Praise for Harold Norse's WILLIAM CARLOS "I believe in your intellectual honesty and in what you are doing with the American idiom of which you are an intrinsic genius." CHARLES "He can't write a bad line. I've never seen one. . . . He is one of the great ones of our rather strange times." JAMES If light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold Norse will be one of the writers who will have helped to set it there." ALLEN "I was kept amazed by your sense of reality, by your awareness of the thing in these poems."

Love Comes First is Erica Jong's long-awaited return to her poetic roots! Here is Erica Jong's first book of all-new poems in more than a decade. Known and beloved for Fear of Flying and her many other books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Jong expounds on the most eternal, universal topic of all: love. Using brilliant imagery and intense metaphorical insights to paint vivid pictures of love, and all that comes with it--the heights of elation, the depths of sorrow--she covers every inch of the spectrum with her vibrant and insightful words. Perfect for wedding showers, lovers of all ages, and Valentine's Day, Jong's trademark trailblazing style and remarkable ability to bridge the gap between literary and popular poetry makes Love Comes First an instant classic. Discover-- or discover yet again--the brilliance of Erica Jong. Watch the trailer for this book:

Praise for Harold Norse's WILLIAM CARLOS "I believe in your intellectual honesty and in what you are doing with the American idiom of which you are an intrinsic genius." CHARLES "He can't write a bad line. I've never seen one. . . . He is one of the great ones of our rather strange times." JAMES If light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold Norse will be one of the writers who will have helped to set it there." ALLEN "I was kept amazed by your sense of reality, by your awareness of the thing in these poems."

These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains that, "Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty." While the poet might be prayerful and the mystic might wax poetic, there is a "fundamental difference which separates the poetic experience from the mystical experience: while the poet progresses toward the Word, the mystic tends toward Silence." As Raïssa Maritain expounds, mystics may be moved to describe their heightened experiences, but for them this "expression is not a means of completing the experience." For the furnishing of her interior castle, a mystic like St. Teresa of Avila needs no speech; her talk, the record she left us of the "prayer of quiet," is "only a result of superabundance, a generous attempt at communication." The poet, on the contrary, cannot do without words. They are the vital stuff of his service to the world. Albert Béguin corroborates Maritain's conclusion, contending that "whatever value one attributes to the poetic act, it remains an act submitted to the necessity of form. It ends at the word." On the other hand, the poetic word points beyond language, ever striving for a fuller communion with reality and its Maker. Inhabiting the tensions between sense and nonsense, poetry and mysticism, articulation and its absence, Maritain manifests the hidden mysteries at the heart of all poetry worthy of the name.

"In Longing: Poems of a Life, acclaimed poet Merle Feld presents a collection of deeply personal poetry reflecting on the realities of family, trauma, isolation, abuse, coming of age, love, and guarded hope"--

The fourth volume of the San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, All That’s Left is a powerful collection of poems for social justice by street-poet-turned- laureate Jack Hirschman. The volume opens with Hirschman’s autobiographical inaugural address, which vividly traces his career as poet, translator, and agitator. Included are several of Hirschman’s earlier poems, marking successive stages of his poetic development. The poems following the address were composed during his tenure as poet laureate, covering contemporary outrages like post-Katrina New Orleans and the Virginia Tech tragedy, paying homage to fallen poetic comrades like Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman, and exploring more personal dimensions of love.

As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has "shared with most poets in every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call nature. Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author "celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment: "In these last few decades of the 20th century it has become ever clearer to all thinking people that although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become, in multifarious ways, an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking 'the great web'--perhaps irremediably."

Contains meditations on love, war, self and community, life and death, and the earth, in a volume that includes twenty-six new poems.

David Biespiel's energetic language, so varied and musical and precise, is quite unmatched by that of other contemporary poets. The Book of Men and Women is his second collection in the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and as always he is the master of the long line, his words strung across its reach as tightly as beads. But new poems in this book explore the intimacies of the shorter line as well and display Biespiel's formal inventiveness and emotional range. The Book of Men and Women addresses our time and human condition in ways both domestic and global. The first section of the book is filled with the wonderful agitation of spell-making language. The poems are connected to the social and historical world, and yet at the same time, they prepare us for the mythic story about men and women that is promised in the book's title. The second section is more formally restrained and as such imbues the speaker with the distinction and melancholy gravitas that characterize the collection. We see this in the remarkable and fully imagined tour de force, "William Clark's Sonnets." The book concludes with a series of autobiographical poems that confront the frailties of love and desire with unflinching intimacy and gratitude. These last poems, composed during an intense three-month period of writing, as well as the other poems in this remarkable volume, showcase Biespiel at the very top of his form.

