So much of what we live goes on inside— The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real For having passed unsaid. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead. —from “Unsaid” Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.

you have just been killed by a thousand tiny cuts. 99 to be exact. bleeding out to the backdrop of this new cartoon. a woodchuck in a tiny witch hat laughs at you, as you lay down, hands over your chest and think, 'perfect.' and a red light atop a powerline blinks in the distance to remind that there is no end, only one long try, deflate at your own pace. don't fight the freefall. 99 poems to cure whatever's wrong with you or create the problems you need. and yes, you need. im your fucking dad, honey. admit it, or we'll never get out of this alive.

In his collection Risking Everything, Housden addressed love’s many aspects. Now, in Dancing with Joy, he assembles 99 poems from 69 poets that celebrate the many colors of joy. Anything can be a catalyst for joy, these poems reveal. For Wislawa Szymborska, the catalyst is a dream; for Robert Bly, being in the company of his ten-year-old son; for Gerald Stern, it is a grapefruit at breakfast; for Billy Collins, a cigarette. Dancing with Joy includes English and Italian classical and romantic works; early Chinese and Persian verse; and poets from Chile, France, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and India, plus a range of contemporary American and English poets. Whether inspiration is what you need, or an affirmation of what is already joyful in life, Dancing with Joy is a welcome treat for Housden’s numerous fans, as well as anyone looking for sheer happiness, marvelously expressed.

A collection of poems evoking the world and feelings of childhood.

Celebrating the art of the poet-translator, this pioneering anthology shows how the very heart of the English tradition has been sustained and enriched by translation over the centuries. The three editors have gathered together supreme examples of this art, poems that sing out on the most pressing of human concerns with all the conviction of two voices speaking as one.

Titled from lyrics of the song “Nobody Home” by Pink Floyd, this well-thought poetry collection touches on the subjects of loss, love, pain, happiness, depression, abandonment, war, good vs. evil, alcoholism, religion, and complicated family relationships. Written mostly in metered, rhyming stanzas, Black Book of Poems provides a non-threatening platform for reflection and meditation on life’s most difficult challenges. This collection offers a refreshingly honest approach to life and love that feels realistic and relatable to everyone.

99 Poems: New & Selected for the first time gathers work from across his career, including a dozen remarkable new poems. Gioia has not ordered this selection chronologically. Instead, his great subjects organize this volume into broad themes of mystery, remembrance, imagination, place, stories, songs, and love. The result is a book we might live our lives alongside, and a reminder of the deep and abiding pleasures and reassurances that poetry provides us.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Philip Terman's latest poetry collection, THIS CRAZY DEVOTION, begins appropriately enough with "Tormented Meshuggenehs," "the crazy sages... / who dervished across the hayfields / and paused to yawp a parable to the cows about the seven beggars..." This passage announces much about the poetry that follows: that its craziness indeed is of the order of devotion in the spiritual sense, rooted in Judaism; and also that it often takes place in bucolic surroundings, rooted in the land. And why is this a little surprising, this conjunction of Jewish life and rural setting? For Terman they are seamless and sacred, and by portraying his Jewishness as woven through a life and landscape familiar to many (non-Jewish) readers, he dispels stereotypes and creates a community of mutual recognition and understanding. That would be virtue enough to applaud this collection, but it offers many other pleasures. "I am talking about this world, there is no other," he declares in the long and lovely meditative "Garden Chronicle" that forms the final section of the book. Such a world it is, full of all of the things to which he is crazily devoted, all of the things he writes about with such acuity and tenderness in these poems: heritage and faith, social justice, poetry, and even (in the title poem) almost meeting Bob Dylan--but foremost, his family and nature, both of which sustain him. He communes with ancestors, a grandfather he was too young to remember, who must have sung to him in Yiddish (and who, he supposes, just might have posed for Chagall). He imagines the radio interview his father might have given, replete with Borscht Belt humor, and recalls going for bagels with "the schlemiel... / who dated your sister-in-law / after your brother died." He devotes the second section, "Of Longing and Chutzpah," to memories of his mother, and in one of the most humorous and poignant moments recalls how in childhood his mother cut his hair to save money, an act Terman likens to "sculpting" him into all the things she might have wished him to be, "the boy she wants to be a mensch." (Based on the accounting he gives here, she succeeded. She also carved out a considerable poet.) Most of all, he writes of "The love of the long married," of children "at the kitchen table / doing homework," waiting on a school bus which arrives bearing all the hopes and happiness in the world. He gives the last word to the daughter whose question "After Later?" signifies "no set time, farther than the horizon, / on top of the sky, around the bend, outside this moment we're in" when, perhaps "all those things they said would happen / must surely have occurred." Such a lovely description of faith, so worthy of devotion.