National Network for Equitable Library Service

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. Giovanni offers an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart.

Walt Whitman experienced first-hand the ravages of the Civil War as a volunteer nurse in the hospitals of Washington DC. During that time, he filled notebooks with "impromptu jottings" that became the basis of two works: Drum-Taps, a collection of seventy-one poems, and Memoranda during the War, an intimate diary of his experience tending to the sick and dying during the war.

Presents a volume of more than fifty new poems accompanied by a generous gathering from the author's collections of the past decade, lending insight into his overall poetic achievements and his use of playful, ironic, and melodic language.

A bilingual English-Italian collection of love poems, Text Me/Dimmelo per SMS expresses through language and metaphor the many ways to say "I love you." Calabrò's poems often evolve from the experiences of the body: from sensual impressions, "Your cheek on my weary shoulder / the day pales, your lips pale / up, up, one more wing-beat / till we run out of oxygen";  to image, "In cold blood / the ice contrail of a Phantom jet /stabs the blue.

Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran's poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into the atavistic tropics of desire breaks this barren matrix. The exotic landscape sparks resurgent passion, which leads to a dramatic and healing turn-around for the couple. The poems of disappointment don't waste a word.

The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green's debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go-of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.

This collection brings together Allan Cooper's best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility. In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge.

Salt Fires is a volume of poems that embrace and reflect our human consciousness: our awareness, our blindness, our Shadow, our mythologies. They invite us to look at ourselves in ways that often are disconcerting, sometimes startling. Love of land infuses Salt Fires. Intimately inhabited and passionately shared, Nova Scotia's farms, woods, and shores reveal themselves to be our Earth in microcosm. A suite of Sable Island poems closes the book and affirms this notion-Sable Island, a strip of sand in a vast ocean, impossible, yet somehow here, like our planet, rich in life and beauty.

All songs have skin, / all skin has holes. On High, Neil Surkan's debut collection of poetry, searches for spirits in myriad places. Wondering how, why, and when to act with a conscience, speakers try out steep hikes, strong drugs, and earnest meditations as they attempt to make meaning in a divided and distracting world.

Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop. In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness. In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces.