National Network for Equitable Library Service

Over the course of three years Alice Oswald recorded conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates in Dart a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way. Read by the author.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.

Brought To You By Penguin. The audiobook edition of Surge, written and read by Jay Bernard. Winner of The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2020. * Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018 * Jay Bernard's powerful debut is a queer exploration of the black British archive, tracing a line between two significant events in recent British history: the New Cross Massacre of 1981 in which thirteen young black people were killed in a house fire - and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.

Arranged as a mother’s survival guide to her daughter, For Tamara is a touching and inventive long poem about surviving and thriving from the author of The Work of Days. It seems simple: a long letter, from a mother to a daughter, relaying the information needed to survive on this earth. But as Sarah Lang’s second book, For Tamara, unfolds, it becomes a roughly-hewn, genre-bending, post-apocalyptic survival guide. The world with which we are familiar has ended, and in its wake are the countless dead and survivors who are little more than scavengers.

The debut poetry collection by the actor, director, and writer James Franco. I’m a nocturnal creature, And I’m here to cheat time. You can see time and exhaustion Taking pay from my face—In fifty years My sleep will be death, I’ll go like the rest, But I’ll have played All the games and all the roles. —from “Nocturnal” “There’s never been a book quite like this. Hollywood — fame, celebrity, the promise of becoming an artist — is the beast at its center. Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling. Hollywood in this book devours its young.

Very Bright, Almost Pretty, by Alexander Williamson explores the largely under-represented impact of Cystic Fibrosis, a life-threatening disease affecting over four thousand Canadians, and their families. The poems wander through hopelessness, the fight for health, quiet moments of gratitude in the face of mortality, and dark, urgent prayers, joys, and ideals. At once visceral and contemplative, these poems ask what it takes to live a doomed life, and what it takes to reconcile with death.

Nautilus and Bone" chronicles the life and work of the radical, passionate Russian-Jewish American poet Anna Margolin on her path toward self-determination. Blending myth, surrealism, historical fact and fiction, this collection of persona poems brings to life one of the most celebrated Yiddish poets of her generation.

Poems masquerading as recipes, poems masquerading as survival guides, poems simmered in love, Pressure Cooker Love Bomb is a humorous collection of poems. Ruprai's second collection is infused with intense sexuality, racial tensions, and questions of gender conformity. With various textures of poems, the collection reads as woman of colour's manifesto with instructions.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a priest, a mystic, and nearly a heretic (he died before the Church court's verdict). In the 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church rehabilitated him and the late Pope John Paul II spoke of his work with fondness. However, what makes him of particular interest is the fact that he has influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, and Rudolf Steiner have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought.

From Madonna to Deepak Chopra, celebrities have been recording and embracing Rumi's poetry for the past two decades, creating a resurgence of interest in this 13th century Sufi mystic. This beautiful collection of 196 of his poems, previously unavailable in English and now translated by native Persian speakers Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, will appeal to Rumi lovers everywhere who want a guidebook for their inner journey.