In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the...

"Tesoro is a story of family, survival, and the formative power of the women in Salgado's life. It is a telling of the balance between love and perseverance. Tesoro is an unearthing of the sacred connections that make a person whole; the treasure we forever keep with us when we learn from those we love, when we mourn those we've lost, and what grows in between."-- Provided by publisher.

In West Virginia, fatal overdoses on opioids have spiked to three times the national average. In these poems, William Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late at night and the brother who closes the door. Underneath and among this multiplicity of voices runs the Appalachian landscapea location, like the experience of drug addiction itself, of stark...

The poetry of Walt Whitman is the cornerstone of modern American verse. He was America's first truly great poet and his influence is still evident today. The first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, was a revolutionary manifesto declaring America's independence from European cultural domination. His rhapsodic free verse broke radically with poetic, tradition: it was poetry about America, its democracy, its people, and its hopes....

"His territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse."--The New York Times. "Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."--Huffington Post. "Richard Siken's debut, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets' Prize, sold over 20,000 copies, and earned him a devoted fan-base. In this much-anticipated second book, Richard Siken seeks definite answers to indefinite questions: what it means...

The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in "The Waste Land." Here, in four linked poems ("Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding"), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and...

"Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--And a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something...

Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886-- when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered...

Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the...