Poetry

In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing recovers the essentially human stories at the heart of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919: of the people who took part in it, and of the lives that were marked by it. This most intense of the riots of the USA's 'Red Summer' lasted eight days, resulting in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries; it was a signal and traumatic event which has now shaped the history of the city where it took place for a century. As well as telling the tale of the riot itse...

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt o...

So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over 70 poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good. American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and th...

This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. T...

translated by Jonathan Galassi Revisited and reorganized over his lifetime, this extraordinary work was described by Leopardi as a 'reliquary' for his ideas, feelings and deepest preoccupations. It encompasses drastic shifts in tone and material, and includes early personal elegies and idylls; radical public poems on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as 'To Silvia'; and later masterworks such as 'The Setting of the Moon', written not long befor...

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once. Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is d...

In this moving, critical and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence - whether linguistic or physical - which has impacted the lives of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Mark Duggan and others. Citizen weaves essays, images and poetry together to form a powerful testament to the individual and collective ...

Award-winning poet Debora Greger grew up in Washington near the site of the Hanford atomic plant, which, unbeknownst to its workers, manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The high school team was named the Bombers,” she writes. “The school ring had a mushroom cloud on it.” In Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters she uses what The Nation has characterized as her “deadpan wit, intelligence and marvelous insight” to explore the legacy of a Catholic girlhood spent in a landscape ...

Here is the book in which Claudia Rankine first developed the 'American Lyric' form which makes her Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combination of poetry, lyric essay, photography and visual art, virtuosically deployed. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's meditation on the self bewildered by race riots, terrorism, medicated depression and television's ubiquitous influence. Written in the years after 9/11, this is an unflinching and deeply felt meditation o...

Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons. Her visual art is spare, playful and poignant: a cereal-box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a te...

These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? Ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrai...

Carroll, a diarist and rock performer, is best known for his coming-of-age memoir The Basketball Diaries, which became an instant classic when it was first published in 1978 and then a national bestseller when a film version of the book was released in 1995. Carroll initially made his reputation as a poet, and has won acclaim and comparisons to everyone from Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara for his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery. This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll's Living ...

'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. What do you think would happen? People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.' When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through...

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic a...

translated by Daniel Ladinsky To Persians, the poems of Hafiz are not “classical literature” from a remote past but cherished wisdom from a dear and intimate friend that continues to be quoted in daily life. With uncanny insight, Hafiz captures the many forms and stages of love. His poetry outlines the stages of the mystic's “path of love”—a journey in which love dissolves personal boundaries and limitations to join larger processes of growth and transformation. With this stunning collection,...

When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.Paperback: 128 PagesProduct Dimensi...

In this luminous collection, Daniel Ladinsky--best known for his bestselling interpretations of the great Sufi poet Hafiz--brings together the timeless work of twelve of the world's finest spiritual writers, six from the East and six from the West. Once again, Ladinsky reveals his talent for creating profound and playful renditions of classic poems for a modern audience. Rumi's joyous, ecstatic love poems; St. Francis's loving observations of nature through the eyes of Catholicism; Kabir's wi...

When Anne Sexton took her own life in October 1974, she left behind a body of work which had already, in less than two decades of writing, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, established her as one of the foremost voices of her generation, and shocked America by breaking multiple taboos of subject matter, from insanity, depression and addiction to menstruation, adultery and the figure of the witch. Sexton's name is legendary. Her poetry is read around the world, translated into over thirty...

Translated by David Raeburn Ovid's sensuous and witty poem begins with the creation of the world and brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into extraordinary new beings. Including the well-known stories of Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy, the Metamorphoses has influenced wr...

Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic.Paperback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mm ISBN: 9780241388945Published by Penguin Books

What if a deer did porn? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Do men deserve to be hypnotized for their crimes? And what would the tit-pics of famous dead Americans Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson really look like? Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is the only book that dares to answer these questions - or, at the very least, to come tantalisingly close before dancing mournfully away again, its pert rump twirling through the artificial night of the last great gorilla actor's costu...

From one of the truly singular and beloved poets of contemporary Italy, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city and--always, and above all--love. This volume is the first substantial gathering of the best of Patrizia Cavalli's work from her first six collections, from 1974 to 2006, translated by a selection of renowned poets. By turns thoughtful and sly, sensual and comic, charismatic and profound, these are works perfectly attuned to the pleasures and pains of everyday l...

For the past fifty years, Louise Gluck has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Gluck has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest living poets. From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the...

What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplate...

In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity. Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multi...

Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.Paperback: 496 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141181110Published by Penguin Books

translated by Antony Wood Alexander Pushkin established what we know as Russian literature. This collection includes his strongly personal lyric verse, which springs spontaneously from his everyday life - his numerous loves, his exile, his hectic life in St Petersburg - while the narrative poems here, from exotic Southern tales to comic parodies and fairy tales of enchanted tsars, display his endless ability to surprise. His landmark work The Bronze Horseman, with its ghostly central figure o...

Translated by Kareem James Abu-zeid and Ivan Eubanks Cloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him. Written in the cosmopolitan...

'I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic' Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.Paperback: 144 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780241396865Published by Penguin Books

For the poet and activist June Jordan, neither poetry nor activism could easily be disentangled from the other. Her storied career came to chronicle a living, breathing history of the struggles that defined the USA in the latter half of the twentieth century; and her poetry, accordingly, put its dazzling stylistic range to use in exploring issues of gender, race, immigration, representation and much else besides. Here, above all, are sinuous, lashing and passionate lines, virtuosic in their m...

As in life, she was a pain in the arsein death. He could hear her roaringall the way from the fifth circle,'Why the hell do you get to be in abetter circle than me, I'm wrathfulbecause of your lust -' Deploying a chorus of voices both ancient and modern to explore a world of sexual politics and singles cruises, dysfunctional families and psychoanalysis, awkward cohabitations and self-help guides for the would-be Dream Girl, this is the third collection from a unique poetic talent: observant, ...

The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the peace of wild things.Paperback: 144 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141987125Published by Penguin Books

Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running over three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations, this anthology offers an illuminating introdu...

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse contains over 700 poems from the third century to the twentieth, including both tanka ('short poem') and haiku, and covering such classic themes as nature, love, partings and time. Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The cliches of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and...

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerou...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Poets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other and in the cosmos. This anthology serves as a truly holistic and global survey to a lyric conversation about the divine that has been going on for ...

This is the prose poem: a 'genre with an oxymoron for a name', one of literature's great open secrets, and the home for over 150 years of extraordinary work by many of the world's most beloved writers. This uniquely wide-ranging anthology gathers essential pieces of writing from every stage of the form's evolution, beginning with the great flowering of recent years before moving in reverse order through the international experiments of the 20th century and concluding with the prose poem's beg...

Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed.Paperback: 80 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141984933Published by Penguin Books

The mysterious quatrains of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus have long proved captivating for their predictions. Nostradamus has been credited with anticipating the Great Fire of London, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today, as the world grapples with financial meltdowns, global terrorism, and environmental disasters—as well as the Mayan prediction of the apocalypse on December 21, 2012—his prophecies of doom have assumed heightened releva...

The most famous work of spiritual fiction of the twentieth century, The Prophet is rooted in Kahlil Gibran's own experience as an immigrant and provides inspiration to anyone feeling adrift in a world in flux. As a prophet named Almustafa is about to board a ship to travel back to his homeland after twelve years in exile, he is stopped by a group of people who ask him to share his wisdom before he leaves. In twenty-eight poetic essays, he does so, offering profound and timeless insights on ma...

translated by Edith Grossman A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Góngora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is at onc...

Ever since it exploded into Vietnam's cultural life two centuries ago, The Song of Kiều has been one of that nation's most beloved and defining central myths. It recounts the tragic fate of the beautiful singer and poet Kiều, who agrees to marry to save her family from debt but is tricked into working in a brothel. Over the course of a swift-moving story involving kidnap, war, jealous wives and rebel heroes, she will become a queen, wife, nun, slave, victim and avenger, surviving through the ...

'So open it anywhere, then anywhere, then anywhere again. We're sure it won't be long before you find a poem that brings you smack into the newness and strangeness of the living present, just as it did us.' In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond. Above all, they have sought poetry that retains, in one way or another, a powerful timelessness: words with the thrilling capacity to...

The complete lyrics by the iconic vocalist of Florence + the Machine, beautifully interwoven with poems, sketches and jottings from her never-before-seen scrapbooks. This is a glimpse into the work and creative processes of a fearlessly unique musician - packed full of Florence's on-the-page musings and reproductions of the art that has inspired her dramatic, genre-defying music.Paperback: 336 PagesProduct Dimensions: 170 x 219 mmISBN: 9780241983829Published by Penguin Books

Believed by scholars to be the inspiration for Tristan and Isolde, Vis and Ramin was written between 1050 and 1055 and is considered the first epic Persian romance. At the heart of the story is Vis, daughter of the queen of Mah and promised to Mobad, King of Marv. Against a background of court intrigue, broken promises, and open conflict, Vis finds herself escorted to her future husband by his brother, Ramin - an impetuous prince who cannot help falling in love with his charge and jeopardizin...

Even the men in black armor, the ones Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade Sizing up the heart's familiar meat? In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad...

Edited by Terrance Hayes Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world. This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote ...