A dazzling collection of Chinese erotic poems about deep love and pure lust, enticement and seduction, ecstasy and disappointment, that span nearly three thousand years and include many poems never before translated into English. The ancient Chinese tradition of erotic poetry has been largely ignored in the west. Now, a vast continent of sensual verse is opened to us with this glorious collection spanning nearly Here are poems that express need, hunger, grief, and longing—for husbands and wives and for concubines and lovers; poems by turns explicit or subtle, light-hearted or desperate, written from both men’s and women’s points of view. The editors have drawn on a wide range of sources from 600 BCE to the present, including highly literary poems, popular verse, and folk songs, as well as poems that appeared in ancient Daoist sex manuals, in classical novels of the Ming Dynasty, and in collections of erotic prints. The result is an array of voices that speak the universal language of desire. For the first time, all the major works of this beloved writer are gathered together in one hardcover volume.

Jervey Tervalon's novel about young people in South Central Los Angeles grows out of his experience teaching in a high school there and his pain at the death of one of his favorite students.

Unmatched in scope and literary quality, this landmark anthology spans three thousand years, bringing together more than six hundred poems by more than one hundred thirty poets, in translations–many new and exclusive to the book–by an array of distinguished translators. Here is the grand sweep of Chinese poetry, from the Book of Songs–ancient folk songs said to have been collected by Confucius himself–and Laozi’s Dao De Jing to the vividly pictorial verse of Wang Wei, the romanticism of Li Po, the technical brilliance of Tu Fu, and all the way up to the twentieth-century poetry of Mao Zedong and the post—Cultural Revolution verse of the Misty poets. Encompassing the spiritual, philosophical, political, mystical, and erotic strains that have emerged over millennia, this broadly representative selection also includes a preface on the art of translation, a general introduction to Chinese poetic form, biographical headnotes for each of the poets, and concise essays on the dynasties that structure the book. The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry captures with impressive range and depth the essence of China’s illustrious poetic tradition.

Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

An assemblage of delicate Chinese verse which delicately explore the worlds of love, nature, and meditation.

One of China’s most significant contemporary poets, co-translated by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world. Presented in the original Chinese alongside English translations by Changtai Bi and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith, this collection introduces American readers to a boundless spirit—one “composing an explosion.”

According to the Kama Sutra, the erotic handbook written two thousand years ago, when the wheel of ecstasy is in motion “there is no textbook at all, and no order.” Indian Love Poems is a unique gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalog the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora. Indian Love Poems features works from the classical languages of Sanskrit and Tamil and such later languages as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, and English. Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire–both male and female–in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.

An invaluable resource to scholars of literary and intellectual movements in late imperial and modern China, sexuality, gender, literary decadence, modernism, countercultures, and erotic literature, this book offers the first literary history on an important movement spanning the late Ming to the early Republican era.

The Songs of the South is an anthology first compiled in the second century A.D. Its poems, originating from the state of Chu and rooted in Shamanism, are grouped under seventeen titles and contain all that we know of Chinese poetry's ancient beginnings. The earliest poems were composed in the fourth century B.C. and almost half of them are traditionally ascribed to Qu Yuan.