Poetry

Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) called himself an Aeolian harp strung to every wind of heaven. His first volume of poems, entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in 1786. An immediate success, it established Burns's poetic reputation, which has grown over two centuries to the point where he is not only the Scottish national poet but the object of a cult unique in British poetry.
The present volume contains 43 of his finest poems and songs, reprinted unabridged from an authoritative tenth-century edition. Included are The Twa Dogs, a deft satire of the Scottish upper classes; To a Mouse, one of the poet's best known, most charming works; Address to the Unco Guid, an attack on Puritan hypocrisy; Holy Willie's Prayer, one of the great verse-satires of all times; as well as such favorites as The Cotter's Saturday Night, To a Mountain Daisy, The Holy Fair, Address to the Deil, The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, and many more.
In addition to his poetic undertakings, Burns almost single-handedly preserved and revived the traditional Scottish song, and this volume includes a rich selection of these works: A Red, Red Rose, Auld Lang Syne, Comin' thro' the Rye, My Heart's in the Highlands, My Love, She's But a Lassie Yet, and a host of others.

Self-described black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems--selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

I Am Your Sister

Excerpts from the American Book Award-winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde's nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

Martha

A Litany for Survival

Sister Outsider

Making Love to Concrete

In this powerful collection, Chelsea Rathburn seeks to voice matters once deemed unspeakable, from collisions between children and predators to the realities of postpartum depression. Still Life with Mother and Knife considers the female body, "mute and posable," as object of both art and violence. Once an artist's model, now a mother, Rathburn knows "how hard / it is to be held in the eyes of another." Intimate and fearless, her poems move in interlocking sections between the pleasures and dangers of childhood, between masterpieces of art and magazine centerfolds, and--in a gripping sequence in dialogue with Delacroix's paintings and sketches of Medea--between the twinned ferocities of maternal love and rage. With singular vision and potent poetic form, Rathburn crafts a complex portrait of girlhood and motherhood from which it is impossible to look away.

One of O, The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year

The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver

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"There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . ." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"Uniting essays from Oliver's previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet's thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . ." --The New York Times

"In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be."

So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood "friend" Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, "a place to enter, and in which to feel," and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, "I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple."

Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Cleo Wade's second anthology of heartfelt poetry and prose builds on the wisdom of her bestselling book Heart Talk, encouraging you to remain hopeful and harness your personal power to bring positive change into our world.

Where to Begin is perfect for those who are ready to be a part of building a society rooted in love, acceptance, justice, and equality.

From Cleo Wade:

Where to Begin is a collection of the ideas, mantras, and poems I turn to when I feel like I am losing it. I wrote this so that I could put them all in one place when I felt overwhelmed by worry, fear, anxiety, or helplessness.

The words in this book are what stop me from walking away from the problems of the world during tough times. They also help me stay connected to hope during difficult moments and remind me that even on the days that feel the most daunting, I still have the power to show up and do something, somewhere, in some way.

Change-making comes in all sizes. It doesn't always have to be one big gesture or nothing. As my friend Jenna often says, "The big stuff is the small stuff." Your big life is made up of a collection of all of your small moments. Our big world is a made up of a collection of all of our small actions. This book is about where to begin.