In Wading Through Lethe, a girl growing up in rural Arkansas learns to navigate life, love, and loss as she approaches womanhood. She leaves home to study and to travel. The heroes and gods of Greek myth appear alongside Christian saints; rural landscapes and cicadas give way to Gothic churches and the Roman Forum. Metamorphosis is at the heart of these poems-the necessary transformations that leave us changed as memory pulls us to the past, where nothing and everything is the same. With musical language, these formal and free verse poems highlight the way we shape memory and the inevitability of forgetting. In the end, the search becomes not about discarding the past but about choosing what we keep. Orpheus may have lost Eurydice, but there is still music.

Presents a comprehensive anthology of African-American poetry covering over two centuries, and includes selections by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.E.B. Du Bois, and many more.

A collection of poems in which the author draws upon her experiences as a Palestinian-American living in the Southwest, and her travels in Central America, the Middle East, and Asia, to comment upon the shared humanity of different cultures throughout the world.

Another remarkable collection of poetry from one of America's masters of the medium. The first part gathers together poems of love and nostalgic memory, while Part II portrays confrontations inherent in a racist society.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A “luminous [and] memorable” debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss (Publishers Weekly). “We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, which never stray far from an engagement with science, geography, art, and aesthetics, nor from the dream logic that motivates their incessant investigations. While John James begins with the biographical—the haunting loss of a father in childhood, the exhausted hours of early fatherhood—the questions that emerge from his poetic synthesis are both timely and universal: What is it to be human in an era where nature and culture have fused? To live in a time of political and environmental upheaval, of both personal and public loss? How do we make meaning, and to whom—or what—do we turn, when such boundaries so radically collapse? “A poet of staggering lyricism, intricate without ever obscuring his intent. Quite simply, The Milk Hours announces the arrival of a great new talent in American poetry.” —Shelf Awareness

An Ancient Collection Reimagined Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”) contains the poems of the first Buddhist women: princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born into limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. The original authors of the Therigatha were women from every kind of background, but they all shared a deep-seated desire for awakening and liberation. In The First Free Women, Matty Weingast has reimagined this ancient collection and created a contemporary and radical adaptation that takes the essence of each poem and highlights the struggles and doubts, as well as the strength, perseverance, and profound compassion, embodied by these courageous women.

The theme of Anne Coltman's debut volume of poetry is grandmothers and grandchildren. Now a grandmother herself, Coltman reflects upon the special bond she shared with her grandmother, the relationship her children had with her own mother, and the role she plays as a grandmother today. The result is a collection of verse examining her often humorous experiences as a family matriarch as well as an exploration of the unique role grandmothers have in modern family life. This collection is sure to be a treat for readers young and old.

Poetry. From 1982 until 2002, Joe Weil worked as a tool grinder and union shop steward in a mold making plant in Kenilworth, New Jersey. Many of the poems in THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER LIGHT were written on the graveyard shift while on break at the factory. There, Weil read the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Ceasar Vallejo, Gabrielle Mistral, Miguel Hernandez, Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, and William Carlos Williams, as well as hundreds of contemporary poets. The poems in THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER LIGHT chart the history of his journey from tool grinder to university lecturer. Weil claims the common thread of his poems to be his "Catholic worker" sensibility and his reading in the Spanish poets as well as Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor. "I am a Catholic writer," Weil says, "I believe in Eucharistic reality ... in beauty and truth hidden under the signs of what is broken and appears to be discounted. I agree with George Bernanos: all is grace. But this grace is difficult, sometimes impossible to quarry." Weil's poems are about the difficulty of quarrying grace where no one expects it to come. His poems read as if he expects to be ambushed by grace at any given moment. This is the great grandmother light, a light present at all times and in all places, that he shares with his readers.