Poetry

An audiobook collection of empowering poetry that proves the only thing needed for a happily ever after is yourself. Read by author amanda lovelace herself, you are your own fairy tale: the audiobook collection features the three enchanting poetry books that round out the collection: break your glass slippers, shine your icy crown, and unlock your storybook heart. you are your own fairy tale is accompanied by music and includes a bonus interview between lovelace and her spouse, parker lee.

A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama's appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother's body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn't know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

The second full length poetry collection from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman. Kate Baer shot into the literary stratosphere with the publication of her debut poetry collection, What Kind of Woman, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Kate’s second full-length book of traditional poetry, And Yet, dives deeper into the themes that are the hallmarks of her writing: motherhood, friendship, love, and loss. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the remarkable evolution of a writer working at the height of her craft, pushing herself and her poetry in a beautiful and impressive way. Intimate, evocative, and bold, Kate’s beguiling poetry firmly positions her in the company of Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Maggie Nelson, and other great female poets of our time.

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival. Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

 “The speaker in Shelley Puhak’s Harbinger is no closer to knowing herself than I am, than we are, which is why we trust her. Each similarly titled poem holds a triptych mirror up to the artist and, in so doing, up to us all, so we may better see ourselves as we are. In ever-changing form.” —Nicole Sealey  A stunning meditation on artistic creation and historical memory from the winner of the National Poetry Series, chosen by Nicole Sealey From “Portrait of the artist, gaslit” to “Portrait of the artist’s ancestors” to “Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper,” the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. “Portrait of the artist as a young man” has long been the default position, but these poems carve out a different vantage point. Seen through the lens of motherhood, of working as a waitress, of watching election results come in, or of simply sitting in a waiting room, making art—and making an artist—is a process wherein historical events collide with lived experience, both deeply personal but also unfailingly political. When we make art, for what (and to whom) are we accountable? And what does art-making demand of us, especially as apocalypse looms? With its surprising insights, Harbinger, the latest book from acclaimed poet Shelley Puhak, shows us the reality of the constantly evolving and unstable self, a portrait of the artist as fragmentary, impressionable, and always in flux.   

Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people. Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood.  These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.

Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses. In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what’s within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America’s existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here—and the apocalypse is a state of being.

[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—by Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane: The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-time future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when ‘the future / takes shape / too quickly,’ when we are entering ‘a time / beyond belief.’ They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form…. Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ‘whirling robe humming with firstness,’ there to ‘greet you if you eye-up.’ I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ‘Wind would be nice but / it’s only us shaking.’ … To read these four twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book:     The earth said     remember me.     The earth said     don’t let go,       said it one day     when I was     accidentally     listening…

The sixth and, on the surface, most innovative poetry collection from Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michael Crummey. Eclectic, unpredictable, and strange, Passengers follows Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer on an imagined circumnavigation of Newfoundland; traces the island escapades of Lucifer from the time of his arrival as a stowaway in the Middle Ages; and wanders the pre-pandemic cities of Europe, touching down in Stockholm’s ABBA museum, the Belfast Public Library, Austria’s plague cemeteries, and the Czech Republic’s Punkva Caves. Widely considered “one of Canada's finest writers” (Globe and Mail), Crummey is noted for the immediacy and emotional impact of his poetry and fiction and for his ability to raise the vernacular to planes of “exquisite beauty.” Part travelogue, part archeological dig, Passengers is an eccentric guide to the wild geography, folklore, and misbegotten history of the human heart.

An authentic exploration of the real Rumi As one of the world's most loved poets, Rumi's poems are celebrated for their message of love and their beauty, but too often they are stripped of their mystical and spiritual meanings. The Gift of Rumi offers a new reading of Rumi, contextualizing his work against the broader backdrop of Islamic mysticism and adding a richness and authenticity that is lacking in many Westernized conceptions of his work. Author Emily Jane O'Dell has studied Sufism both academically, in her work and research at Harvard, Columbia, and the American University of Beirut, and in practice, learning from a Mevlevi master and his whirling dervishes in Istanbul. She weaves this expertise throughout The Gift of Rumi, sharing a new vision of Rumi’s classic work. At the heart of Rumi’s mystical poetry is the “religion of love” which transcends all religions. Through his majestic verses of ecstasy and longing, Rumi invites us into the religion of the heart and guides us to our own loving inner essence. The Gifts of Rumi gives us a key to experiencing this profound and powerful invitation, allowing readers to meet the master in a new way.

Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between “seed” and “summit” of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians—and it does not let readers look away. In this debut collection, No‘u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo‘o, ma‘i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother—not god— / the way my grandmother intended,” and we heed; before her, “we stunned insects dangle.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates. Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, “still sacred.” It is a vow to those yet to come: “the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough.”

So many of us have a tree we treasure in our lives or a preferred stretch of woods to retreat to, especially during these long and confining pandemic years. Ada Limón, award-winning poet and beloved host of the popular podcast The Slowdown, has kept a catalog of cherished trees that have grounded and inspired her throughout her life; trees that have marked time and place and have expanded meaning about what it is to be alive on this planet. Here, in a piece that is equal parts a tribute to nature’s power and mystery, boldly confessional memoir, and honest reckoning with our world’s beauty and its many upheavals, she takes the reader on a tour tree by tree, from California to New York City, from Cape Cod to Kentucky. There’s the grove of eucalyptus that recalls the sweet turbulence of first love; the mythic bay laurel, “sexed and sensual,” that fills the valley where Limón grew up; there are seeds of trees that traveled to the moon and back on Apollo 16 and are now fully grown and rooted here, acting as if they are no different from any other tree; the fruit trees—pear, peach, orange, apple—that “everyone in her bloodline” has picked to survive, and that her family now grows on their own land because “to own your own tree, to own the fruit you pick, is a big thing.” There are the trees—western hemlock and Sitka spruce—that have helped her through seismic losses, and others—like the otherworldly Yoshino cherry, whose life span is comparatively short—that remind us that everything has an end. And, crucially, there are the many benefits of trees: what they teach us about silence and stillness, about healing and hope. In twenty-three intimate vignettes, Limón demonstrates, through the force of her passionate intelligence and stunning lyricism, how connected we are to nature and how it better connects us to ourselves and one another. She proves herself to be the visionary of biophilia we all need now, as we confront the ills of climate change. Like the very trees it celebrates, “Shelter: A Love Letter to Trees” is a sensory refuge, and in keeping with the best nature writing, it invites us to slow down in these turbulent and ever-accelerating times, and affirms, often with ecstasy, our place in a natural world that has shaped and sustained us over the centuries.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What Kind of Woman returns with a collection of erasure poems created from notes she received from followers, supporters and detractors—an artform that reclaims the vitriol from online trolls and inspires readers to transform what is ugly or painful in their own lives into something beautiful.  “I'm sure you could benefit from jumping on a treadmill” “Women WANT a male leader . . . It’s honest to god the basic human playbook” These are some of the thousands of messages that Kate Baer has received online. Like countless other writers—particularly women—with profiles on the internet, as Kate’s online presence grew, so did the darker messages crowding her inbox. These missives from strangers have ranged from “advice” and opinions to outright harassment.  At first, these messages resulted in an immediate delete and block. Until, on a whim, Kate decided to transform the cruelty into art, using it to create fresh and intriguing poems. These pieces, along with ones made from notes of gratitude and love, as well as from the words of public figures, have become some of her most beloved work.   I Hope This Finds You Well is drawn from those works: a book of poetry birthed in the darkness of the internet that offers light and hope. By cleverly building on the harsh negativity and hate women often receive—and combining it with heartwarming messages of support, gratitude, and connection, Kate Baer offers us a lesson in empowerment, showing how we too can turn bitterness into beauty. 

