Property by Julie Agoos

Working within the frame of her native New England, Julie Agoos positions herself in her new book, Property, less as a first-person lyric speaker than as an acute listener to the layered history of small and large violences which ignite repeatedly in American life. Structured as a progression of poems which invoke the “genres” of oral history, gossip, legal transcript, and diary writing, Property arrives, in the long poem “Deposition,” at the story of a particular, explosive, and horrific local crime.

Property’s subject is historical and political: as she experiments from her unique lyric perspective with multiple ways of “telling”and explores through dramatic superimposition how the past inscribes and disturbs the present, Agoos interrogates our homegrown social and racial divides, and focuses emphatically on the ethics of living in a real and present world of ubiquitous war. Her images of natural beauty join a plain style derived from the rhythms of vernacular speech to challenge the complacenciesand consequences of her own American identity and belonging.

Born in Boston in 1956, Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land (Yale University Press, 1987) and Calendar Year (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). She taught for eight years as a lecturer in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and, since 1994, in the English department and MFA program in poetry at Brooklyn College/CUNY, where she is an associate professor. She lives in Nyack, New York

The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice by Kelli Russell Agodon, Martha Silano

 As in in O, OPRAH MAGAZINE... Write a poem a day every day of the year! The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Published by Two Sylvias Press) offers a unique writing prompt for every day of the year. Created by poets for poets, this calendar of exercises offers inspiration and a place to begin. Whether you are a novice or well-established author, The Daily Poet is an essential resource for poets, teachers, professors, or anyone who wants to jumpstart their writing practice. The Daily Poet is portable, coffeeshop tested, and offers quick warm-ups for any writing group or classroom. An excellent guide for students, The Daily Poet is also a handy reference for poets looking for fresh ideas to share in their writing workshops

Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong by Hô Xuân Huong and John Balaban

Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air"

"Sometimes books really do change the world... This one will set in motion a project that may transform Vietnamese culture."—Utne Reader

Ho Xuan Huong—whose name translates as "Spring Essence"—is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risque poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary.

The publication of Spring Essence is a major historical and cultural event. It features a "tri-graphic" presentation of English translations alongside both the modern Vietnamese alphabet and the nearly extinct calligraphic Nom writing system, the hand-drawn calligraphy in which Ho Xuan Huong originally wrote her poems. It represents the first time that this calligraphy—the carrier of Vietnamese culture for over a thousand years—will be printed using moveable type. From the technology demonstrated in this book scholars worldwide can begin to recover an important part of Vietnam’s literary history. Meanwhile, readers of all interests will be fascinated by the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, and the scholarship of John Balaban.

"It's not every day that a poet gets to save a language, although some might argue that is precisely the point of poetry."— Publishers Weekly

"Move over, Sappho and Emily Dickinson."— Providence Sunday Journal

"In the simple landscape of daily objects–jackfruit, river snails, a loom, a chess set, and perhaps most famously a paper fan—Ho found metaphors for sex, which turned into trenchant indictments of the plight of women and the arrogance, hypocrisy and corruption of men... Balaban's deft translations are a beautiful and significant contribution to the West's growing awareness of Vietnam's splendid literary heritage."—The New York Times Book Review

“Hanoi is a city of poets, and one of my favorites is Ho Xuan Huong, whose daring and thought-provoking poems have been translated and published in ‘Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong'”— The New York Times

The translator, John Balaban, was twice a National Book Award finalist for his own poetry and is one of the preeminent American authorities on Vietnamese literature. During the war Balaban served as a conscientious objector, working to bring war-injured children better medical care. He later returned to Vietnam to record folk poetry. Like Alan Lomax’s pioneering work in American music, Balaban was to first to record Vietnam’s oral tradition. This important work led him to the poetry of Hô Xuân Huong.

Ngo Than Nhan, a computational linguist from NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, has digitized the ancient Nom calligraphy.

NEO-ROMANTIC POETRY I. Italian - English by Marc Tarrús

Neo-romantic poetry of the poetical work: Catalan Hunter. This completed book includes, in bilingual edition, 58 Neo-Romantic poems of varied themes

Whale Fall: Poems by David Baker

“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”

Diane Seuss, Paris Review

A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” 

(New York Times Book Review)

Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier.

