Whether you're a savvy mom of teens or a new mom trying to get baby to sleep, this book is for you. A must read for every mom who ever said: "Stop rocking on the chair!" Not your average poetry book, Ode to Chores is a clever and entertaining view of parenting, motherhood, children, pets, and the life and times of moms on call 24/7. ------------------ The Inspiration For This Book The whole thing started because I was lonely. I spent hours every day with my little kids, which I really loved for a while, but my husband was gone A LOT, and when he came home, he was all talked out. He just wanted to spend a little time with his two boys roughhousing and eating Oreo Thins. Plans with friends were few and far between because we were all busy shuffling kids to school and activities when we weren't working jobs, or doing house projects, or stumping for our chosen elected officials, or reconnecting with our significant others. In the meantime, exhausted at the end of every day, I still wanted to be an artist, a writer, and a musician. I'd been on stage for 25 years and suddenly the only singing I was doing was lullabies at 3 AM in a rocking chair trying to get my little muffin to sleep. . . just for a little while. . . sleep muffin, sleep. Somewhere along the way, I put down my pen and found myself deep in the stuff of kids. Then, one evening after an especially frustrating dinner with the boys, I sent everyone off to their rooms, flipped over an envelope lying in the mess on the dining room table, and wrote the poem Stop Rocking on the Chair. I was surprised at how satisfying it was to say it on the page. From there I started writing these "mom poems" all the time. As I did, I felt less and less alone. I was not only writing about my experience but a thread of experience that connected to moms all over the world and through time. The common language of motherhood reconnected me to my creativity and other people at the same time. I first thought I wrote this book for myself, but it turns out I wrote this book for you. I hope it brings you joy and even makes you cry. I hope it brings mothers together and inspires you to make some art and put it out into the world, so we can all have a moment of connection together. Call me. We'll have coffee. ------------------ About the Author Brenda Kahn is a poet, memoirist and an international recording artist who has shared the stage with Bob Dylan, David Byrne, and Jeff Buckley. She has expertise in changing both guitar strings and diapers. She is a writer of songs, poetry, memoir, and excuse notes for sick kids. She can paint and spackle like nobody's business and will also perform a cover of Bessie Smith's Ain't Nobody's Business if you request it at a live show. She lives in South Salem, NY with her husband and two boys, her golden retriever (Barley Patches), her two cats (Fluffy and Colby) and Ekko the crested gecko. Learn more about Bren at www.brendakahn.com Stay connected and support her work at www.BrendaKahn.com/Patreon

Don't be left out! Meet the boy with the golden nose, visit places like Caughtshort and Flatworm. Drop into the Space News Agency for the latest intergalactic update! All this and more can be found in this collection of children's verses.

"Another winning collection from one of our most read and enjoyed poets: a bountiful group of poems that reflect on language, nature, old age, young love, Judaism, and our current politics--all in her usual direct and mind-tingling fashion. "Words are my business," Marge Piercy begins her twentieth collection of poetry, a glance back at a lifetime of learning, loving, grieving, and fighting for the disenfranchised; and a look forward at what the future holds for herself, her family and friends, and her embattled country. In the opening pages, Piercy tells of her childhood in Detroit, with its vacant lots and scrappy children, the bike that gave her wings, her ambition at fourteen to "gobble" down all knowledge, a too early marriage ("I put on my first marriage / like a girdle my skinny body / didn't need.") We then leap into the Twilight Zone "after the knee has been replaced," where she is "learning to be quiet," learning to give praise despite it all. There are funny poems about medicine ads with their dire warnings, and some possible plusses about being dead: "I will never have to do another load of laundry . . ." There is "comfort in old bodies coming together," in a partner's warmth--"You're always warm: warm hands / smooth back sleek as a Burmese cat./ Sunny weather outside and in." Piercy has long been known for her political poems and her love of cats, and here there are plenty of both. Illegal immigrants, dying languages, fraught landscapes, abortion, President-speak. She examines her nonbeliever's need for religious holidays and spiritual depth, and the natural world is appreciated throughout. On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light is yet more proof of Piercy's love and mastery of language--it is moving, stimulating, funny, and full of the stuff of life"--

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Here are the football results: League Division Fun Manchester United won, Manchester City lost. Crystal Palace 2, Buckingham Palace 1 Millwall Leeds nowhere Wolves 8. A cheese roll and had a cup of tea 2 Newcastle's Heaven Sunderland's a very nice place 2 Ipswhich one? You tell me. Football, first love, teachers and tongue-twistersâ?¬¿. This is a fantastic poetry collection by two of the funniest, most famous poets writing today.

