Poetry
In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
2007 Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award for Poetry, honoring Tom Pohrt (Illustrator) This book is a collection of poems recording the devastation unleashed on the Great Plains by the blizzard of January 12, 1888. The Blizzard Voices is based on the actual reminiscences of the survivors as recorded in documents from the time and written reminiscences from years later. Here are the haunting voices of the men and women who were teaching school, working the land, and tending the house when the storm arrived and changed their lives forever.
A best-selling volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry in an English-Spanish edition.
Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most popular poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into realms of intuition and pure imagination.
This complete translation of Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda's original Spanish-language poems alongside William O'Daly's English translations. In his introduction O'Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda's poetry, writes, "These poems, more so than any of Neruda's other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith."
When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist.
"Neruda's questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O'Daly's translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous." --Publishers Weekly
Pablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile's ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973.
II.
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
XIV.
And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?
Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?
Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?
Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?
Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2015 National Book Award, poetry category
Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away--loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it--that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all--death, sorrow, loss--is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.
All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback
Yes, long shadows go outfrom the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
--from Twilight: After Haying Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic. Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after
"The Dream Keeper" was first published. In a larger format, featuring
Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational
message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932. "There's no
better way to show kids what poetry is about than to share this
collection."-- "Booklist."
a handsome new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after
"The Dream Keeper" was first published. In a larger format, featuring
Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational
message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932. "There's no
better way to show kids what poetry is about than to share this
collection."-- "Booklist."
Voted a Best Poetry Book of the Year by Library Journal
Included in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of the Year
One of LitHub's most Anticipated Books of the Year!
A State of the Union from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope.
Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.--New York Times
Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be.--NPR
Juan Felipe Herrera's magnificent new poems in Every Day We Get More Illegal testify to the deepest parts of the American dream--the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants and futures that belong to all--from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate song than any anthem stirring the blood.--Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine
From Basho to Mandela, Every Day We Get More Illegal takes us on an international tour for a lesson in the history of resistance from a poet who declares, 'I had to learn . . . to take care of myself . . . the courage to listen to my self.' You hold in your hands evidence of who we really are.--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
These poems talk directly to America, to migrant people, and to working people. Herrera has created a chorus to remind us we are alive and beautiful and powerful.--José Olivarez, Author of Citizen Illegal
The poet comes to his country with a book of songs, and asks: America, are you listening? We better listen. There is wisdom in this book, there is a choral voice that teaches us 'to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the courage.' The courage to find more grace, to find flames.--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
In this collection of poems, written during and immediately after two years on the road as United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera reports back on his travels through contemporary America. Poems written in the heat of witness, and later, in quiet moments of reflection, coalesce into an urgent, trenchant, and yet hope-filled portrait. The struggle and pain of those pushed to the edges, the shootings and assaults and injustices of our streets, the lethal border game that separates and divides, and then: a shift of register, a leap for peace and a view onto the possibility of unity.
Every Day We Get More Illegal is a jolt to the conscience--filled with the multiple powers of the many voices and many textures of every day in America.
Former Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera should also be Laureate of our Millennium--a messenger who nimbly traverses the transcendental liminalities of the United States . . .--Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Be Recorder
