National Network for Equitable Library Service

Poetry is a fascinating use of language. With almost a million words at its command it is not surprising that these Isles have produced some of the most beautiful, moving and descriptive verse through the centuries. In this volume we look at death, the end of mortality. Through the eyes and minds of our most gifted poets the emotions of this subject are distilled to bring you a unique poetic guide. It is a subject that few of us talk about, but many think about and more than a few of us dread.

From the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner – a stunning collection of poems about history, childhood, nurturing a new generation of children, and the transformative power of marital love. With poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.

From the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Louise Glück, a daring and exuberant new collection. Moving through myths of the American landscape, the fatalism of American Puritanism, family history, New England winters, aesthetic theory, and the suavities and anxieties of contemporary life, the poems in this astonishing collection ultimately speak about the individual soul's struggle with its own meaning. "In its stern and quiet way Sandra Lim's The Wilderness is one of the most thrilling books of poetry I have read in many years" (Louise Glück).

A Time Magazine Best Paperback of 2017. One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017." "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker. The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive.

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize — Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States. Even the men in black armor, the ones jangling handcuffs and keys, what else are they so buffered against, if not love's blade sizing up the heart's familiar meat? We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat. Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean. Love: naked almost in the everlasting street, skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.

Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. The iconic tortured artist/everyman delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions. "The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles." — Joyce Carol Oates "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels." — Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. "Clear, compelling and insightful."—Washington Post. Earthy and lyrical, Only as the Day Is Long draws from Dorianne Laux's five expansive, award-winning volumes and includes twenty new odes that pay homage to the poet's mother. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long represents a bold and brilliant body of work from a "poet of immense insight and masterful craft" (Kwame Dawes).

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?

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love. In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” love one another—from afar, behind closed doors, in motels. The child survives an injurious mother and the beast-shaped men she brings home; the boy becomes a soldier. Years later, the boy—the eponymous beloved, Missy—dies by suicide, kicking up a riptide of memory. This is where K.