Muriel Rukeyser's previously unpublished play presents the captivating life of Harry Houdini, one of our country's most intriguing celebrities. The play is magical, sexy, and provocative-presenting Houdini's life from his Brooklyn childhood and tricks (picking up pins with his eyelids) and his young romance with wife Bess, to his relationship with his mother; from picking the lock of a jail and releasing his circus companions to Houdini's Congressional Hearing and his famous escape acts. Part biography, part fantasy, Rukeyser explores issues that tap into desire, race, family, and politics. "Houdini" was performed once in Lenox, Massachusetts in the early 70's, with Christopher Walken playing the lead. This lost drama will appeal to theater people, Houdini fans, poets, magicians, and anyone interested in the interplay between reality and the imagination. How much of our lives do we conjure? Rooted in the early 70's, but timeless in its underlying theme, "Houdini" joins the Rukeyser resurgence that is well underway.Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is one of our country's most influential, yet neglected writers. She published fifteen collections of poetry, translations, childrens books, and several works of nonfiction. Her "toys of fame" include the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She served as president of P.E.N. American Center from 1975 to 1976.

The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 is San Francisco poet Bob Kaufman's third collection and his first to be published since the late 1960s. One of the original Beat poets (the coinage "beatnik" is his), Kaufman's work has always been essentially improvisational, often done to jazz accompaniment. And he became something of a legendary figure at the poetry readings in the early days of the San Francisco renaissance of the 1950s. With his extemporaneous technique, akin in many ways to Surrealist automatic writing, he has produced a body of work ranging from a visionary lyricism infused with satirical, almost Dadaistic elements to a prophetic poetry of political and social protest. Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the '50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his pledge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence.

First published in 1990, The Myths We Live By explores how memory and tradition are continually reshaped and recycled to make sense of the past from the standpoint of the present. The book makes use of the rich material of recorded life stories, with examples stretching from the transient myths of contemporary Italian school children on strike, back to the family legends of classical Greece, and the traditional storytelling of Canadian Indians. The range of examples is international and together they advocate a transformed history, which actively relates subjective and objective, past and present, politics and poetry, and highlights history as a living force in the present. The Myths We Live By will appeal to anyone interested in oral history, memory, and myth.

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.

In hilarious verse, Boris Johnson casts a satirical eye over the phenomena of 'pushy parents', and shows that if you push your children far enough they might just push back!

"What is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors "who supposed their children's children would be rich and free?" What is it to live in the chaos of a world driven by "intolerable, unquenchable human desire?" How do we cope with all the wars? In the midst of the dark matter and dark energy of the universe, do we know what train we're on? In this cornucopia of a book, Ostriker finds herself immersed in phenomena ranging from a first snowfall in New York City to the Tibetan diaspora, asking questions that have no reply, writing poems in which "the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle."--Amazon.

In this probing collection of poems, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz draws on her own experiences to explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts" and who continue to search for ways to heal and redeem what was lost.

"[Shukman] explores a little-known piece of Jewish history, in a sequence of poems that forms the centrepiece of this book. In 1917 several thousand Jewish tailors were deported from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman's grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London. ..."--Book flap.

Esther Schor’s poems live where the poet who must choose—rhyme and rhythm; the wayward fortunes of travel, art and myth—meets the given of everyday life: children and comets, punchlines and snow. In her formal sequence, "Cumbria," the enduring ruins and rocks of the Lake District tell us our own frailty; they speak of "Death/ how it comes and goes, how a cry/ becomes speech, turns to a whisper." In the title poem, two narrators take us to Sumatra in the late 18th century. The Hills of Holland is a truly ambitious work by an extremely talented writer.

"Powerful . . . Fiction of a very high order . . . Frederick Busch at his best." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "[These] provocative tales center around relationships gone awry, families grappling with loss, and lonely men and women struggling with remnants of love . . . . What Busch ultimately serves is a heady and rewarding brew made up of people as real as ourselves, groping for and sometimes even discovering the comforts of love." -- USA Today "Memorable . . . [The] stories leap off the page with astonishing resilience and vigor. . . . Busch is a chronicler of domestic manners whose insights into family hierarchies transcend the factual to attain poetry and truth." -- The Boston Globe

Kings and Queens by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon is a highly entertaining collection of poems about all forty-one English Kings and Queens since William I. Reissued in Puffin Poetry Kings and Queens is an authentic classic that has delighted young readers and adults alike. With wonderfully witty illustrations by Robin Jacques, history has never been so much fun! Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon were born in the 1880s into a highly literary family. Eleanor published nearly 70 books, mostly for children. Together with Herbert, her younger brother, she also wrote a children's panto, two operettas and a musical fairy story.

A collection of short poems about all kinds of unusual animals, including the Backtalk Bat, the Roombroom, and the Channel Changer.