Get the Knowledge Without the College! You are a writer. You dream of sharing your words with the world, and you're willing to put in the hard work to achieve success. You may have even considered earning your MFA, but for whatever reason--tuition costs, the time commitment, or other responsibilities--you've never been able to do it. Or maybe you've been looking for a self-guided approach so you don't have to go back to school. This book is for you. DIY MFA is the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. By combining the three main components of a traditional MFA--writing, reading, and community--it teaches you how to craft compelling stories, engage your readers, and publish your work. Inside you'll learn how to: • Set customized goals for writing and learning. • Generate ideas on demand. • Outline your book from beginning to end. • Breathe life into your characters. • Master point of view, voice, dialogue, and more. • Read with a "writer's eye" to emulate the techniques of others. • Network like a pro, get the most out of writing workshops, and submit your work successfully. Writing belongs to everyone--not only those who earn a degree. With DIY MFA, you can take charge of your writing, produce high-quality work, get published, and build a writing career.

A collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet with “a sharp lively wit and a tender approach to the human condition” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Though he was also renowned as a biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg was first and foremost a poet—upon his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson said “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” In this outstanding collection of seventy-seven poems, Sandburg eloquently celebrates the themes that engaged him as a poet for more than half a century of writing—life, love, and death. Strongly lyrical, these intensely honest poems testify to human courage, frailty, and tenderness and to the enduring wonders of nature. “A poetic genius whose creative power has in no way lessened with the passing years.” —Chicago Tribune

In 1986 Kids Can Press published an edition of Robert Service's ?The Cremation of Sam McGee? illustrated by painter Ted Harrison, who used his signature broad brushstrokes and unconventional choice of color to bring this gritty narrative poem to life. Evoking both the spare beauty and the mournful solitude of the Yukon landscape, Harrison's paintings proved the perfect match for Service's masterpiece about a doomed prospector adrift in a harsh land. Harrison's Illustrator's Notes on each page enhanced both poem and illustrations by adding valuable historical background. Upon its original publication, many recognized the book as an innovative approach to illustrating poetry for children. For years The Cremation of Sam McGee has stood out as a publishing landmark, losing none of its appeal both as a read-aloud and as a work of art. Kids Can Press proudly publishes this deluxe hardcover twentieth anniversary edition --- complete with a spot-varnished cover, new cover art and heavy coated stock --- of a book that remains as entrancing as a night sky alive with the vibrant glow of the Northern Lights.

A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.

Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.

"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it— He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.

Presenting the best poems from the nationwide Places of Poetry project, selected from over 7,500 entries Poetry lives in the veins of Britain, its farms and moors, its motorways and waterways, highlands and beaches. This anthology brings together time-honoured classics with some of the best new writing collected across the nation, from great monuments to forgotten byways. Featuring new writing from Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield, Places of Poetry is a celebration of the strangeness and variety of our islands, their rich history and momentous present.

**Winner, 2019 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Daisy Utemorrah Award** **Winner, 2021 Australia Books Industry Awards, Small Publishers' Children's Book of the Year** **Winner, 2021 Queensland Literary Awards, Children's Book Award** **Winner, 2021 Speech Pathology, Australia Books of the Year Awards, Eight to ten Years** **Shortlisted, 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature** **Shortlisted, 2022 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Children's Literature Awards** **Shortlisted, 2022 Ena Noel Award, The IBBY Australia Encouragement Award for a Young Emerging Writer or Illustrator** **Shortlisted, 2021 Children's Book Council of Australia, Book of the Year Awards, Younger Readers** **Shortlisted, 2021 Australian Book Design Awards, Best Designed Children's Fiction Book** **Shortlisted, 2021 Readings Children's Book Prize** **Longlisted, 2021 Colin Roderick Literary Award** Age range 8 to 12 Meet 11-year-old Bindi. She's not really into maths but LOVES art class and playing hockey. Her absolute FAVOURITE thing is adventuring outside with friends or her horse, Nell. A new year starts like normal -- school, family, hockey, dancing. But this year hasn't gone to plan! There's a big art assignment, a drought, a broken wrist AND the biggest bushfires her town has ever seen! Bindi is a verse novel for mid-upper primary students. Written 'for those who plant trees', Bindi explores climate, bush fires, and healing. Written from the point of view of 11-year-old, Bindi and her friends on Gundungurra Country.

Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as "riding on dragons." Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of "leaping" as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Transtromer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--