Sarah Kay's powerful spoken word poetry performances have gone viral, with more than 10 million online views and thousands more in global live audiences. In her second single-poem volume, Kay takes readers along a lyrical road toward empowerment, exploring the promise and complicated reality of being a woman. During her spoken word poetry performances, audiences around the world have responded strongly to Sarah Kay's poem The Type. As Kay wrote in The Huffington Post: "Much media attention has been paid to what it means to 'be a woman,' but often the conversation focuses on what it means to be a woman in relation to others. I believe these relationships are important. I also think it is possible to define ourselves solely as individuals... We have the power to define ourselves: by telling our own stories, in our own words, with our own voices." Never-before-published in book form, The Type is illustrated throughout and perfect for gift-giving.

In print for twenty-seven years, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion volume to Bloom's other seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this finely crafted text, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. Bloom discusses British and American poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons and Ashbery. A full-scale reading of one poem, Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," represents this struggle between one poet and his precursors, the poem serving as a map for readers through the many versions of influence from Milton to modern poets. For the first time, in a new preface, Bloom will consider the map of misreading drawn by contemporary poets such as Ann Carson and Henri Cole. Bloom's new exploration of contemporary poetry over the last twenty years will illuminate how modern texts relate to previous texts, and contribute to the literary legacy of their predecessors.

Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures―Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman―who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl―a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.

Typewriter Music begins with a memory of new love - with 'grace unasked for, urgencies that boom under the pocket of a shirt' - and ends in the intimate territory of the long-familiar relationships that define our lives as we grow old. This volume is marked by a breadth of intelligence, stepping lightly among the objects of our lives and the wonder of everyday encounters, and then journeying across the globe, in a flight of music, imagination, history and language.

From acclaimed author, actor, and singer-songwriter David Duchovny, a deeply personal, existential, and insightful debut poetry collection.

This elegant edition of Susan Polis Schutz's most beloved work includes the poems and advice of earlier editions, plus new poems inspired by her daughter growing up into a young woman and leaving home. Steven Schutz's sensitive illustrations envelop Susan's poetry in an artistic expression of his love for his daughter and her mother. The result is a loving celebration of the joy and pride that all parents feel for their unique, beautiful daughters.

A daughter is forever. No matter how old she is, in your heart she'll always be that little girl full of imagination, dreams, and fantastic potential -- the one who captured your heart the day she came into your life... Bestselling poet Susan Polis Schutz and Grammy Award-winning songwriter Donna Fargo, along with many other authors, have contributed to this book some of the most eloquent words any daughter could ever receive. This is a beautiful, lasting way to convey your love for your daughter, your confidence in her, and your promise to always be there for her no matter where life takes her... "My day always becomes wonderful when I see your pretty face smiling so sweetly. There is such warmth and intelligence radiating from you. It seems that every day you grow smarter and more beautiful." - Susan Polis Schutz

""A Dream of Love"" is a play written by William Carlos Williams, consisting of three acts and eight scenes. The story revolves around a young couple, Jack and Edith, who are deeply in love but face numerous challenges in their relationship. Jack is an aspiring writer who struggles to make ends meet, while Edith comes from a wealthy family and is torn between her love for Jack and her family's expectations. As the play progresses, the couple's relationship is put to the test as they navigate through various obstacles such as financial struggles, infidelity, and societal pressures. The play also touches upon themes of class struggle, the pursuit of artistic passion, and the complexities of human relationships.Throughout the play, Williams employs poetic language and vivid imagery to convey the emotional depth of the characters and their struggles. The play ultimately culminates in a dramatic conclusion that leaves the audience questioning the true nature of love and the sacrifices one must make to pursue it.Overall, ""A Dream of Love"" is a poignant and thought-provoking play that explores the complexities of love and the human experience.Direction, No. 6.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

In her deepest and most personal work to date, Leslea Newman once again captures in eloquent, lyrical language the joys and sorrows of contemporary American life. From mother/daughter relationships to family dynamics, from cultural identity to aging and loss, Leslea Newman's keen observations will resonate with readers of any age and background.

When one of America's best-loved, bestselling authors faces a life-altering crisis, she responds by creating a remarkable sequence of poems that offers hope and reassurance to others seeking comfort. Jane Yolen has spent her life giving enjoyment to millions of readers with her award-winning books and poems. But when her husband was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor in his skull, she began to write to find solace. For the forty-three days that David underwent radiation treatment, Jane spent each night pouring her emotions into a sonnet. It was the only part of the day over which she felt she had any control. When Jane read some of those poems on NPR's All Things Considered, there was an immediate outpouring of support and a clamoring for her work from cancer patients, those who treat and care for them, and those listeners simply moved by her words. The Radiation Sonnets is for them. The poems reflect not only what happened on a particular day--the naps and nausea, visits from family and friends, Jane's struggle to get food into her weakened husband--but also tell a larger story: of her deep love for her husband, her ambivalence about medical technology, her joy in small victories, her acknowledgment of life's utter precariousness, her humor in the face of fear, and her refusal to give up hope. For caregivers and survivors alike, for anyone whose life has been touched by illness, The Radiation Sonnets is a triumphant celebration of the human spirit.

