The eighth five-book collection of poetry by poet and writer Thomas Porky McDonald, After the Dream: Poems 2009-2011, brings the author even closer to home than in his previous work, with a thought to where the world is headed. The title poems for each of the five books in the mix, Born in the City, The Class of No Return, Touched by Life, Back to Astoria and What Lies Ahead, all speak of a man still searching to incorporate his early life into the realities of the 21st Century. Other notable pieces from each collection include “Friendships to Eternity,” “Together One, as Always” (City), “While the Leaves Blew,” “Always too Old to Change Anything” (Class), “When the Game Simply Took You Away,” “I’ve Never Forgotten About Friendship” (Life), “Scenes From a Lost Neighborhood,” “When Fear Overrides Our Humanity” (Astoria), “Needed in the Land of the Needy” and “A Glimpse of Bernadine” (Ahead). A solid entry from the still wandering and wondering balladeer.

This title contains Michael Jackson's personal writings and over 100 photographs, drawings, and paintings from his own collection. The book is a personal view of the world around us and the universe within each of us.

One of Ashbery’s most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era’s most revolutionary poets The Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery’s National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice—reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken—that just a few years later would carry Ashbery’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century’s most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including “Soonest Mended,” “Decoy,” “Sunrise in Suburbia,” “Evening in the Country,” the achingly beautiful long poem “Fragment,” and Ashbery’s so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.” The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery’s reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it.

When Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was first published, it catapulted its author into the bestseller lists and established her as one of our funniest and most eloquent poets. There are so many kinds of awful men - One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead. (from 'Rondeau Redoublé')

After going to various states on the Major League landscape over 21 seasons, poet/writer Thomas Porky McDonald came upon the notion of continuing to tour the rest of the contiguous United States, using Minor League parks as a starting point. A pair of Western tours with his niece Jaclyn and her son Alex, as well as a stop in Graceland with his sister Patti, would be in the mix, with each stop bringing out more of McDonald’s signature poetry. Poet in the Parks is a sequel of sorts, as the earliest trips chronicled feature returns to Major League parks with his Poet in the Grandstand road partner, Adam Boneker, who later hits the Minors trail with McDonald, as well as a stop in New Orleans during the time of a World Pandemic. Ultimately, this second travel/poetry volume is merely a quest to savor the American landscape, no matter how many cities, states, parks and places of interest you pass through along the way.

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

Having packaged his more than 3,100 poems in chronological and themed collections, poet & writer Thomas Porky McDonald had the idea of putting together a volume of some relevant pieces that feature his lifetime home of Queens, New York. On addition, Porkwalk: The Queens Collection utilizes the same formula that McDonald chose in a previous collection based on his 20 years working out of neighboring Brooklyn, Dem Poems: The Brooklyn Collection. The 364 poems contained in this book are divided into sections, with old friends, his Astoria neighborhood, baseball and the losses he has suffered in the mix. This collection brings the poet back to where it all began and is thus arguably the most important one to date.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

The sixth collection of poetry to be released by Thomas Porky McDonald, Vespers at Sunset: Poems 2005-200 7 sees the poet alternately reaching back and looking forward, with the usual five-book format along For The ride. Up first is the Fat Parrot Diaries, a volume which contains a number of reflective pieces, like "Deuce" and "47," about Frank Brady, a friend whom McDonald has alluded to often in the past. The passing of Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks inspired the impassioned verse "The Buses Won't Be Running in Heaven Tonight" And The growing specter of aging exballplayers spurred the longing ode "As Those Years Deplete the Roster." Diaries is complemented by its immediately succeeding set, Drfling Shadows, whose title piece contains lasting images also seen in both "Lookin' Out Mikey's Window" and "A Vision of Kirby," written for an old friend and a baseball icon, respectively. The present is even more in evidence in Shadows, with a country visit ("At Lackawanna," and "The Life Goes on and On") and a Midwest trip ("The Guy From Midwood," "The Other Side of the Street") supplying the muse. In the Alley brings the poet back to New York, As the day-to-day ("The Room That Con Ed Missed"), The great beyond ("Till the Canyons Evolving Are Done") And The most evil day of all ("At 8:45") each pitch a tent. As always, baseball is well represented, with the city of Baltimore ("Legends House," "Ripken County") providing the latest stop on the tour. Alley also contains thoughts of impending doom ("A Feeling, As Yet Unknown") and Eternal gratefulness ("Those Who Set You Free"), balanced by a seminal classic ("A Time"). The final two books of Vespers are Frankie Rules, a book centered on the memory of Brady ("Frankie's Cure," "Frankie's Sport," Frankie's Heart And The title piece), and Old Phenoms, where the soon to be razed Shea Stadium ("The Space Beyond 1' Street," "Queries to an Usher on Doomsday") stands astride a pair of more personal farewells ("The Bond of the Eternal Souls," "The Window on the Second Floor"). Another representative collection from the kid from Queens.