The language of poetry is rich and complex—from abstract language to voice, with all the enjambment, Nashers and sprung rhythm in between. The Poetry Dictionary illuminates and unravels it all with clear, working definitions. In addition, you'll find vivid and thorough descriptions, along with examples from classic and contemporary poetry, Greek to avant-garde, to illustrate the terms. In many cases, several different poems are used to show the evolution of the form, making The Poetry Dictionary a unique anthology of the art. It's a guide to the poetry of today and yesterday, with intriguing hints as to what tomorrow holds. Author/poet John Drury focuses on those terms that are useful to students and teachers. These are words you need to effectively discuss the craft—concepts that will broaden and stimulate your own creative processes. Drury's from-experience viewpoint and spirited voice keep The Poetry Dictionary relevant, immediate and not only easy to read, but hard not to.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

A powerful and inspiring new poetry collection from the co-authors of Can I Touch Your Hair?

Worse Things is a story about connections, the ways they are made, and what happens when they are lost or illusive, from the award-winning author of Pearl Verses the World and Toppling. Winner of QLD CBCA Bilby Award for Younger Readers 2021 Worse Things follows the lives of three main characters: Blake, an Aussie Rules football player who suffers a devastating injury; Jolene, a hockey player who hates the game and and is grieving over the recent death of her father; and Amed, a soccer-loving, non-English speaking orphan who feels like an outsider since arriving in Australia after being raised in a refugee camp. Worse Things by Sally Murphy and Sarah Davis, selected as an Honour Book in the CBCA Book of the Year: Younger Readers category 2021. A touching and inspirational story about connections and the things that bind us all.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Authors include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, and Harryette Mullen.

This is the first dictionary to identify, chart, and explain in context the many proper names and place names that so famously enrich the poetry of William Butler Yeats and, just as famously, anchor that poetry to Ireland. In compiling this work, Lester I. Conner has relied upon Yeats's own prose, the principal Yeats criticism, and the writings of Yeats's friends and critics. The result is a work that warmly ushers us into the poems, where we find we are not strangers after all.

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over. Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art. Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.

Alphabetically arranged entries explain the devices, techniques, history, theory, and terminology of poetry from the Classical period to the present.

Tremper Longman III and Peter E. Enns edit this collection of 148 articles by over 90 contributors on Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ruth and Esther.