Winner of the Commonwealth Club Book Award, Silver Medal for Poetry (1990) In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control – because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

This book is about challenges. How do we handle loneliness, lust, desire, failure, and despair? How do we handle a lifelong sense of worthlessness? How do we handle admitting we needed to be rescued? Who am I? Am I in this book? You will recognize yourself, and learn about others' challenges, mixed in with fun reads, wordplay, and other comic relief. This book is not pornographic, but it is not for young children.

This charming picture book biography tells the inspiring story of Anne Bradstreet, a gifted Puritan writer who overcame barriers to become America's first published poet.

"The lineage of poetic experimentation with footnotes and other paratexts is long and varied, yet few have explored these formal possibilities with as much intellectual depth and emotional resonance as Kristina Marie Darling. Fortress continues Darling's investigation into the print page as a kind of interface - leading not only to poetry but to the reader's understanding of the ways one imaginatively co-creates character, narrative, drama. The "sprawling fields" of the vast white page we find here remind us that poems are places as much as they are language - places that invite us in, guard against us, and sometimes won't let us go. 'What does it mean to cross a threshold?' Darling's narrator asks. 'Most nights I would never choose to leave.' Reading Fortress, one can't help but agree." -Andy Frazee, author of The Body, The Rooms "Picking up Kristina Marie Darling's newest collection is like holding a delicate antique: her work trembles with fragility in its exploration of the ephemeral. This collection carefully juxtaposes love and nostalgia alongside the way we covet mementoes to serve as relics and proofs of the depths of our heart's capabilities. Readers traverse through scatterings of dead flowers, ruined gardens, and broken jewelry that serve as mirrors to pain and longing. The collection's masterful use of white space allows for contemplation: a place to ponder what's shattered, what's left, and what still has any worth. In the lines of Darling, you'll find a place to interrogate your deepest wounds, and, in doing so, you may discover them to be 'synonymous with both beauty and ruination.'" -Anne Champion, author of Reluctant Mistress "In Kristina Marie Darling's innovative new collection, the distance between our bodies is measured in language. Footnotes become poems, defining absence and commenting on the blankness of the page. Fortress is a meditation on loss: the loss of a marriage and the loss of a life. The fortress our heroine paces through acts as both a prison and a memory palace. It is scattered in fading red poppies and Polaroid photographs. Room after room, we pick up fragments of broken glass and piece them together into something whole and glittering." -Lily Ladewig, author of The Silhouettes"

The wildly enchanting new collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa "If I am not Ulysses, I am / his dear, ruthless half brother." So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks. And Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the characters Komunyakaa conjures over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here another recalls Napoleon as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; and here he is just a man, reflecting on why he'd "rather die a poet / than a warrior." Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations, there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms, his effortlessly surreal images, his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only, say, of king against jester but of man against his own desire, and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past. Another brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of our "most significant and individual voices," The Emperor of Water Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.

Flies are the most ubiquitous of insects: buzzing, minuscule, and seemingly insignificant, they've been both plagues and minor annoyances for millennia. Rather than ignore these incredibly mundane and seemingly insignificant creatures, poets spanning centuries--from the seventeenth to the twentieth--and continents--from North America to Asia--have found that these ordinary bugs in fact illuminate deep spiritual mysteries. In this revelatory book, Robert Hudson considers seven poets, each of whom wrote a provocative poem about a fly. These poets--all mystics in their own way--ponder the simple fly and come to astounding conclusions. Considering Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and several other poets, The Poet and the Fly brings together the poetry, the flies, and the poets' own lives to explore the imaginative, and often prophetic, insights that come from the startling combination of poetry and flies. Ultimately, the message each poet offers to us through the fly is as relevant today as it was in their own time: the miracle of existence, the gift of mortality, the power of the imagination, the need for compassion, the existence of the soul, the mystery of everything around us, and the sacramental, grace-giving power of story.

The Christian gospel, says Brueggemann, is too easily preached and heard. Too often technical reason and excessive religious certitude reduce the gospel to coercive, debilitating pietisms that mask the text's meaning and freeze the hearers heart. With skill and imagination, Brueggemann demonstrates how the preacher can engage in daring speech?differently voiced and therefore differently heard. This speech, as suggested by the Bible itself, is "poetic" speech, enabling the preacher to forge communion in the midst of alienation, bring healing out of guilt, and empower the hearer for "missional imagination." As an alternative to theological/homiletical discourse that is moralistic, pietistic or scholastic, Brueggemann proposes preaching that is artistic, poetic, and dramatic. The basis for the 1989 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School, Finally Comes the Poet is a unique and transforming guide for powerful preaching.