A major new collection of poems about women's lives and the closing circle of nature, from a bestselling poet. These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

Kenny Fries explores love and its ramifications in the age of AIDS. Wit ha keen ear for what people say to one another, a sharp eye for the unerring detail, the just right angle of vision, he shows us a haunting world of risk and loss, tempered by dignity and affirmation. The Healing Notebooks deserve a wide audience - Colette Inez

Transmigration explores many kinds of journeys in, through and after death: the journey of a self from one gender to the next; the journey of the soul in and out of flesh; the journey of a marriage into and out of love; the journey of a body from amputation to wholeness. Boiling human existence down to love, wish and desperation, Joy (formerly Jay) Ladin cobbles many materials— shreds of Cosmo Girl, metaphysics and how-to text, intimate moments and moments of despair—into a halting, sometimes faltering path from a life that is unlivable to life that is fully lived.

"She is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. A storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life."--Back cover

"In Alicia Jo Rabins' second collection, Fruit Geode, the terrifying power of maternal love coexists with sorrow for the loss of one’s younger self. In lyrical, unflinching poems, Rabins investigates the passages of pregnancy, birth, and early infancy through a constellation of ancient and modern experience: Sumerian storm demons, astronauts, herbal medicine, Neanderthal DNA, Jewish mysticism, climate change. In tracing the ritual mysteries of motherhood, Fruit Geode examines what it means to be transformed, to leave behind our certainties and walk into the unknown. "I regard my former life / With a distant affection, / As an astronaut / Looks through a porthole / At the small green planet / Where she used to live," writes Rabins. This is a book about what it means to live in a human body, how love changes us, and what we pass on from one generation to the next."--

Now in paperback, a collection to treasure from one of our most popular poets: poems that range from the Detroit of her childhood to her current life on Cape Cod, from deep appreciations of the natural world to elegies for lost friends and fellow poets. In her trademark style combining the sublime with gritty reality, Marge Piercy describes the night she was born: "the sky burned red / over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives. / The elms made tents of solace over grimy / streets and alley cats purred me to sleep." She writes in graphic, unflinching language about the poor, banished now by politicians, no longer "real people like corporations." There are elegies for her peer group of poets, gone now, whose work she cherishes but from whom she cannot help but want more. There are laments for the suicide of dolphins and for her beloved cats, as she remembers "exactly how I loved each." She continues to celebrate Jewish holidays in compellingly original ways, and sings the praises of her marriage and the small pleasures of life. A stunning collection in the best Piercy tradition.

Early American Poets is a beautiful anthology of the poetry that helped define the American literary tradition. Louis Untermeyer has curated a selection of works from the likes of Whitman, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as many lesser-known poets. This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the early days of American poetry, and is sure to delight poetry lovers of all ages. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Each bilingual volume in The Defiant Muse series includes 60 to 80 poems by both well-known and rediscovered poets, selected on the basis of their individual merit and as illustrations of the evolution of feminist thought and feeling. Reflecting their own cultural milieus as well as enduring themes, the poets write of love and friendship, revolution and peace, religion, nature, isolation, work, and family. The Dutch, French, German, and Italian volumes represent their respective countries; the Hispanic volume includes poems from the many Spanish-speaking nations; and the Hebrew volume encompasses writing in Hebrew from around the world. The poems are presented in their original languages alongside English translations. Each volume includes an introduction, placing the poetry in historical and aesthetic perspective, and full biographical and bibliographical notes on the poets.

Poetry. With a voice as familiar as family, Rachel B. Glaser's second book of poems, HAIRDO, hilariously navigates the daily anxieties and fantasies of the writer's path through her own modern life. Writing through action movies, pornography, chat rooms, photo shoots on train tracks, crushes on teachers, and orchids in grocery stores, the poems in this book present us with emotional souvenirs of a curious and honest life lived. Bursting with Glaser's truly unique heart, her mega-watt wit and insightful eye, HAIRDO is a book you will find yourself reading at 3AM, not able to put it down. "I love every single piece of art that Rachel Glaser makes. If she dug a hole I would want to spend time in that hole, because I know it would be just as strange, delightful, and intriguing as her linguistic and pictorial creations. Hooray for HAIRDO, and long live this incomparable maker." -- Heather Christle "Rachel Glaser has shown me the paradise of this world with her poems. Every man, woman and the rest of us need to see ourselves as one another, as puddles, horses, as imperfect, and that is the paradise. And all of that is especially here in her newest book with a tremendous passion anyone who ever loved poetry must come back to life to read. If poetry is dead like some sad, weepy critics have declared, then Glaser is the resurrection the weepy along with her dedicated poetry citizens have needed " --CAConrad

"Winner of the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry - "You have to touch the fire of letters," writes Maya Pindyck in a startling collection of poems where we are forced to not look away from the war of language and its gouged field of bodies, blood, blossoms, and ideas. Here is the memory of a self and her home, bleakly dissonant as a war-stained country ... Impossible Belonging is defiant, immediate. Beyond geographies of war, love, and words, Pindyck commands the past, present, and future: "Remember our country/banning the book noting/our refusal to see./Remember this compass/mapping our last past"--

These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

Janice Silverman Rebibo is back! A highly-acclaimed Hebrew poet, Rebibo is now smart and entertaining in her native English and, as always, thought-provoking. In My Beautiful Ballooning Heart, her poems crisscross borders, overcome traumas and love without bounds. Rebibo walks the poetry/prose fence with humor and insight, and at long last in English.

