“A wonderful example of the poet’s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post In his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls “the problems of the normal,” which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem “Don’t Do That” opens with the lines: “It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / along with some resentment I’d held in / for a few weeks.” In other poems, Dunn contemplates his own mortality, echoing Yeats—“That is no country for old men / cadenced everything I said”—only to discover he’s joined their ranks. In “The Writer of Nudes” his speaker is in search of the body’s “grammar” but tells his models, “Don’t expect to see yourself as other / than I see you.” Full of grace, wit, humor, and masterful precision, the poems in Here and Now attest to the contradictions we live with in the here and now. Political and metaphysical, these astonishing poems remind us of the essential human comedy of getting through each day. from "The House on the Hill" . . . from out of the fog, a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise. No things without ideas! you'd shout, and the doors would open, and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.

Megan Falley’s much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry shocks you with its honesty: whether through exacting wit or lush lyrical imagery. It is clear that the author is madly in love, not only with her partner for whom she writes both idiosyncratic and sultry poems for, but in love with language, in love with queerness, in love with the therapeutic process of bankrupting the politics of shame. These poems tackle gun violence, toxic masculinity, LGBTQ* struggles, suicidality, and the oppression of women’s bodies, while maintaining a vivid wildness that the tongue aches to speak aloud. Known best for breathtaking last lines and truths that will bowl you over, Drive Here and Devastate Me will “relinquish you from the possibility of meeting who you could have been, and regretting who you became.”

A startling, provocative collection from the best under-18 writers and artists in America. Astonishing. Remarkable. Perceptive. These are just three of the adjectives that could be applied to the work in this collection. Drawn from the winners of the 1999, 2000, and 2001 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, this anthology is a groundbreaking document of voices and visions from the front lines of today's youth.

A celebrated and diverse group of poets have contributed the beautiful selections that make up Poetry of Presence. This book of mindfulness poems provides a refuge of quiet clarity that is much needed in today's restless, chaotic world. Every reader will find favorites to share and to return to, again and again.

An illustrated collection of poems about traveling and vacations, including "I'm Off to Treasure Island," "If You're Traveling in Transylvania," and "Are We Nearly There Yet?"

A stunning celebration of mindfulness and a meditation on slowing down and enjoying each moment, from the team behind the award-winning Windows Explore identity and connection, inspire curiosity, and prompt engaging discussions about the here and now.

Poetry. African & African Ameican Studies. The title of this new volume of poetry by upfromsumdirt packs a lot of meaning and intention into a mere three words. It is dedicated to Emmett Till, and more recent Black victims of violence, and is entirely an urgent demand for social justice. But don't be fooled by the play on words, for upfromsumdirt isn't playing around here. This isn't a poet merely having fun with language (well, there are points where he clearly is enjoying himself), but rather a reclaiming and reinvention of language in order to engage it in the serious work at hand. In "Tea with Bojangles" he proclaims "reinvisionism is a freedom / if not a luxury, the tongues of your / indignant gods in my painted mouth like / a mud dauber in pink cotton candy..." He knows that words have power to sting, and one word that he uses repeatedly is "Africadabra," an act of conjuring, invoked to break "connection to the God of Chains... / His shackles left you spouting slave-words / from your spirit..." He knows the very language in which he writes is a legacy of slavery, and he shatters and reforges it, breaking the chain, making it a new thing. Freeing it, and with it himself, and us. There is also a ring of science to the title, suggesting light emanating from excitation, which is no accident, for upfromsumdirt often employs the language of science, and science fiction, in his work, connecting it to Afrofuturism and the projection of a future embracing Blackness. In "Black Wholeness: A Theorem," he hypothesizes that "thick = dark thighs x 40 thieves to the power of mules," and enjoins us to "please discount all that you believe about gravity // in the romanticism of such lightless / reality a poem for love is born... [S]hit happens when we raise accountants / instead of wizards," he laments in "Playdates for Zombied Heads of State," anxious over the world awaiting his six-year-old son. "[I]t's as I always say: // a people without the science / to contort their skin into myth / abort the realities they want..." As a talisman against "walking rigor mortis" he places his "solemn black word" beneath the boy's pillow. And in this volume, upfromsumdirt, wizard and poet (for are they not the same thing?) has placed many solemn black words in our ears, in hope that we might hear, and heed.

Important to the essays here is the possibility of using logos without the negative, restricting and violent aspects of logos. In this respect I speak about affirmation and about tragic awareness rather than about the tragic itself or tragic conflict, as I read texts of a literary democracy that is already here, texts by Don DeLillo, Tomas Tranströmer, John Ashbery and Thanasis Valtinos, or see arrangements by Lo Snöfall. Indeed it is all about arrangements, about knowing how to affirm and doing it rather than using language and its codes in order to transcribe, however accurate this might be. Arrangements say yes, since they do not raise any absolute boundaries. The arrangement is a logos without logos: it is a cosmos, where affirming is a tragically aware cosmetics. Cosmos is neither the world nor any ordering or embellishment of this world, but an openness as the incalculable accumulation of arrangements that say yes in their awareness that they do not amount to an ontology.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.