Microscopes swivel and flowers spread as the poet wrestles with a spectrum of growing pains. These coming-of-age poems draw inspiration equally from science textbooks and fairy tales. As the final poem prays, "I will see the moon and morning and know". Branches explores what it means to live to the next day, and the next, before we fully understand what we are surviving.

Paradise Collectors is a 75 page compilation of Jewish themed poetry, featuring poems inspired by Judaism, Jewish holidays, and Jewish practice from D.L. Lang's previous books and a few new additions. Includes "Turning" previously published on ReformJudaism.org, "Prayer for the Shomrim" previously published in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, and "Is" previously published in the Marin Poetry Center anthology Vol 21, and winner of 3rd place at the 2019 Solano County Fair. This collection grew out of my building a set for a synagogue reading in Napa. The title comes from a quote I read in May 2018: "Paradise is scattered over the whole earth and that is why it has become so unrecognizable." - Novalis It struck me and others as a very Kabbalistic quote. I wrote the title poem Paradise Collectors after reading that quote in a horoscope. We are paradise collectors and one day, we shall find it. Together.

Poetry. Though known today mostly as an essayist, Phillip Lopate worked seriously as a poet for fifteen years during the 1970s and 1980s. As Henri Cole writes: "Phillip Lopate may be an American ambassador of nonfiction, but he is also a youthful, taciturn, love-seeking New York poet, whose poems--plainspoken, personal, darkly humorous--quietly gather strength while confronting the beautiful and ugly in city life. I admire their vitality and honesty."

In The Clinic, Memory , Elaine Feinstein has selected poems from the last half century of her writing life. They range widely: tender, early lyrics from 'In a Green Eye'; elegies for her father and close friends, amused reflections on ageing and longer poems such as 'Gold', based on the life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, or the lot of refugees in 'Migration'. Other poems explore the conflicts in a long marriage, teased out most poignantly in poems for her late husband in 'Talking to the Dead'.

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God , A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence draws on her life s work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities. Poetry arises from the search for sacred language thatdescribes the awe and mystery of the realworld.Deena Metzger is a contemporarypoet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, thatincludes selections from her earlier books of poetry, and draws on her life swork, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself withsuch a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritualand political ruins of our time.It isno longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledgedlegislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with fullheart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom andthe natural world.Here we meet thearticulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, theland and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them.This book combines a searing look at thehorrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, andindulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write onbehalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair isacknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task ofreconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward aviable future and all its unexpected possibilities. "

The imagination in David Biespiel's Shatterin Air is as luminous as the hear is generous.--Stanley Plumly

Barefoot in the Sanctuary is a volume of poetry inspired by long hikes out in the wilderness, spiritual experiences with my synagogue community, and artistic absorption of the tumultuous times we live in. It is D.L. Lang's 7th poetry book.

Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of Warning, her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over the more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of literary forms, new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories, she has always written what she thinks if as songs . For this new book she has brought back some of those best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph s ability to convey the experiences of a thinking heart is in no way diminished."

About the Author Roger Nash is the author of seven books of poetry. His poetry and short-fiction are widely published across Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A., and have won numerous awards, including the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario, where he is Poet Laureate.

Lisa leads us through the spiritual journey of her life with poignant reflections on family, love, fears, hopes and dreams. Audrey Copeland, Professor UAF Lisa Miller forges a lean and sinewy poetry that is at once reflective and raw, invoking both the head and the heart. Millers free-verse wends its way along peaks and valleys of the human journey, and the author is as steadfast before lifes inevitable pains and she is sanguine amid its myriad delights. This is a collection of sincere and insightful glimpses from a fellow sojourner. Paul Korchin, Ph.D. Professor of Religion, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

These poems search for compatibility between contemporary consciousness and a rich, ancient liturgical tradition. Specifically, they explore the deep feelings of joy and regret, shame and hope associated with the Days of Awe, the Jewish High Holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and concluding with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Tekiah refers to the sound of the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn that is blown to commemorate the beginning of creation. The sound also recalls the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the destruction of the Temple, and the binding of Isaac, and anticipates as well the reunification of the Jews of the Diaspora. Finally, and perhaps most important, it serves as an entreaty to the Jewish people to perform teshuvah, to return to God.

In this follow-up to his 2015 collection, Let Me Drown With Moses, James Goldberg explores themes of suffering, community, faith, and discipleship with both an unflinching commitment to God and a clear-eyed perspective on the difficulties of mortality. Whether telling stories from Goldberg's LDS ward, chronicling his experience in chemotherapy, imagining alternate histories, or commenting on the scriptures and society, the poems in Phoenix Song describe what it means both to feel burned to the ground and to rise from the ashes.

The forty-nine poems in Let Me Drown With Moses are not for those who think of religion as another name for self-help. They are for those who still believe in a God who wrestles. For those who think faith should challenge as much as it comforts. For those who would follow a prophet chest-deep into the Red Sea, even before the waters part.Drawing on imagery from scripture and Mormon history, Let Me Drown With Moses gives voice to the spiritual longing of a people and does its own small part to keep religion a living language in the 21st century.

Allen Ginsberg was a serious shutterbug who delighted in taking candid snapshots of friends and fellow writers, but up until now readers have had little chance to consider the "poetic" world of his photographs. Here in the form of twenty detachable postcards are photographs taken over the years on the poet's many travels and trips abroad. Pictures include: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso in Mexico; Burroughs and Bowles in Tangier; Snyder in Japan; Whalen and Creeley in Vancouver; Ginsberg in India and Prague, and Philip Glass in Turkey. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1956 City Lights published his signal poem "Howl," one of the most widely read poems of the era. He died in 1997. Also Available from City Lights Postcards from the Underground TP $8.95, 0-87286-365-4 bu CUSA

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person. In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers. Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World , which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes , which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s , and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature . His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.

Emoticoncert follows intensities and absences across different bodies and scales. Broken up into musical "movements," each section serves as its own composition. As a whole, the book works as a concert of intensities associated with loss, nationalism, and the slippery boundary between human and animal. Moving across both real and dreamed terrains, Emoticoncert is a dislocated kind of traveling linked by a sense of musicality and a desire to record the intensities that arise in the author's entanglements with things both present and gone.

Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes--stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation--and cut them into serial strips: tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.

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.

John G. Paton was an evangelist for Jesus Christ among the South Sea cannibals. Since beginning Vision Forum, we have made it our goal to urge fathers to turn their hearts to home and to rise up with courage to address the issues of the age. When I share this message before an audience, I usually begin by quoting at length an autobiographical account, penned by John G. Paton in the 19th century, describing how his father's love and training prepared him to endure bitter hardship, to persevere against unspeakably difficult circumstances, and to resist sin. This may be the most important narrative of missionary work you will ever read. The book touched me on the deepest level and has become an important part of my life and personal vision. We have republished it because it contains the finest testimony of multi-generational love and devotion between a father and son that I have ever read outside the Scriptures. Paton, a descendant of the Scottish Covenanters, was able to love and lead to Christ the very people who tried to eat his wife and child. One of the most important books you will ever read to your children. An Autobiography.