The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development.

In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent¬—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps. In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.” With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.

Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates “smart, surprising and affecting [poetry] . . . Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget” (David Scott Kastan, Yale University). In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto’s fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of “thee” and “thine,” kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard’s time and language and our own here and now. “I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him.” —Gerald Stern, National Book Award–winning poet “Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world.” —Publishers Weekly “Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults.” —Martin Espada, National Book Award–winning poet “Shakespeare’s words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased.” —The Norton Shakespeare

This new collection from the editor of Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love and author of The Sexual Healing Journey includes 121 poems by such poets as Rumi, Marge Piercy, Emily Dickinson, Nikki Giovanni, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Octavio Paz, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Therapist and marriage counselor Wendy Maltz turns up the heat while celebrating healthy sexuality in this collection of poems that dispel the negative cultural message that what feels good must be bad. Maltz's anthologies are designed to inspire couples toward a deeper physical intimacy and to show that the sexual impulse can be aroused by conveying personal experience through great writing.

Poems on "long distances of the imagination," family, films, France, and art. "The book's centerpiece, 'Alternating currents, ' juxtaposes real historical figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller with their fictional contemporaries Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson."--Jacket.

"Composed in the mid-sixteenth century, ...[this] could be considered the first novel written in South Asia...Employing the poetic style known as campu, which mixes verse and prose, Pingali Suranna's work transcends our notions of tranditionl narrative.... [This novel] is both a gripping love story and a profound meditation on mind nd language."--Back cover.

Family was a whitewashed, / milk-toothed word / that couldn’t account for the mother / who wept and burnt / the roast if the floor was dirty– / or if it was Tuesday, or there were clouds. Written in an eloquent and searingly honest voice, these poems address the pain and pleasure of growing up. Courtney Queeney tells intense emotional truths in poetry that is at once personal and universal. She exposes the rawness of a complicated relationship with her mother–She mothered the disorder in me, / this difficulty getting out of bed / and dressing like a real human adult, / trying not to be her daughter–and her attitude toward love expresses both profound longing and erotic dissonance: I translate love from the hush of a hung-up phone / before a body comes to engage me for an hour. And Queeney writes with humor and self-doubt of the conflict between desire and the quest to remain true to oneself–I will fly around the world on an airplane until I arrive at calm. / I will spend my days suspended in air, manufacturing a closure. Filibuster to Delay a Kiss sounds a new and distinctive note in the symphony of young American poets.

From the author of I Find You In the Darkness, a brand-new poetry collection about love, longing, and one woman's everlasting connection to the sea My soul reminds me that I am a Mermaid. A woman who longs to be held by the sea... Beloved contemporary poet Alfa is back with a collection of all-new poems celebrating strength and female empowerment. With more than 180 poems focusing on resilience, inner strength, and self-love, The Salt in His Kiss celebrates the fantastic creature inside every woman.

The Empress of Kisses explores the landscape of the human heart through free and formal verse. The poems chronicle a wide variety of relationships past and present, real and imagined, with family, friends, lovers, pop culture icons, mythological figures, historical events, and with words themselves. The collection features a special focus on the experiences of Generation X, the “forgotten generation.” "This book offers all the pleasures that poetry affords—sonic felicities, skilled wordplay, resonant insights, and unexpected destinations. This is a delightful and memorable book."—Beth Ann Fennelly, final judge, author of Unmentionables November 9th, 1989 For thirty years there is no kiss. Then there is the possibility of a kiss, like a rumble or a half-heard shout— did it come from this side or that side? When the kiss breaks through, we all struggle to register the impossible, how the wall came down, how their lips found each other, every obstacle reduced to rubble around their feet, the bright paint of her lipstick smeared, unintelligible graffiti all over the changed angles of his face.

The first study to offer an integral theory of love poetry, examining why it is that poetry, even more than other arts, is so consistently associated with romantic love.