A collection of fourteen poems about animals, from a laughing rooster and a joyous whale to a proud peacock and a cat named Runcible.

A collection of verses selected from earlier books by Charlotte Zolotow.

"What is a Bong Tree? brings together a big selection of Michael Rosen's writings and talks over five decades. They are about the centrality of literature, including children's literature, in the lives of all of us; about the power of poetry to inspire, console and entertain; and about the need to argue and campaign for these liberating forces in the face of ignorant and reductionist actions by successive governments in the United Kingdom, which have narrowed and impoverished children's experience of literature by pressing it into the service of a regime dominated by tests and examinations. The pieces here refer frequently to Michael's childhood and upbringing, and offer a generous tribute to his parents, Connie and Harold Rosen, and their influence on him and his subsequent work. Tonally, the pieces carry Michael's trademark: they're witty and insouciant; they carry serious ideas unseriously. Parents, teachers, librarians, academics, in fact anyone concerned with the nurture and education of children, and with the place of culture - in its widest sense - in our society, will find much pleasure and practical encouragement here." John Richmond, Editor

The unspoken poetry of our nation revealed by an American master. The first collection of the extensive and superlative work realized by Mary Ellen Mark in the United States, Mary Ellen Mark is composed of many previously unpublished images, as well as photographs from several of her best-known projects. From "Streetwise" to "The Damm Family," Mary Ellen Mark includes the most iconic images from these groundbreaking stories, as well as powerful, never-before-seen photographs Mark accomplished in subsequent years. She makes a deeply felt commitment to her subjects, and her empathy and humanity come through in every image. Mark is unsurpassed at shaping not only the odd but the everyday into genuinely surprising visual icons. With an eye for symbolism and a gift for meticulous composition, she is drawn to a variety of spectacles and situations, and demonstrates a particular affinity for children. Her elegantly revealing imagery creates a fascinating portrait of our complex, amusing, and occasionally unsettling country.

A collection of short humorous poems in the nursery rhyme tradition.

One long poem threaded with personal, evocative poetry constantly moving. A Zen journey. A journey of love. The Absence of Zen. Becoming Jewish. The Kaddish. Blessings. A very readable work of what was known before and what is known now. From "The world is a hard place": We look at our empty handsand feel shadows and shade,sky drying where water has bee,and are left with wind, know themonly by their absence. Water. Wind.-- Melissa Bell review in VISIONS-International 2001

A collection of animals celebrates the months of the year, one by one, in poetry

From as little as the snail to as big as the giraffe, from the thundering mastodon of long ago to the ordinary backyard squirrel of today, the animals in this book inspire our imagination. Here is a fascinating cornucopia that exudes a whimsical affection and respect for the creatures with whom we share our kingdom.

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She's always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another's son--a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed Psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language, ' Back warns. Good then that she's giving it to us."--Kazim Ali "'What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking, ' and the book itself is the answer: Poetry --this poetry--is necessary, irreplaceable, urgent. This is the best work of an important Israeli-American poet, translator, peace activist and scholar who reminds us, through the courageous beauty of her poems, that not to be political in these times is to collaborate with the forces of darkness. And what is political for Back couldn't be more intensely personal, as the mother of an air-force paramedic who suffers from PTSD. Narrating the endless cycle of violence of her region, Back's poems protest, grieve, and rescue language from its political and commercial appropriations. Throughout she adopts the irreverent tradition of textual allusion in Jewish poetry, allowing herself to radically rewrite the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Psalms, and feminize the Jewish liturgy. This is one of the best new books of poetry I have read in recent years!"--Chana Kronfeld "Poetry may make nothing happen, as Auden infamously wrote, but Rachel Tzvia Back's poetry makes something delicately yet fiercely come forth: the grief of mothers, the fear of soldiers, the tenderness of a younger brother's hand, the stones and sand against which cyclamens struggle to flower in Israel/Palestine. This is a poetry that honors the vast silence out of which and into which we go, and the silences before and after extreme violence. Drawing on ancient epic and myth, alert to the rhythms of land- and sea-scapes, Back's poems arise from a background of unending war, refugee crises, the 'sea of small feathered/things' and 'of mortar fire fired.' These are incantations offered in part to heal a son, to recognize injury, to sound out grief and guilt, but also to register difficult flashes of beauty and the presiding elemental forces of "eastern winds," sun, moon, season, and sea. Back's lyrics are as purposive, stealthy, and precise as the step of the tutelary cat in some of her poems. Her beautifully spare lines offer 'a narrow bridge and all the world'." --Maureen McLane

A tender work of mourning, this poetry collection—owing to the remembered words of a much-loved husband—recalls the author’s life before marriage and considers a future after her husband’s death. Imagining that future, she confronts the myths of an afterlife, a belief in God, her debts to other poets, and her dependence on friends and children. At the center of these beautiful lyrics—written with complete control of rhythm and tone—it is a man, rather than grief, that appears clearly.

