I think creativity is the key to the fountain of youth. Gems of Wisdom reflects the creative genius, and wisdom that comes with age. This anthology is a marvelous, brave book, a testimonial to the power of age, and to the spirit. The prose pieces in this book bring the reader into the dreams, hopes and insights of those who embrace age. As we live in an anti-age society, this anthology is important, as it represents the age pride and the importance of the creative process. This is a masterpiece! And everyone at every age should read this book. ---San Francisco Author of The Viagra Diaries and Founder/Age March We would like to acknowledge all of the offerings submitted for this publication. Though we could not include all pieces submitted, we the judges and editors were enchanted by the many memories and stories that we were privileged to share.. ---Kimberly Kinser - Poet, Writer, Amherst Artist and Writers Workshop Leader The anthology by AgeSong abounds with playful poems of times well lived! It's a fine thing to read the poem stories that sing of love songs, along with hardship from people who are now in their seventies and eighties, even nineties. The humor will delight you. You may wonder what you'll be saying at that age! ---Janell Moon, Poet Laureate of Emeryville for 2011-2012, Author of Salt and Paper: 65 Candles

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

This landmark work explores how our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. Showing us a resurgent vision of harmony between nature and humanity in the work of some of our most widely read poets, Imagining the Earth reveals the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it.

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia. This revised edition includes a newly expanded section of American poets from the colonial era to the present. "[A] splendid collection of verse by women" (TIME) throughout the ages and around the world; now revised and expanded, with 38 American poets.

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."—Philip Levine The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune). from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. SALT AND PAPER is a daily reflection that is immediate and an accumulation of life experience in poetry and prose fragments placing a heartfelt, yet realistic light on difficult subjects as the author speaks of aging: a friend's slow demise with Alzheimer's; the lifelong effect of a brother's mental illness; the present, lived aging process; the interlacing of four generations--and, the creative, writing life that responds with compassion, humor, art.

This exquisitely giftable anthology of poems about age and aging reveals the wisdom of trailblazing writers who found power and growth later in life. At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years. Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before. To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.

Edna Gordon provides life lessons as a Hen Hawk Elder from the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca people. She shares her valuable teaching lessons and poetry on Mother Earth and our need to find balance in our lives and within our environments. In "Voice of the Hawk Elder," with the assistance of former National Georgraphic writer and editor, Harvey Arden, her words come to shape a picture of a world we need to find, from a woman whose voice we need to hear!