Ferlinghetti is a national treasure, and his voice has become part of our collective conscience. Some of his most famous poems from this collection such as "I Am Waiting" and "Junkman's Obbligato" were created for jazz accompaniment. Written in the conservative post-war 1950s, his poems still resonate, as they will continue to resonate, with a joyful anti-establishment fervor that beats a rhythmic portrait of humanity. Ferlinghetti sings of a world in which "the heart flops over / gasping 'Love'," "cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain," and where "we are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide." This special 50th Anniversary Edition comes with a newly recorded CD of the author reading the 29 poems of the title section of A Coney Island of the Mind as well as selections from Pictures of the Gone World.

A compilation of small observations and musings, filled with moments of reflection and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting with a complex, confounding, breathtaking world... and a reminder to stop and be awake and alive in yourself.

The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation. Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it—that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover—literally—this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."

And so you've reached that time in life when you're starting to pick investments over adventure, clean over scenic, comfortable over intense; when, even though in your heart of hearts you're only seventeen, the rest of you is (how did it happen?) forty. The wise and witty lady of It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty is here to get you through those forty-ish years with poems that reflect our common shared experience. So let her help you take a look at that decade of sagging kneecaps and college reunions and fantasies of love in the afternoon; at Maoist kids, cholesterol counts, adult-education courses and other atrocities - which somehow just don't hurt so much when you laugh. A marvelous book filled with insight and warmth, How Did I Get to Be 40 ... & Other Atrocities is Judith Viorst at her best.

• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America With The Imaginary Lover , Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review , aptly describes this book: “intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.” To read her poems is to “discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human.”

Looking back at his own life and the experiences of ancestors, family, and friends, this collection of poetry explores their diverse rites of passage in America in a celebration of the power of love, the strength of the human spirit, and the persistence of life in a world of challenge and pain.

For Jewish grandmothers everywhere, with love and respect for their courage and dignity, their humor, their tsouris and their noches, their bitterness, and most of all, for their stubborn insistence on survival.

In Roomanitarian, popular author, actor, musician, and spoken-word artist Henry Rollins returns to the combative prose that has won him critical acclaim and a legion of devoted fans. The book is divided into three parts: The first section, "Walking the Chasm,” written in the form of a poem, epitomizes Rollins’s beautifully stark, hard-hitting style. The second part, "Ended," is a series of short prose pieces reminiscent of Solipsist. Finally, the biting humor and social commentary Rollins is renowned for is on full display in "To Ann Hitler with Love," a series of mock love letters to a fictional woman who bears a striking resemblance to conservative pundit Ann Coulter.

Just before her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, Grace Paley completed this wise and poignant book of poems. Full of memories of friends and family and incisive observations of life in both her beloved hometown, New York City, and rural Vermont, the poems are sober and playful, experimenting with form while remaining eminently readable. They explore the beginnings and ends of relationships, the ties that bind siblings, the workings of dreams, the surreal strangeness of the aging body—all imbued with her unique perspective and voice. Mournful and nostalgic, but also ruefully funny and full of love, Fidelity is Grace Paley's passionate and haunting elegy for the life she was leaving behind.

Provides a poetic commentary on the illusions and realities of life and love.

In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet’s mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love “this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride.” Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes “whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art—the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself.”

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky." It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations. Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was one of the finest writers of his generation. Winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, he was hailed by John Ashbery as "one of the major twentieth-century poets." Schwartz's stories were also widely read and loved, admired by James Atlas for their "unique style that enabled Schwartz to depict his characters with a sort of childlike verisimilitude." Graced with an introduction by Cynthia Ozick, this New Directions Bibelot, Screeno: Stories & Poems, gathers many of Schwartz's most popular works, including: "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," "America, America!" "The Heavy Bear who Goes with Me," and "Screeno." Also included is a newly discovered story, "The Heights of Joy," which appeared in the magazine Boulevard in 2002. Delmore Schwartz's life is legendary. The brightest star of the Partisan Review's post-war intellectual circle, a lecturer at Harvard and Princeton, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation, he was stricken by a cruel mental illness and died after living in solitude in a Manhattan hotel. Yet it is his work that endures: "What complicates and enriches Schwartz's comedy," says Irving Howe, "is, I think, a reaching out toward nobility, a shy aspiring spirituality, a moment or two of achieved purity of feeling."

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.

“Stern’s unadorned craftsmanship has few rivals in American letters.”— Philadelphia Inquirer Early Collected Poems gathers the poems from the first six books of Gerald Stern’s body of work. A master poet, Stern has sought new language for the overlooked, neglected, and unseen facets of human experience. Whether writing about modern poets, Hebrew prophets, death, war, or love, “Stern’s literary songs are sharp, surprising, and unerring in their delivery” ( Ploughshares , Editor’s Choice). from “The Red Coal” The coal has taken over, the red coal is burning between us and we are at its mercy— as if a power is finally dominating the two of us; as if we’re huddled up watching the black smoke and the ashes; as if knowledge is what we needed and now we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge.

"Stone, Paper, Knife centers on the loss of an old love and the beginning of a new love, a woman's politics and identity rooted in the land and expressed in poems of grieving, of loving,a nd of deep and fundamental connection with the sources of life and the survival of our species and our world."--on upper cover.

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.

"The poems in this substantial volume, the majority of which are no longer available in other editions, have been selected from seven previous collections (1971-95)." "Among favorite poems redeemed, readers will rejoice to find "Lucky Life." Stern also offers a generous array of new poems under such titles as "Self-Portrait in His Sixties," "The Sounds of Wagner," and "Both of Them Were Sixty-Five," a poem about a meeting between the author's mother and Aaron Copland. There are moving tributes to Larry Levis, "Eggshell," and Allen Ginsberg, "Lilacs for Ginsberg." Throughout, Stern circles and addresses the themes that have always engaged him: love, hope, memory, and faith." --Book Jacket.

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

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.