A Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in this collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets This hilarious book of poetry transforms disco staples, classic rock anthems, and recent chart-toppers into hilarious iambic pentameter! All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. An entertaining journey into the world of Elizabethan poetry, and based on the immensely popular Tumblr of the same name, Pop Sonnets is the perfect gift for Shakespeare fans and music lovers alike. “Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can't get enough.” —TIME

‘One of the very best collections of pop songs written in the style of William Shakespeare that I’ve read so far this year!’ ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic ‘Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can’t get enough’ TIME ‘Amazing’ Buzzfeed

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

Learn about all of Shakespeare's plays in one book! Read about William Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems as you never have before in an entertaining pop-up book collaboration between the internationally known comedy troupe the Reduced Shakespeare Company and best-selling illustrator Jennie Maizels. Featuring five interactive spreads filled with dramatic pop-ups, fun foldouts, hilarious summaries, and fascinating commentaries, this is the perfect introduction to one of the world’s greatest playwrights and his enduring works.

This edited collection brings together scholars from across the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the USA and India, to offer a truly international perspective on the global reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the 18th century to the present. Global Shakespeare has never been so local and familiar as it is today. The translation, appropriation and teaching of Shakespeare’s plays across the world have been the subject of much important recent work in Shakespeare studies, as have the ethics of Shakespeare’s globalization. Within this discussion, however, the Sonnets are often overlooked. This book offers a new global history of the Sonnets, including the first substantial study of their translation and of their performance in theatre, music and film. It will appeal to anyone interested in the reception of the Sonnets, and of Shakespeare across the world.

Poetry has always been a central element of Christian spirituality and is increasingly used in worship, in pastoral services and guided meditation. Here, Cambridge poet, priest and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite transforms 70 lectionary readings into inspiring poems for use in regular worship, seasonal services, meditative reading or on retreat.

A trailblazing exploration of the poetic power of popular songs, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles to Beyoncé and beyond. Encompassing a century of recorded music, this pathbreaking book reveals the poetic artistry of popular songs. Pop songs are music first. They also comprise the most widely disseminated poetic expression of our time. Adam Bradley traces the song lyric across musical genres from early twentieth-century Delta blues to mid-century rock 'n’ roll to today’s hits. George and Ira Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm.” The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” These songs are united in their exacting attention to the craft of language and sound. Bradley shows that pop music is a poetry that must be heard more than read, uncovering the rhythms, rhymes, and metaphors expressed in the singing voice. At once a work of musical interpretation, cultural analysis, literary criticism, and personal storytelling, this book illustrates how words and music come together to produce compelling poetry, often where we least expect it.

Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of the aristocracy - verses of friendship, war, politics, death and above all of love - into wide common readership for the first time. The major poets of Henry VIII's court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were first printed in the volume. Wyatt's intimate poem about lost love which begins 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seke', and Surrey's passionate sonnet 'Complaint of a lover rebuked' are joined in the miscellany by a large collection of diverse, intriguingly anonymous poems both moral and erotic, intimate and universal.