Selected Poems of W. H. Auden Paperback by W. H. Auden, Edward Mendelson (Editor)

 This significantly expanded edition of W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems adds twenty poems to the hundred in the original edition, broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side, giving a fuller picture of the range of his genius. Also new are brief notes explaining references that may have become obscure to younger generations of readers and a revised introduction that draws on recent additions to knowledge about Auden.

As in the original edition, the new Selected Poems makes available the preferred original versions of some thirty poems that Auden revised later in life, making it the best source for enjoying the many facets of Auden’s art in one volume

Hourglass Museum by Kelli Russell Agodon

There are just handful of contemporary American poets whom I do not want to live without, whose books I keep by my desk and never lend out.  Kelli Russell Agodon is one of these poets.  Hourglass Museum is such a beautiful collection. Lyrical, intelligent, magical and honest, the poems are both of this world and out of this world.  Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary.

 

--Nin Andrews

Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds.

--Wyn Cooper

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in the Seattle area.

This Afterlife P by A E Stallings

 A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator.

This Afterlife: Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. The Underworld and the Afterlife, ancient history and the archaeology of the here and now, all slant rhyme with one another. Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself. Fulfilling the promise of the energy and sprezzatura of Stallings’s earliest collection, her later technical accomplishments rise to meet the richness of lived experience: of marriage and motherhood, of a life lived in another language and country, of aging and mortality. Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems.

Expert at traditional received forms, Stallings is also a poet of restless experiment, in cat’s-cradle rhyme schemes, nonce stanzas, supple free verse, thematic variation, and metaphysical conceits. The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion

100 Selected Poems by e. e. cummings

 E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of Cummings’s wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which Cummings is famous. They demonstrate beautifully his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry by Deborah Ager

With works by over 100 poets, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry celebrates contemporary writers, born after World War II , who write about Jewish themes. This anthology brings together poets whose writings offer fascinating insight into Jewish cultural and religious topics and Jewish identity. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, it includes poems by Ellen Bass, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, David Lehman, Jacqueline Osherow, Ira Sadoff, Philip Schultz, Alan Shapiro, Jane Shore, Judith Skillman, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, and many others

James Agee: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #27) by James Agee

Better known for writing in a variety of other genres, James Agee always thought of himself as essentially a poet. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1934 for Permit Me Voyage, Agee was, in the words of editor Andrew Hudgins, "as restless in his poetry as he was later in his prose, exhibiting a variety . . . that we expect from the protean mind that excelled in so many different kinds of writing." Ranging from intense religious sonnets to lyrics for musical comedy, Agee?s verse takes us into the heart of his unique genius, what Robert Fitzgerald called his "sense of being . . . a raging awareness of the sensory field in depth and in detail."

About the American Poets Project

Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics

Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings and Richard S. Kennedy (Editor)

"No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to both the general and the special reader."―Randall Jarrell

The one hundred and fifty-six poems here, arranged in twelve sections and introduced by E. E. Cummings's biographer, Richard S. Kennedy, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.

If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer, Yousef M. Aljamal (Compiler), Susan Abulhawa (Foreword)

“If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”

This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family.

The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. “If I Must Die” is included here, alongside Refaat’s other poetry.

Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.

Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat’s closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity

Exit Opera: Poems by Kim Addonizio

A Library Journal Best Poetry Book of 2024

A new volume by acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio, whose work is known for its streetwise, unflinching explorations of love, lust, and mortality.

Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject―jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers―these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to “[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find” and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life. As she writes in “My Opera”:

The staging is difficult. Exploding stars

are involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,

a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar containing

a tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swells

that I am steering toward you in the dark.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World by Ada Limón (Editor)

The #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!

“Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.”

 –Margaret Renkl, New York Times

“A lovely book to take with you to read at the end of your next hike.”

–Los Angeles Times

Published association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.  

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what “nature” and “poetry” are today, inviting readers to experience both anew

Complete Writings Of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde

 Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork

So Fragile Are the Beautiful Things: Haiku and Other Nature Poetry by Luke Levi

 In So Fragile Are the Beautiful Things, Luke Levi's focus is on beauty in nature. Using vivid imagery, his nature poems are lyrical, soulful and inspiring meditations on the natural world.

While capturing small moments of calm, whether sunlight, birds, deer, clouds or bees, this nature poetry collection contains a romanticism of the world.

Also included are black and white nature photos taken by the author. So Fragile Are the Beautiful Things is a memorable addition to any library

Living on Fire: A Collection of Poems by Virginia Adair

 Returning to the range, structure, and lyric quality of the national bestseller Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair's new collection of poetry, Living on Fire, establishes more firmly than ever this writer's literary eminence. In clear, memorable poems--about love in its many variations, about music, about the American desert, about mortality, and about her own blindness--the poet speaks to her readers with a directness distinctly American, and with feeling enhanced and deepened by technical rigor. Of young love she writes, "Their arms bound them together like timbers/for a raft and they rocked a little, as if on water." Of her blindness: "Blind to abundance when I was not blind,/I breathe one rose and hold it in my mind." Of the Mojave she recalls "long purple robes trailing down the arroyos./As the sky dims into dusk."

All the poems in Living on Fire create their own small worlds. During a long-ago trip down the Mississippi, the author recalls, "Sometimes our waterways became narrow and dim, dark mirrors/under live-oak branches hung with Spanish moss and snakes." A new love affair brings "this nighttime madness/in the backseat of a roadster." Later, she remarks with almost as much wonder as sadness, "Sightless,/I have become a stranger to my own person." Together, these poems articulate a sensibility at once distinctive and universal. Virginia Hamilton Adair has taken the specificities of her own sometimes joyous, sometimes tragic life and transformed them into powerful celebrations and elegies whose beauty and profundity will affect everyone who reads them. Even in the midst of despair, this is a poet whose work, in its sustained passion, indeed lives on fire.

Archways of Life by Mercedes de Acosta

Experience the profound and evocative poetry of Mercedes de Acosta in her timeless collection, Archways of Life. First published in 1921, this volume captures the essence of human emotion and introspection through a series of compelling poems that explore themes of love, loss, and self-discovery.

Mercedes de Acosta, known for her deep and introspective literary style, brings readers into a world of vivid imagery and poignant reflections. Her poems, including "Faded Petals," "Soiled Hands," "Unpossessed," and many more, offer a glimpse into the complexities of the human spirit and the beauty of life's fleeting moments.

With a foreword acknowledging "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse" for reprinting some of her work, de Acosta's Archways of Life stands as a testament to her literary prowess and her ability to touch the hearts of readers across generations.

Leopold Classic Library is proud to bring this classic work back into publication, ensuring that it meets the highest quality standards for modern readers. Each page has been carefully reviewed to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the original 1921 edition, making this a valuable addition to any literary collection.

Rediscover the poetry of Mercedes de Acosta and immerse yourself in the timeless beauty of Archways of Life