In the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single gray whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, microplastics, and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range.

Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page, or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.

She Never Will be All Mine - Poems of the Heart by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“She Never Will be All Mine - Poems of the Heart” is a collection of classic love poetry written by American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Celebrated for their lyrical beauty, Millay's poems are infused with fiery romance and the youthful spirit that would become a characteristic of her writing. The poems include: “When the Year Grows Old”, “The Dream”, “Witch-Wife”, “Ashes of Life”, “Three Songs of Shattering”, “The Shroud”, “Sonnet II”, “Sonnet VI Bluebeard”, “Sonnet II”, “Sonnet IV”, “Sonnet VI”, “Sonnet VII”, “Sonnet X”, etc. A beautiful collection of moving love poetry not to be missed by fans and collectors of Millay's seminal work. Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892–1950) was an American playwright, Pulitzer Prize-winning lyrical poet, and feminist activist. One of the most celebrated poets in American history, Millay is hailed as the twentieth century's most skillfull sonnet writers who expertly married modern attitudes with traditional forms of expression. Other notable works by this author include: “Two Slatterns and a King”, “The Lamp and the Bell”, and “Aria da Capo”. Read & Co. Booksis publishing this brand new collection of classic poetry now for a new generation of readers to enjoy

Refuge & Occasion by Vyt Bakaitis

Vyt Bakaitis, poet and eminent translator from the Lithuanian, has gathered here poems from the past decade. This new collection, Refuge & Occasion, pursues several strands that ultimately braid together with characteristic freedom of shape and music whereby the requirements of the utterance design its flow. He writes: “Strange all I found and still carry/ what I remember left me to wonder.” Elegies and lyrics of erotic loss, tensely noted and feelingly unwound form one strand. The poet turns his eye and heart to cruder disappointments of the current political moment in several longer poems that aggressively explore the failures of human action and illusory consolation. “What’s real is the fact” the poet wryly notes. There are also several poems to honor significant occasions of being moved and sustained by art along with a number of outright odes to his muses. The charged enigma that winds through all of the poems, however, is the tension of enduring spiritual stasis and uncertainty. “Let’s pull out some maps. There are none” is where the poet starts. The mystery of life’s refusals is countered by a profound sense of the flow willing “times curvature to catch” both in memory and in ecstatic instances that “the wild wave struck … young as the storming moment.”

Healing Earthquakes: Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca (Author)

 Combining a stunning lyrical intensity with a profound exploration of the human soul, Healing Earthquakes uses poetry to conjure a romance, from beginning to end. Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces us to a man and woman before they are acquainted and re-creates their first meeting, falling in love, their decision to make a family, the eventual realization of each other's irreconcilable faults, the resulting conflicts, the breakup and hostility, and, finally, their transcendence of the bitterness and resentment. Throughout the relationship we are privy to the couple's astonishing range of emotions: the anguish of loneliness, the heady rush of new love, the irritations and joys of raising children, the difficulties in truly knowing someone, the doldrums of breakup, and so on. It is impossible not to identify with these characters and to recognize one's own experience in theirs. As he weaves this story, Baca explores many of his traditional themes: the beauty and cruelty of the desert lands where he has spent much of his life, the grace and wisdom of animals, the quiet dignity of life on small Chicano farms. This is an extraordinary work from one of our finest poets

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems (New Directions Paperbook) by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development.

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."

Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems by Kim Addonizio

"Addonizio doesn't do pretty; beneath her considerable wit is a wickedly sharp edge."―Library Journal, starred review

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected joy. Whether looking outward to events on the world stage―the war in Iraq, the 2004 Asian tsunami―or inward at struggles with the self, these poems aim at the heart and against the feeling that Lucifer may have already won the day.

from “Lucifer at the Starlite”

     Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:

     better management. The CEO

     has lost touch with the details. I’m worth

     as much, but I care; I come down here, I show

     my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:

     To our boys and girls in the war, grinding

     through sand, to everybody here, our host

     who’s mostly mist, like methane rising