"American readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun." —Helen Vendler With this, his second collection of poetry, James Lasdun consolidates his reputation as a writer of rich, emotionally charged poems of utter virtuosity. The poems in this book concern themselves with transformations, dislocations, and metamorphoses. Vividly rendered landscapes from Tuscany to New Jersey evolve into meditations on love, myth, and sexual and social politics. Woman Police Officer in Elevator is a rigorous and compelling mix of the classical and the cosmopolitan.

R.B. Lemberg's poems are a manifesto of memories, unearthing worlds that are gone and poignantly present: their childhood in the Soviet Union, suspended between Ukraine and the permafrost of Siberia, among the traumatized, silent, persecuted members of their Jewish family; Lemberg's coming of age in Israel, being the other wherever they go, both internally and externally, in multiple identities, languages, genders; and the arrival in "the lost land" of their America, where they have put down "tentative roots." Every line in this stunning, lyrical memoir is chiseled with the poignant precision of ice into a coruscating cascade that engulfs us with the author's sensations of solitude, anger, grief; sometimes hurling like an avalanche, sometimes tenderly unfolding like constellations in a circumpolar sky - leaving open the possibility that with the disturbing truths covered for decades, the thawing permafrost from Lemberg's past might also lay bare layers of love.

Jiri Orten was one of the great poets of the 20th century. A Czech Jew who narrowly avoided being sent to a concentration camp, Orten was hit by a speeding German car in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941. He was refused admission to a nearby hospital and died shortly afterwards (at the age of 22) in a "Jewish Hospital" which was basically a warehouse. "Jiri Orten is a powerful, visionary poet whose work has been beautifully translated by Lyn Coffin. These are poems we can return to again and again-for their courage, for their sustenance." - Sam Hamill "Lyn Coffin's translations do justice to a great poet. I can think of no higher praise for a translation than that." - Joseph Brodsky (about Lyn's translations of Orten's Elegies) "I can now die a happy man.... These are the poems my brother would have written if he'd written in English." - Ota Ornest, Jiri Orten's brother ... How dark it is outside! What was I going to say? Oh, yes, now I remember. Because of all those hours I slept soundly through calm nights, because of all those loved ones who are deep in dreams-- Now, when everything's running short, I can't stand being here by myself. The lamplight's too strong. I am sowing grain on the headland. I will not live long.

Elaine Feinstein is a poet of lyrical directness who writes with tenderness about an ageing father, a child on a swing, old films, a flowering cactus, and with insight about love, loss, jealousy, and the fear of abandonment. The poems in this expansive collection are drawn from 11 volumes published over 30 years.

Elaine Feinstein's voice is clear, passionate and subtle. She writes about love, loss, jealousy and the pressures of living as mother and wife, drawing coherent shapes out of her own inner uncertainties. This collection is drawn from 14 volumes of poems and translations published over 30 years.

"THE LOVE BOOK", transcendental jewel of American Poetry, banned as part of an illegal program of harassment, arrests, and mass confiscations instituted by then-governor Ronald Reagan, is back in all its notorious glory to claim its rightful place in San Francisco literary history.

Intense and deeply personal, this compilation of poetry, grapples with the reality of death, loss, and finding meaning in the face of life's finitude in contemporary times. For over three decades, Simcha Paull Raphael has written scholarly books on death and the afterlife, including his groundbreaking study Jewish Views of the Afterlife. In this collection of thirty-six poems, Raphael invites us into the inner sanctum of his own intimate wrestling with death and loss. As Rabbi Jill Hammer writes in the Foreword: "Raphael has done the brave work of exposing his own emotional life, the inner workings of his drive to address mortality and immortality. In a sense, he has let us know the behind-the-scenes of his academic and spiritual work." The poems herein reflect and wrestle with a spectrum of topics: the gamut of Jewish death rituals (funeral & shiva, Kaddish & Yizkor); personal tributes to the author's deceased parents; his journey of making meaning in the face of grief and loss; challenges of love and marriage; the vicissitudes of family life; and thoughtful poetic reflections on the state of the world today. As a book mirroring the universal journey of awakening to the reality of life's finality and eternity, Musings with the Angel of Death speaks to the heart and soul.