This Lamont Prize-winning book offers all the joy, sadness, humor, beauty, and song that typically characterizes the work of the well-respected but unfortunately lesser-known American poet Gerald Stern. Stern, who has been writing since the 1960s, made a name for himself in 1977 with the publication of Lucky Life, now his most renowned collection. In Lucky Life Stern takes the reader on a journey, pausing everywhere from the streets of New York to post-Holocaust Germany to the soil of a lobelia plant. In an intimate and mature voice, he shares with us the lineage of his ancestors; his personal relationships; and bits of art, music, history--even the neighbors he chats with on the beach. His style is Whitmanesque, urging us to "listen a little for the spongy world" after it has rained, and reminding us how to "understand the power of maples." Reading Stern's poetry is like listening to the words of a loving grandparent who has been through his or her share of painful experiences but has come to terms with them through wisdom gained from a long life. Stern offers several reasons for surviving in this often senseless world, but one of the most outstanding is found in the title poem: "Lucky you can be purified over and over again. / Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone."

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.

My dear husband, How can I ever thank you For all the years of happiness, For all your care, concern, and love? I am so grateful To the Almighty God above For sending you my way! With you I want to stay Till the end of my last day . Even after all these many years of married life I feel like a young bride, Happy to be still at your side, On our 60th Wedding Anniversary. These poems are the expressions and manifestations of my deep love, passion, and friendship for my husband. I have also included the musical scores I composed to some of the lyrics. I am very thankful to the Almighty for sending the man of my dreams to me some 60 years ago. And I am looking forward to many more years of happiness, love, and companionship with my partner in life.

Walter Rinder has had the courage to be the voice for the feelings so many people find so hard to express. With the same courage, and with deep conviction, he now speaks of another natural love-men sharing loving relationships with men. WHERE WILL I BE TOMORROW? breaks a link in the chain that shackles all men's emotions, allowing tenderness, an easing of ancient cultural bonds.

William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. As well as being a poet he painted and maintained a lifelong interest in it. Williams was also a physician in both paediatrics and general medicine. He served at the Passaic General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey as chief of paediatrics from 1924 until his death. Williams is most well-known for his poems that are closely associated with the Modernism and Imagism movements. In addition to poetry he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and worked on translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement via friendships with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Soon his opinions moved away from theirs and his style began to confirm his alignment to a modernist expression of his surrounding environment. From the late 40's health became a major issue in his life but with himself as the patient. He suffered a heart attack in 1948 and, after 1949, a series of strokes. One such stoke in 1953 left him in hospital for four months and brought about severe depression. In these later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets especially the American literary movements of the 1950s; the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. One of Williams's most productive relationships was with fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth volume of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956. William Carlos Williams died on March 4th, 1963, at the age of 79 at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

"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.

The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner brings together, for the first time, all of the approximately 3,072 published and unpublished poems composed by Larry Eigner (1927-1996), a prominent American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the influential Black Mountain School. Scrupulously edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville from the extensive archives of Eigner typescripts at the University of Kansas and Stanford University, this monumental, four-volume, 8 1/2 by 11 inch edition sets forth in chronological sequence the story of Eigner's achievement, from his modest beginnings as the boy-author of traditional rhymes to his highly original (and often profoundly moving) constructions made of letters in the space of his typewriter page, which have gained him widespread recognition and placed him in the forefront of the literary avant-garde. For over 40 years, beginning in the early 1950's, Larry Eigner's writing was a wonder and a delight to readers of contemporary poetry, appearing in countless little magazines and in over 75 books and pamphlets. With the publication of The Collected Poems―faithfully reproducing the precise visual and aural relationships envisioned by the author in an equivalently spaced Courier computer font which preserves typewriter spacing―the fact of Eigner's amazing accomplishment can finally be known, appreciated and appraised by a much-better-informed, wider audience. Palsied from hard birth, growing up in a close-knit, nurturing household in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Eigner courageously overcame a series of physical obstacles and limitations to achieve a mastery over the material text, producing his typescripts on his 1940 Royal manual typewriter using only his right index finger and thumb to create shifting constellations of words in space whose musical and visual designs are realized in a language at once immediate and highly abstract. Perhaps the best realization to date of the idea of "composition by field" proposed by Charles Olson in his landmark essay "Projective Verse," The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner is a literary event of the first order.

"The book of Anna is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present--her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition--while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways"--

A collection of poems by David Bergman that deal with relationships, art, religion, myth, and family.