List

Voted one of the best poetry collections of 2019 by readers on Goodreads! Bestselling and Goodreads Choice Award winning poet Trista Mateer takes a magical approach to self-care with her new collection, Aphrodite Made Me Do It.

In this empowering and feminist retelling, Mateer transforms the mythology of the goddess into 224 pages of modern poetry and full-color artwork. Broken into sections alternating between the perspective of The Poet and Aphrodite herself, the work within tackles the timeless topic of love--romantic, platonic, and self-love. The collection addresses issues like heartbreak, sexuality, womanhood, trauma, and the restorative power in taking control of your own lore, speaking your truths, and rewriting your origin story. If you let her, by the end of this book, Aphrodite will make you believe in the possibility of your own healing.

If you were only made to be beautiful, we wouldn't have put you down here in the dirt.Perfect for fans of Amanda Lovelace, Nikita Gill, Rupi Kaur, Elizabeth Acevedo, Rick Riordan, and Madeline Miller; or anyone interested in Greek myths, tarot, and Instagram poetry.

Try Trista Mateer's other book of poetry, Honeybee.

By the author of the wildly successful 2am Thoughts

and Nineteen

comes Rooms of the Mind

-- a journey into the parts of our psyche that can either hide and protect us, or expose us to all that exists. Here you'll find an exploration of pain, heartbreak and wonder at what the world might bring us next.

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 USA Today bestseller

Amanda Gorman's electrifying and historic poem "The Hill We Climb," read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition.

"Stunning." --CNN
"Dynamic." --NPR
"Deeply rousing and uplifting." --Vogue


On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe with her call for unity and healing. Her poem "The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country" can now be cherished in this special gift edition, perfect for any reader looking for some inspiration. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this remarkable keepsake celebrates the promise of America and affirms the power of poetry.

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition

Gold Medal Winner of the 3x3 Illustration Annual No. 14

A Penguin Classic
 
This edition of The Sonnets is edited with an introduction by John Hollander and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

When Barbara Abercrombie's husband died, she found the language of condolence irritating, no matter how well intended. "My husband had not gone to a better place as if he were off on a holiday. He had not passed like clouds overhead, nor was he my late husband as if he'd missed a train. I had not lost him as if I'd been careless, and for sure, none of it was for the best." She yearned instead for words that acknowledged the reality of death, spoke about the sorrow and loneliness (and perhaps even guilt and anger), and might even point the way toward hope and healing. She found those words in the writings gathered here.

The Language of Loss is a book to dip into and read slowly, a collection of poems and prose to lead you through the phases of grief. The selections follow an arc that mirrors the path of many mourners — from abject loss and feeling unmoored, to glimmers of promise and possibility, through to gratitude for the love they knew. These writings, which express what often feels ineffable, will accompany those who grieve, offering understanding and solace.

"You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same." That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?

With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.

A selection of the very best from one of America's most thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, "likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life's most important questions."

Thomas Lynch--like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams--is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power:

I have steady work, a circle of friends
and lunch on Thursdays with the Rotary.
I have a wife, unspeakably beautiful,
a daughter and three sons, a cat, a car,
good credit, taxes, and mortgage payments
and certain duties here. Notably,
when folks get horizontal, breathless, still:
life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car.

Thomas Lynch spent his career as an undertaker in Midwest America--and in his off-hours became a writer of exceptional insight. Publishers Weekly calls him, "A poet with something to say and something worth listening to." This collection presents 140 of his greatest poems drawn from his previous books, Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life in Milford, Grimalkin, The Sin-Eater, and Walking Papers. This is a collection for readers who love all life's questions and mysteries--big and small.

"Thomas Lynch's poems take us under the apparent world to where consciousness is alive and shimmering with joy and loss, blindness and epiphany."--Billy Collins

How to Feed a Horse is a manuscript in three parts: One, "Ranch Poems," activities, contemplations, awareness of the creek environment. Two, "Numerology," disparate poems that invite us to consider the absurd in our language, politics, history, and human relationships. Three, "Her(e)," conversations with a network of women, some imagined, some historic, some intimate. The author's preoccupations with climate change and our deteriorating planetary environment surface as she gives herself over to be witness to the landscape, its decline and perseverance, its glory and rich legacy. The poems are also love poems; they show the ecstasy and shock of the now.

Some Bodies in the Grief Bed is Rick Benjamin's latest attempt to find the intersection of the human and the non-human in the context of this earth's ecology. A poem about migrations butterflies and others make might be followed by another appearing in the life of a family; and this poet is always trying to face down the distinction between them. At the same time, he is deeply interested in every detail of either: giraffe's eating an Acacia's topmost leaves and pods; the way the sound of percussive roofs in rain bring up memories a boy might have thought he'd buried. These are offered as equal parts of one book, planets orbiting around the same sun. As the title suggests, Some Bodies in the Grief Bed evolves around loss, but also those moments of ecstasy and joy that are attached to them. As Martín suggests, such grief is also and always just another opportunity to praise everything and everyone we've been lucky enough to hold and have in this world without keeping. This book reminds us both to hold each moment and to be more mindful of what it's made (out) of-- the organic, impermanent nature of our "passing love" (Langston Hughes) on this planet.

Praised for a voice with the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet (Ilya Kaminsky), James Longenbach explores a life lived with the knowledge of its end in his sixth collection. These luminous, lyrical poems pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we will not?

Forever explores the meaning of love, from its discovery in the first poem, Two People, to its maintenance in the last, Forever. In between, the volume explores the precariously imminent demise of all that we love?the finite lives of other people, the mortal beauty of Venice--all thrown into urgent relief by the poet's own cancer diagnosis.

Evoking the vivid dailiness of domestic life...and the specificity and poignance of memories, these lyrics are intimately personal, achingly autobiographical (Langdon Hammer, American Scholar). Forthright, moving, and wry, the poems in Forever look back gratefully--excitedly--on a lifetime of self-making and self-shattering events.

"I celebrate myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass."So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literature.The publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 was a landmark event in literary history. Ralph Waldo Emerson judged the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." Nothing like the volume had ever appeared before. Everything about it--the unusual jacket and title page, the exuberant preface, the twelve free-flowing, untitled poems embracing every realm of experience--was new. The 1855 edition broke new ground in its relaxed style, which prefigured free verse; in its sexual candor; in its images of racial bonding and democratic togetherness; and in the intensity of its affirmation of the sanctity of the physical world.This Anniversary Edition captures the typeface, design and layout of the original edition supervised by Whitman himself. Today's readers get a sense of the "ur-text" of Leaves of Grass, the first version of this historic volume, before Whitman made many revisions of both format and style. The volume also boasts an afterword by Whitman authority David Reynolds, in which he discusses the 1855 edition in its social and cultural contexts: its background, its reception, and its contributions to literary history. There is also an appendix containing the early responses to the volume, including Emerson's letter, Whitman's three self-reviews, and the twenty other known reviews published in various newspapers and magazines.This special volume will be a must-have keepsake for fans of Whitman and lovers of American poetry.

The Edda is our richest treasure trove of Norse mythology--starting with a creation myth, passing through the struggle of the gods, giants, dwarves, and elves for survival and supremacy, and ending in the Ragnarok, a final all-engulfing battle wherein the world itself is destroyed. Norse mythology has captured many imaginations, and inspired epics including Wagner's The Ring and J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

The Prose Edda, also known as the Younger Edda, Snorri's Edda and, historically, simply as Edda, was written in Old Norse in Iceland during the thirteenth century. In 1220, Snorri Sturluson, a respected poet, parliamentarian, and a visitor to the royal court of Norway, decided to compile the myths and poetic conventions of Norse mythology before they vanished under the influence of Christianity and the verse forms of Europe. The result is the Prose Edda, a unique glimpse of early Norse mythology.

Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), poet, historian, the most powerful chieftain in Iceland and "Lawspeaker" of the Icelandic Parliament, The Althing is a significant figure in Icelandic history. His extensive writings beyond the Prose Edda provide insight into Scandinavian history and are among the earliest records of the discovery of Vinland (North America).

This unabridged edition includes introduction, notes and an extensive list of alternative names

Selected poems of Maureen N. McLane

More Anon gathers a selection of poems from Maureen N. McLane’s critically acclaimed first five books of poetry.

McLane, whose 2014 collection This Blue was a finalist for the National Book Award, is a poet of wit and play, of romanticism and intellect, of song and polemic. More Anon presents her work anew. The poems spark with life, and the concentrated selection showcases her energy and style.

As Parul Seghal wrote in Bookforum, “To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the fragment, the polemic and the elegy.” In More Anon, McLane—a poet, scholar, and prizewinning critic—displays the full range of her vertiginous mind and daring experimentation.

Featuring a new introduction from the author, Superdoom: Selected Poems brings together the best of Broder's three cult out-of-print poetry collections--When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone--as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.

Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder's language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, Superdoom is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls' night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali's conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history's grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives.

Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine's Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book's final section, "Little Book of Woe," which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness.

At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you'll hear in return is "a lifetime of song."