In this classic text, the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In new essays for this revised edition, J...

" . . . a major addition to the literature on oral traditions." ―Journal of Religion in AfricaThis 750-year-old epic celebrates the exploits of the legendary founder of the Empire of Old Mali. It constitutes a virtual social, political, and cultural...

Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and, sometimes,...

Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.   There is no one...

The acclaimed second collection of poetry by Patricia Lockwood, Booker Prize finalist author of the novel No One Is Talking About This and the memoir Priestdaddy SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The...

A fearless, wide-ranging book on the state of poetry and American literary culture by Tony Hoagland, the author of What Narcissism Means to MeLive American poetry is absent from our public schools. The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of...

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize *...

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever wereJohn Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They...

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write...

This major interpretation of the life and art of Robert Lowell exposes the full relationship between the poetry and the personal and national experience to which it is so remarkably connected. Steven Axelrod proposes that the key to our understanding of...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street JournalAimless Love combines fifty new poems with...

Meet Wynona Stone. She's on track to lose her job, she doesn't love the weatherman she's sleeping with, and everything she tries (cosmetology, astrology) falls short. So she stays home making models, watching soaps, and staring down "doubt, a storm...

From the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Louise Glück, a daring and exuberant new collection. Moving through myths of the American landscape, the fatalism of American Puritanism, family history, New England winters, aesthetic...

"[Wright's] penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems are at once classically philosophical and freshly revealing" (Booklist)Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers...

“Poetry is leading us,” writes Alice Walker in The World Will Follow Joy. In this luminous collection―a bestseller in hardcover―the beloved writer offers sixty poems to inspire and incite. Penetrating and sensitive, playful and wise, these intensely...

Honored as a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" by Publishers Weekly"The book's a little crazy, packed with air quotes and brackets, jokes and condemnations, forms that explode across the page. Crazily enough, it's also packed with truth.”—NPR“The voice of...

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems!Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of...

This book by a major American poet is for poetry readers at all levels, academic and non-academic. It is a sequence of poems that will surprise and delight readers—in the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip, and an earthy dog who...