A poetic meditation on identity, loss, and loneliness from the bestselling poet and visual artist An all-new illustrated poetry collection from the bestselling author of yesterday i was the moon, New Names for Lost Things combines Noor Unnahar’s powerful poetic voice and her signature collage-style visual art for a book of highly personal reflections on loss, inheritance, and what is left behind on the nonlinear path to becoming who you are meant to be.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY NPR ​​“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time “A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of Keep Moving and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​ Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

Recommended by Jason Reynolds on PBS News Hour “Don’t think for one minute that Black Imagination is easy. As you will read here, it is hard-earned and sometimes dangerous, but it’s necessary, and radical, to claim and work towards. Listening to my people in this book gave me so much life, and I’m pretty sure, dear reader, you’re in for the same.” —from the Foreword by Steven Dunn “Witnessing is sacred work too. Seeing ourselves as whole and healthy is an act of pure rebellion in a world so titillated by our constant subjugation,” reflects viral curator Natasha Marin, on Black Imagination. This dynamic collection of Black voices, performed by Tony and Grammy Award-winning actor, rapper, and producer Daveed Diggs and Emmy Award-winning writer, creator, producer, and actor Lena Waithe, works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are no where near monochromatic. “Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks.” Each insists on their own variance and challenges every listener to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter. "A first step toward freeing ourselves."—Gloria Steinem "I've never felt the physical feeling of pages melting in my hands or chapters folding themselves into squadrons of black airplanes flying to freedom because I've never experienced an art object like Black Imagination."—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy “Black Imagination required Natasha Marin to curate as a curate in the medieval sense— a spiritual guide that cares for souls... We are challenged to move beyond the abject, beyond pure pessimism, on the wings of a different criticality... 'visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien'.” —Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk "Defiantly hopeful... think Soul Train Line, think The Stroll, think the joyous striving with language for the possibilities of safety and hope.” —Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska Cover art by Vanessa German.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Grammy Award–nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder. In this debut collection, Halsey bares her soul. Bringing the same artistry found in her lyrics, Halsey’s poems delve into the highs and lows of doomed relationships, family ties, sexuality, and mental illness. More hand grenades than confessions, these autobiographical poems explore and dismantle conventional notions of what it means to be a feminist in search of power. Masterful as it is raw, passionate, and profound, I Would Leave Me If I Could signals the arrival of an essential voice. Book cover painting, American Woman, by the author.

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller A Goop Book Club Pick "If you want your breath to catch and your heart to stop, turn to Kate Baer."--Joanna Goddard, Cup of Jo A stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships of being a woman in the world today, and the many roles we play - mother, partner, and friend. “When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.” So ends Kate Baer’s remarkable poem “Things My Girlfriends Teach Me.” In “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels” she challenges her reader to consider their grandmother’s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem “Deliverance” about her son’s birth she writes “What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?” Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate Bear proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. Her words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.

"Dazzling. . . . In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to lose." — Esquire A magnificent testament to the earth, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday. One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. A member of the Kiowa tribe, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and grew up on Navajo, Apache, and Peublo reservations throughout the Southwest. It is a part of the earth he knows well and loves deeply. In Earth Keeper, he reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people. “When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors," he writes, "I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land. This is a declaration of belonging. And it is an offering to the earth.”   In this wise and wonderous work, Momaday shares stories and memories throughout his life, stories that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound spiritual connection to the American landscape and reverence for the natural world. He offers an homage and a warning. He shows us that the earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty, a source of strength and healing that must be honored and protected before it’s too late. As he so eloquently and simply reminds us, we must all be keepers of the earth.

Sorry I haven’t texted you back, (I’ve been so anxious and depressed) I haven’t had time to catch my breath, you know how life gets! Returning to the form of Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately, Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back is a poetic mixtape dedicated to those who struggle or have struggled with their mental health. Divided into two parts, “Side A” holds 92 poems, titled as “tracks,” and “Side B” holds the “remixes,” or blackout-poetry versions, of  those 92 poems. The book includes the evergreen themes of love, grief, and hope. Named after Cook’s viral Instagram poem, Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back lands in the crossroads of self-help and poetry.

