National Network for Equitable Library Service

A captivating and poignant new collection of poetry from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Roo Borson that probes some of our most important questions. After Roo Borson's two previous collections – Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida and Rain; Road; an Open Boat – set the seasons in motion, focusing the poet's mind on time, mortality, transience, and absence, Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar arrives to complete the triptych.

The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller. The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman. Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage.

"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."—Leonard Cohen, songwriter Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things "brown" in this powerful new collection. “Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed.” — The New York Times. Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a Black Kansas boyhood to comment on our times.

Popular since its original publication more than 35 years ago, Leonard Cohen's classic book of contemporary psalms is just as relevant and compelling as ever. Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. The poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt, and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world – yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition – these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

In this stunning collection of new poems, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has defined her life's work, describing with wonder both the everyday and the unaffected beauty of nature. Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird's nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.

"Throughout [BLUD], McKibbens breathes brilliant life into language, forging lush, rhythmic poems that are both fiercely urgent and tightly controlled, dark and flickering with fairy-tale-like magic. . . . Stunning, unflinching, fearless." — Booklist Starred Review. "Chicana poet, activist, and witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised. . . .

Black Mesa Poems is rooted in the American Southwest, the setting of Jimmy Santiago Baca's highly acclaimed long narrative poem, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (New Directions, 1987). "Baca's evocation of this landscape," as City Paper noted, "its aridity and fertility, is nothing short of brilliant." The individual poems of Black Mesa are embedded both in the family and in the community life of the barrio, detailing births and deaths, neighbors and seasons, injustices and victories.

In her legendary career, artist and activist Nikki Giovanni has established herself as a writer who can entertain and challenge, and a voice for social justice who can inform and inspire in times of national crisis. Controversial, revolutionary, ethereal, or illuminating, her poems about race, Black lives, violence, gender, and family move readers of all ages and backgrounds. With Bicycles, she's collected poems that serve as a companion to her 1997 Love Poems. An instant classic, that book—romantic, bold, and erotic—expressed notions of love in ways that were delightfully unexpected.

A ravishing collection by Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation.