Explore the transcendent world of unity and ultimate beauty in Edgar Allan Poe’s verse in this complete poetry collection.Although best known for his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe was by nature and choice a poet. From his exquisite lyric “To Helen,” to his immortal masterpieces, “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “The Raven,” Poe stands beside the celebrated English romantic poets Shelley, Byron, and Keats, and his haunting, sensuous poetic vision profoundly influenc...

An acclaimed poet finds moral and spiritual connection in this fierce, dexterous volume.Balancing emotional openness with formal restraint, April Bernard proves once again a poet who “harmonizes the raucous and the classic, the songful and the wry, the courtly and the quick” (Wayne Koestenbaum). Throughout her sixth collection, Bernard searches for “the world behind the world,” a spiritual realm of justice and peace, music and grace. The host of saints present in t...

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomedJohn Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice—even an unpopular one—for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that call...

"Bernard has written a gorgeous, tough, haunting book."—Frank BidartApril Bernard's idiosyncratic and profoundly emotional voice combines flights of fancy, moral sternness, and wit in broadly explorative poems—from a memoir sequence about the East Village in the 1980s, to "disheveled" sonnets of self-interrogation, to darkly comic hallucinations.

What is a just response to persons seeking to desist from criminal behavior? In America, over the last several decades mass incarceration has emerged as the prevailing policy response to crime and reoffending. The majority of those who are imprisoned will be released, and those that are released tend to return to communities challenged by high rates of violence, crime, unemployment, and poverty. In these conditions, without some type of intervention, persons with criminal histories are lik...

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599).The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could displa...

“It is as if the poet set fire to her earlier work and wrote these poems in the light of those flames.”—Mark WunderlichApril Bernard explores subjects ranging from childhood anger to adult grief, from a museum of skulls to the Western movie genre. By turns playful, sorrowful, and sharp-edged, Brawl and Jag stands as Bernard’s most personal and accessible collection to date.From “Anger”:I always lie when I always sayI did...

"In Romanticism, the untrammeled Romantic in us struggles for expression in Art. The winner-no question-is the reader."—New Haven ReviewRomanticism explores and challenges the central ideas of high Romanticism: the tragedy and gallantry of the individual’s life journey, the appeal of revolution and violence, the beckoning forces of Nature, and the estrangement from but constant longing for God. Here is a powerful argument for the primacy of strong...

Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins.With his distinct voice and accessible language, America’s two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.Like the present book’s title, Collins’s poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”–but also with quiet observation, int...

"Lies, wishes, fantasies—all the weaponry of compassionate imagination at war with society—deploy with delicious satire in [Muske-Dukes's] first book." — Library JournalA poet, novelist, critic, and essayist, Carol Muske-Dukes has established herself as one of the preeminent talents of modern American writing. Birth, loss, imprisonment, and renewal are among the subjects of Camouflage, her first published book of poems. These twenty-eight poems ar...

A surreal new collection from an acclaimed poetHallucinogenic plants chant in chorus. A thoughtful dog grants an interview. A caterpillar offers life advice. Amy Gerstler’s newest collection of poetry, Dearest Creature, marries fact and fiction in a menagerie of dramatic monologues, twisted love poems, and epistolary pleadings. Drawing on sources as disparate as Lewis Carroll and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as abnormal psychology, etiquette, and a...

Leave it to the graceful Marie Ponsot, now in her late eighties, to view her life in poetry as easeful. As she tells us, pondering what stones can hear, “Between silence and sound / we are balancing darkness, / making light of it.” In this celebratory collection, Ponsot makes light, in both senses, of all she touches, and her pleasure in offering these late poems is infectious. After more than a half century at her craft, she describes her poetic preferences unpretentiously thus: “no fruit...