The New York Times bestselling debut book of poetry from Lana Del Rey, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. “Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many. Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.” —Lana Del Rey Lana’s breathtaking first book solidifies her further as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). The collection features more than thirty poems, many exclusive to the book: Never to Heaven, The Land of 1,000 Fires, Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving, LA Who Am I to Love You?, Tessa DiPietro, Happy, Paradise Is Very Fragile, Bare Feet on Linoleum, and many more. This beautiful hardcover edition showcases Lana’s typewritten manuscript pages alongside her original photography. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is also brought to life in an unprecedented spoken word audiobook which features Lana Del Rey reading fourteen select poems from the book accompanied by music from Grammy Award–winning musician Jack Antonoff.

This program is read by the author The debut collection of poetry from Lili Reinhart, the actress and outspoken advocate for mental health awareness and body positivity. I seem to be your new favorite novel. One that keeps you up at night, turning my pages. Fingers lingering on me so you don’t lose your place. Swimming Lessons explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion. Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-sized yet profound, Lili's poems reflect her trademark honesty and unique perspective. Swimming Lessons reveals the depths of female experience, and is the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own. A Macmillan Audio Production from St. Martin's Griffin

An NPR Best Book of the Year A new collection of poetry from one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present—a now—in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, “counting silently towards infinity.” Graham’s essential voice guides us fluently “as we pass here now into the next-on world,” what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us “to the last be human.”

"Narrator JD Jackson addresses his listener as "bro" in this decidedly contemporary retelling of the classic saga...His brilliant performance captures all the artistry, wit, and immediacy of this fresh translation, and breathes new life into what for most has been a literary fossil." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world—there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history—Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation. A Macmillan Audio production from MCD x FSG Originals "Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand." --Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker "The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale."--Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today

A new collection from a poet who has made "a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Glück). Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from disbelief at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with "Night Sky," thirty metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an open-air observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward a sense of infinitude and connection.

The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020 Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 NPR's Best Books of 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living. "When you lose someone you love, the world doesn’t stop to let you mourn. Nor does it allow you to linger as you learn to live with a gaping hole in your heart. Indeed, this daily indifference to being left behind epitomizes the unique pain of grieving. Victoria Chang captures this visceral, heart-stopping ache in Obit, the book of poetry she wrote after the death of her mother. Although Chang initially balked at writing an obituary, she soon found herself writing eulogies for the small losses that preceded and followed her mother’s death, each one an ode to her mother’s life and influence. Chang also thoughtfully examines how she will be remembered by her own children in time."—Time Magazine

A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality—here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people’s poet, Wanda Coleman. One of the most talked about literary collections of the year is this collection by a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity about her life on the margins. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of Coleman’s poems spanning four decades, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Although Coleman was rejected by the literary elites during her lifetime, here’s what people are saying now about Wicked Enchantment: “Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent.” —The Washington Post “These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion.” —The New York Times “Wanda Coleman’s work has that ineffable quality that accompanies poetry you understand in your belly and your head. . . . It is an unmistakable style that propels a Coleman poem, and draws us into it.” —Reginald Dwayne Betts “Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent.” —Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author “One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A.” —The New Yorker “One of the most exciting, original, deliciously dangerous voices of the 20th century.” —The Irish Times “Required Reading” —Bustle “Best Poetry of 2020” The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Irish Times Winner California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s 2020 Golden Poppy Award for Poetry

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a writer's pencil and the pointed pipette of a chemo drip entering the poet's vein. Yet, Deirdre stands as much in the center of these poems as do the paintings. At times, the two seem to escape into the paintings themselves: "Standing by the high farmstead in the upper left of the picture—there!—in a patch of / sunlight. They could be us, out for a walk." Balancing the desire to escape into the stillness and permanence of art with the insistent yearning to be fully present in each moment, Carson reminds us—"Look! There!"—that in the midst of illness, even in the face of death, there is, still, life.