a counter-tradition is evident in his major heirs--Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Frost, and Lowell. Indeed, Emerson's own poetry failed in many ways to live up to his views and instead revealed an inherent paradox: that coopting of religion by a poetic theory alienates religion from its life principle--theology--and disables the poem as well.

This definitive collection displays the beauty and elegance of the best in Welsh poetry from the 20th century. Chosen by one of Wales's most celebrated contemporary poets, this compilation spans the breadth of Welsh life, including the poetry of Georgian influenced W. H. Davies and Edward Thomas, Welsh-language enthusiasts Tony Conran and Nigel Jenkins, and politically inspired Tony Curtis and Duncan Bush. Hundreds of other important Welsh poets are also represented, including John Ormond, Leslie Norris, Harry Webb, Jean Earle, and Gwyneth Lewis.