This anthology of classic and modern poetry features works selected and read by celebrated American movie actors and directors.

A dazzling new anthology of 180 contemporary poems, selected and introduced by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Inspired by Billy Collins’s poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, Poetry 180 is the perfect anthology for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that are an immediate pleasure. A 180-degree turn implies a turning back—in this case, to poetry. A collection of 180 poems by the most exciting poets at work today, Poetry 180 represents the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance. Open the anthology to any page and discover a new poem to cherish, or savor all the poems, one at a time, to feel the full measure of contemporary poetry’s vibrance and abundance. With poems by Catherine Bowman, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, Edward Hirsch, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Frances Mayes, Paul Muldoon, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt, Mary Jo Salter, Charles Simic, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, and many more.

Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world. Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year. “Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón “As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell “Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems' structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.

Poems are made to read OUT LOUD! A wittily illustrated anthology of poems, designed to be read aloud. 20 poems by the award winning â??Joseph Coelho will arm children with techniques for lifting poetry off the page and performing with confidence. Perfect for confident children and shy readers alike, this book teaches all sorts of clever ways to performing poetry. Children will learn 20 techniques for reading aloud by trying out 20 funny and thoughtful original poems by the much loved and award winning performance poet, Joseph Coelho. There are tongue twisters, poems to project, poems to whisper, poems to make you laugh. There are poems to perform to a whole class and others to whisper in somebody's ear. Richly textured, warm and stylish illustration by Daniel Gray-Barnett bring each page to life. "Poetry for children is dead. Really? Not when there are young poets like Joseph Coelho" ~ Books for Keeps

The NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the author of YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL “A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief.” —NPR “A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal.” —People For fans of Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life’s challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience. When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

Since the publication of the bestselling Sounding the Seasons, Malcolm Guite has repeatedly been asked for more sonnets. This new collection offers a sequence of 50 sonnets that focus on many passages in the Gospels: the Beatitudes, parables and miracles, teachings on the Kingdom, and the ‘hard sayings’ - Jesus’ challenging demands with which we wrestle. In addition this collection includes: •A sequence of seven sonnets on 'The Wilderness', exploring mysterious stories of divine encounter such as Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. •Poetic reflections on music, hospitality and ecology. •Seven short poems celebrating the days of creation. •A biblical index pairing the poems with scripture readings for use in worship.

With a powerful introduction by Ross Gay and a moving afterword by Sidney Clifton, this special anniversary edition of The Book of Light offers new meditations and insights on one of the most beloved voices of the 20th century. Though The Book of Light opens with thirty-nine names for light, we soon learn the most meaningful name is Lucille—daughter, mother, proud Black woman. Known for her ability to convey multitudes in few words, Clifton writes into the shadows—her father’s violations, a Black neighborhood bombed, death, loss—all while illuminating the full spectrum of human emotion: grief and celebration, anger and joy, empowerment and so much grace. A meeting place of myth and the Divine, The Book of Light exists “between starshine and clay” as Clifton’s personas allow us to bear the world’s weight with Atlas and witness conversations between Lucifer and God. While names and dates mark this text as a social commentary responding to her time, it is haunting how easily this collection serves as a political palimpsest of today. We leave these poems inspired—Clifton shows us Superman is not our hero. Our hero is the Black female narrator who decides to live. And what a life she creates! “Won’t you celebrate with me?”

A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

A fearless, wide-ranging book on the state of poetry and American literary culture by Tony Hoagland, the author of What Narcissism Means to Me Live American poetry is absent from our public schools. The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose shades are drawn. This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its vitality, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity, its plaintive truth-telling, and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture's more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak. —from "Twenty Poems That Could Save America" Twenty Poems That Could Save America presents insightful essays on the craft of poetry and a bold conversation about the role of poetry in contemporary culture. Essays on the "vertigo" effects of new poetry give way to appraisals of Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Dean Young. At the heart of this book is an honesty and curiosity about the ways poetry can influence America at both the private and public levels. Tony Hoagland is already one of this country's most provocative poets, and this book confirms his role as a restless and perceptive literary and cultural critic.