Good Books

WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY The collected works of one of contemporary poetry's most original voices Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it's that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet's own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience. Half-lightencompasses all of Bidart's previous books, and also includes a new collection,Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a "Creature coterminous with thirst," still longing, still searching in himself, one of the "queers of the universe." Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart'sHalf-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.

2016 National Book Award Winner, Poetry

"Reprints the nearly two hundred pieces from his earlier Collected Poems, together with the poems from his most recent collections--Entries, Given, and Leavings--to create an expanded compilation"--Jacket.

The poems that make up Bishop's small and select body of work display honesty and humor, grief and acceptance, observing nature and human nature with painstaking accuracy.

Rarely are these works translated by someone who is both a medieval scholar and a poet, and this combination makes for both fidelity to the complexity of the originals and compelling poetry in a modern idiom.

"An important part of the Irish national imaginary, Yeat's poems and plays have helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern Irish state that emerged from the nation's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history."-- from publisher.

Edited and annotated with an afterword by Richard Sieburth. With essays by T.S. Eliot and John Berryman.

The former U.S. poet laureate and best-selling author of Nine Horses and Around the Room presents a new compilation of his acclaimed poems, some of which have never before been published.

This volume brings together all the prose written for publication by America's most famous poet—some previously unpublished, some long available in other editions—along with helpful notes by Richardson, professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. (Amazon)

The fourth collection by the author portrays the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. It sets what it means to be "light longing for lightness" against what it means to "burn with all the humanity fire strips away."

Kay Ryan is the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. Here is the poet's own selection of more than two hundred poems, offering both longtime followers and new readers a stunning retrospective of her earlier work as well as a generous selection of powerful new poems.

A collection from the winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1992.

Includes work from the author's first five books--Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials--as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas

A look at social change throughout history, as seen through the music, poetry, speeches, and manifestos of rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past - and present - including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Chief Joseph, and Muhammad Ali.

"As the ultimate example of the Romantic artist, William Blake made radical developments in art technique to communicate his vision.

Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou talks about his poetry, the world of poetry, and his life. Filmed over a two year period from 1996-1998.

Presents outstanding critical scholarship on black contemporary poetry's origins and trends, its conflicts and consonances.

John Trudell, poetry (spoken) ; with vocal and instrumental accompaniment.