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky : CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the random Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws Of biography, chance, physics-- The unseasonable soul holds forth, Eager for form as a renowned Pedant, the emperor's man of worth, Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy. As the small children learn, what happens Takes over, and what you were goes away. They learn it in sardonic soft Comments of the weather, when it sharpens The hard surfaces of daylight: light Winds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokes All over a wrecked house, The nude wallpaper and the brute Intelligence of the torn pipes. Therefore when you marry or build Pray to be untrue to the plain Dominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when not A soul is there, and how it implies Always that separate, cold Splendidness, uncouth and unkind-- On chilly, unclouded mornings, Torrential sunlight and moist air, Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Briefly surveys children's poetry, and provides a list of recommended works

From Library Journal Bloch gives us lines worth storing in the heart against nameless pain. Themes include giving birth, raising children, relationships that fail ("Whatever you gave me, I used it right away/ for breathing"), marriage that lasts ("Rosin of sunlight slides up and down/ a string of spiderweb,/bowing a high note"), and childhood ("If we were so happy/ why weren't we happy?"). Adding to the ongoing work of late 20th-century women telling their lives in honest detail, her voice is at its best when her own body is at risk ("There's a future loose in my body and I/ am its servant:/carrying wood, fetching water"). Surprisingly, the Russian Jewish inheritance articulate in the matrioshka doll poem points us more toward Bloch's human identity than toward any specific ethnic experience. The poems' elegant simplicity of diction make them very readable. Recommended for most contemporary poetry and women's studies collections.- Judy Hogan, Durham, N.C.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Publisher 6 x 9 trim. LC 92-9628

Israel Zangwill was born in London on 21st January 1864, to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Zangwill was initially educated in Plymouth and Bristol. At age 9 he was enrolled in the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields in east London. Zangwill excelled here. He began to teach part-time at the school and eventually full time. Whilst teaching he also studied with the University of London and by 1884 had earned his BA with triple honours in philosophy, history, and the sciences. His writing earned him the sobriquet "the Dickens of the Ghetto" primarily based on his much lauded novel 'Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People' in 1892 and its glimpse of the poverty-stricken life in London's Jewish quarter. As a writer he was keen to reflect on his political and social outlooks. His simulation of Yiddish sentence structure in English aroused great interest. His mystery work, 'The Big Bow Mystery' (1892) was the first locked room mystery novel. Zangwill was also involved with narrowly focused Jewish issues as an assimilationist, an early Zionist, and later a territorialist. In the early 1890s he had joined the Lovers of Zion movement in England. In 1897 he joined Theodor Herzl (considered the father of modern political Zionism) in founding the World Zionist Organization. Zangwill quit the established philosophy of Zionism when his plan for a homeland in Uganda was rejected and founded his own organisation; the Jewish Territorialist Organization. Its stated goal was to create a Jewish homeland in whatever territory in the world could be found for them. Amongst the challenges in his life he found time to write poetry. He had translated a medieval Jewish poet in 1903 and his volume 'Blind Children' in 1908 shows his promise in this new endeavour. 'The Melting Pot' in 1909 made Zangwill's name as an admired playwright. When the play opened in Washington D.C., former President Theodore Roosevelt leaned over the edge of his box and shouted, "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's a great play." Israel Zangwill died on 1st August 1926 in Midhurst, West Sussex.

The modern world is a crucible of risks and pressures. Katia Kapovich's new poetry collection, Cossacks and Bandits, addresses a coherent range of cultural, aesthetic, psychological, philosophical, social and political issues relevant to the complexities of modern life. How does one survive war, terror, loss, injustice, trauma, displacement, marginalization and other hurtful experiences without embracing cynicism or indifference? What resources of strength must we rely on in a society that is ideologically and economically fluid and at times cynical and indifferent, where mass culture, institutional religion and national belonging have only weak and doubtful remedies to offer? The book focuses on the personal histories of men and women who are survivors of sociopolitical and economic distress. To Kapovich such individuals are the true modern hero and heroine. They show that at the limits of experience, survival and dignity depend on creative thinking, on a leap of imagination, as in the Russian children's game of Cossacks and bandits. Set in the US, Eastern Europe and the Middle East - regions that the poet knows intimately, having spent a considerable part of her life in each - this volume is a poetic survival guide to cultural and geographical displacement, alienation and marginality. With feeling and mastery, with sadness and humor, Kapovich fuses a diverse polyphony of voices and themes into original, full-blooded, lyric American verse of great general and literary interest.

Product Description Annie Reiner's poetry explores our deepest thoughts and feelings in a sometimes profound, sometimes playful way. Often they are both, achieving a balance that echoes the balance in the mind which her poems describe. Writer Benjamin Weissman found her work to have "genuine insight that is comic and surreal." The title poem of The Naked I was a winner of the 1992 Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Review A young poet with a playful turn of mind visits her private places 'though I don't know the way/and cannot go there without you.' Delightful journey -- Weaver, John D. Annie Reiner is a poet, and a fine poet at that. I am glad my friends will be able to enjoy The Naked I -- Angelou, Maya Here are parables in primary colors, full of a survivor's wisdom and the power of a poet in her prime, about being alive in the last moments of the old millennium and the first moments of the new one. Annie Reiner's The Naked I is an astonishing book -- Saroyan, Aram From the Publisher Reiner is a writer, painter and author/illustrator of four children's books. In addition, she is an LCSW conducting psychoanalytic therapy and extensive teaching and supervision of other psychoanalysts, psychologist and social workers.

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.