Starting in 2005, game designer Raph Koster decided to post a poem to his popular blog every Sunday. Ten years later, this is a selection of eighty of those poems, accompanied by gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations and illuminating endnotes. These are verses written to an audience that didn't necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children's homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. In them we voyage across the world, or deep inside apples; we see a toddler become a pterodactyl, and clouds become mundane water vapor. We see sonnets written in computer code. These are poems for everyday people about ordinary things made extraordinary. " In these engaging poems, which tease the conventions of formal verse, Raph Koster shines a curiosity laser on topics ranging from the building of the Globe Theatre to the BASIC programming language. Koster memorializes far-flung journeys through such locales as mountainous Afghanistan, exurban China, Las Vegas casinos, and a very real-seeming Seoni jungle visited not IRL but through Kipling and gaming. -Tarin Towers, author of Sorry, We're Close On a stormy night in Tuscaloosa, reading Raph Koster's collection of poems: I congratulate you on the sustained and sustaining enthusiasm, joy, play, and wit at work in these poems. In your poems - as in the gaming world - you've created a richly varied world saturated with myth and stories. -Hank Lazer, poet, author of The New Spirit and N18 (complete) "

"A thirteen month cycle of poems distilled from chosen scriptures, viewed from her perspective as Black, as woman, as poet, and looking for the glory found in the margins of life"--

"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.

In a time of inflated posturing and relentless self-promotion, Kari Gunter-Seymour's poems offer quiet intensity. Her work provides a refuge where one's curiosity, intelligence, and awareness of the complexities of contemporary Appalachian female culture and the struggle to hold on to "old ways" while embracing the new, take shape. The work is firmly and unapologetically attached to the poet's home soil. More than merely commenting, Gunter-Seymour's work searches for meaning. It takes readers outside and indoors, into the world and into bodies and minds, a foray into the tangled bonds of family, weighted with memories. Her work speaks to a knowing that as the threads of our lives unravel, so too, gifts materialize. Here, relationship issues, trauma and disappointment are transformed into a journey of revelation, a testament to the complexity and power of love even as it contends with circumstances beyond its control. Each poem is earthy and rich, filled with imagery, exploring beyond the boundaries of feminism, science, and spirituality. There is specific cultural musicality of language and line, a strong sense of observation, giving readers a renewed sense of understanding and discovery of today's Appalachian woman.

Poetry. Copeland's TRANSCENDENTAL TELEMARKETER contains beautiful lyrics of emotion and meditation, but it also contains rants against war and violence, and all the while it swings us from the U.S. to Japan to Afghanistan, from Islam to Buddhism to Christianity It's compelling, playful, and well-crafted.--William Allegrezza Beth Copeland's poems are music. She combines powerful alliteration ('following blue rivers of blood / flowing back to the heart') with unobtrusive rhyme ('silver wolves / howl, owls hoot'). Occasional use of form seems to grow from the poem. Asia influences Copeland's writing; as in Japanese poetry, nature imagery becomes philosophy. Fresh juxtapositions 'explode like poppies from the barrels of guns.' Color commands our vision: 'the violet wave of light around the Japanese iris.' We hear, mystically, 'the Earth's vibrations / converge in a single note.' Read this book several times--each visit will uncover a different layer.--Anne-Adele Wight Beth Copeland's TRANSCENDENTAL TELEMARKETER lifts language beyond its typical meanings, lets it 'whirl like a spinning top set loose on the sidewalk, ' until language and meaning split--the way the 'I' does in the poems -- 'I break in two: one girl stays on the bed while the other one floats to the ceiling to watch.' With rare prowess, Copeland crafts these poems, delivering 'the equator in that Ouija world, ' 'death' as a 'potent aphrodisiac.'--Debrah Morkun

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

In tracing George Herbert's revisionary goals as they developed through the two manuscripts of the Church, this book offers a new approach to the interpretation of his poems in showing that Herbert intended to encourage his readers to connect the separate lyrics into larger structures of meaning and also to look beyond his poetry to the Bible.

Contemporary poets offer behind-the-scenes perspectives on the poetic process.