.In a time of spiritual decadence, still another poet has injured us with the visions of possibility. Here is a rare wedding of poetic prose, philosophy and psychological awareness without the wooden self-consciousness of most modern psychological writing. A human document. It touches the deepest places. .Informs and potentially heals its readers by communicating with love, a sense of what underlines the particulars of their lives. This book will live. -CARL A. FABER Ph.D. Psychologist, Lecturer, Author

Plutonian Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box of Aeons, and Adamantine Truth of ordinary mind inspiration, unhexing nuclear ministry of fear. Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda’s tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year’s eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air

“… the shadows of death are the spices of love, and eternal life would be the school of absolute coldness. We love a being that the morrows threaten, and love her all the more as she is more threatened….” Albert Caraco was born in 1919 in Constantinople in a Jewish family established in Turkey for four centuries. He grew up in Prague, Berlin, and Paris, where he attended Janson-de-Sailly high school, and got his degree from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. In 1939, he and his parents fled Europe to South America at the break of World War II, and settled in Montevideo after living in Brazil and Argentina, where his first books were published. Albert Caraco acquired Uruguayan citizenship and retained it for the rest of his life. Back in Paris in 1949, he started writing his immense body of work, part of which remains unpublished to this day. An ambiguous figure, Albert Caraco built nothing short of a baroque literary cathedral, rife with contradictions, yet rising from an uncompromisingly pessimistic foundation. In 1971, consistent with what he had announced recurrently in his semainiers (weekly diaries), he killed himself just a few hours after his father died. The death of his mother in 1963 was the occasion for a reckoning of his relationship with the woman he reproached for having given him birth, while praising her for forming his taste and character and uprooting the sheer possibility of consoling illusions in her only son. The result was Post Mortem, a bittersweet lament and a love poem in prose that offers a glimpse into his bleak worldview and an abstract of his works.

"Richard Howard is widely recognized as one of America's finest poets, and he has been especially celebrated for his sparkling and trenchant dramatic monologues based on the lives of historical figures. Howard's monologues have brought to life the voices of all sorts of different people, but two of his favorite subjects are two of his favorite writers--Walt Whitman and Henry James--and at the heart of this book are the numerous poems he has devoted to these great forebears, which are gathered here in a single volume for the first time. Howard's angles of approach are always unexpected: he shows us Whitman reckoning with Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde; Henry James trying to make sense of Los Angeles, where he is being set up for lunch with L. Frank Baum; and much more. Howard's monologues are above all inspired and revelatory dialogues, as expansive and celebratory as Walt Whitman and as subtly inquiring as Henry James"--

I have always been interested in the wild and nature. Ever since I was a small boy, play in the fields and woodlands near my home in England. I was attracted by the immense diversity of life, and awed by each plant, tree, insect, animal and bird. I saw back then a wonderful world, here we were blessed by the four seasons. How things change though, over the years; the climate, urbanisation, and fields make way for new projects to benefit us. So in this series of poems, I have tried to capture what things in nature I have seen and loved. I hope they are enjoyed by all who read them.

All the spells you'll ever need for any occasion. There is always an occasion, a reason, or an event that calls for magic. Easy Enchantments will give you the tools and the power to make things go your way. Whether you're looking for a spell to guarantee your lover's fidelity, banish negativity, make a job interview go well, find an apartment, or pick lucky lotto numbers, Lexa Roséan tells you what you need to do. Each spell calls for common items easily found in a supermarket, and has simple instructions as well as intriguing lore about the spell's origin. Simple, easy, and effective, Easy Enchantments can help you get what you want, meet who you want, and make any occasion magical.

Elaine Feinstein has always written most passionately about people. In this intimate collection, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she knows, and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulna with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzenberger, who brought Feinstein into the Russian world of Marina Tsvetaeva. Feinstein imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg, and Sylvia Plath, and she delights in Joseph Roth's melancholy wit and Disraeli's nerve. There are a few sardonic self-portraits as well. In the last poem, "Death and the Lemon Tree," she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.

"Over the course of ten years, poet and critic David Biespiel published a brief, dazzling essay on poetry every month in what became the longest-running newspaper column on poetry in the United States. Collected here for the first time, these enormously popular essays, many of which have been revised and expanded, offer a fresh and refreshing approach to the reading and writing of poetry. With passion, wit, and common sense, they articulate a profound and entertaining statement about the mysteries of poetry and about poetry's essential role in our civic and cultural lives. A Long High Whistle discusses the work of nearly a hundred poets from ancient times to the present, in English and in translation--among them Catullus, Ovid, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Inger Christensen, Natasha Trethewey, and many others. This collection will provide anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, with insights into what inspires poets, how poems are written and read, and how poetry situates itself in American life."--

Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli's virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.

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."

A new format reprint of one hundred poems. potency and tenderness The gratifying thing about reading his work now is that it grows with you. The older I get the more the poems reveal. I'm knocked out by the richness, the resonance, the generosity, the hard intelligence, the clarity, the passion, and above all else, the great, great aching tenderness, which remains very much a part of who he is and he means to me. Leonard Cohen a poetic mind of genuine dignity and power an unobstrusive mastery of technique. Northrop Frye When I first clapped my eyes on the poems of Irving Layton I let out a yell of joy With his vigour and abilities, who shall not say that Canada will not have produced one of the West's most famous poets? William Carlos Williams