Poems about the joys and struggles of complex, contemporary life—and heartbreak.Written against a backdrop of heartbreak and loneliness and spanning the geography of Cincinnati, Detroit, and New York, this is a complex, intriguing book of poetry that plays dynamically with language as each new reading brings forth something unseen from the previous reading. Highlighting the varied modes of writing that Tyrone Williams has mastered—the fractal lyric, the metahistori...

Incisive observations on popular music, poetry, and culture, and on the ways that gender, race, class, and contemporary politics shape artistic production.Poet and critic Tyrone Williams (1954–2024) was a prolific reviewer of poetry, poetics, and culture, publishing nearly 150 reviews between 1975 and 2023. Starting with his omnibus reviews of music in a college student newspaper, this collectionpresents a selection of Williams's reviews that address prominent topi...

The Heart is a book of true events told as stories by two narrators, the heart and the mind.Each chapter takes you to a different place and time in the author's life. He has revisited these moments to view them through the emotions of the heart and the contemplation of the mind.This is a book of battle and war--the war that rages inside every human being. A war for dominance and control. The power to determine what choices and actions every person will take. Only the heart ...

Tyrone Williams reveals that every act of communication is a speculation, and that the spectacles we must use to see and assess it—those of our own particular condition and conditioning—are never without qualifying contour and coloration. Williams is a keen observer of the distortions of such lenses, as the titles of the two sections of this collection suggest—first is an “Eshuneutics” (interpretation purportedly infused with an Eshu’s sensibility). But the trickster’s eye can turn to mock...

A little step into the world of a hopeless romantic who describes love at it's worst and best in his heart racing journey. This was written by a heartbroken soul as he passively describes how his fear for love came about. Full of heartfelt words and rhyming poetic flow to mellow your heartbeat in the essence of passivity.

With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century’s accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been culled from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States.The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples of what was then...

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across...

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection ...

r.h. Sin's final volume in the Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel series expands on the passion and vigor of his first two installments. His stanzas inspire strength through the raw, emotional energy and the vulnerability of his poems. Relationships, love, pain, and fortitude are powerfully rendered in his poetry, and his message of perseverance in the face of emotional turmoil cuts to the heart of modern-day life. At roughly 300 pages, this culminating volume will be his lengthiest yet.

Perfect for Mother’s Day, or for any day on which we wish to acknowledge this all-important bond, Mother is an awe-inspiring affirmation of the enduring love that exists in every corner of the globe.With her signature eloquence and heartfelt appreciation, renowned poet and national treasure Maya Angelou celebrates the first woman we ever knew: Mother. “You were always the heart of happiness to me,” she acknowledges in this loving tribute, “Bringing nougats...

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred social justice movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations about the reality of life—especially Black life—in America. One of the foremost voices in African American literature and a celebrated activist of her generation, she has been hailed as a healer and a sage, a powerful voice on issues of race, equality, violence, and discrimination.With Chasing Utopia, Giovanni demands that the prosai...

Though we have encountered our share of grief and troubles on this earth, we can still hold the line of beauty, form, and beat. No small accomplishment in a world as challenging as this one.”- from the prefaceI was born to grow,alongside my garden of plants,poemslikethis oneSo writes Alice Walker in this new book of poems, poems composed over the course of one year in response to joy and sorrow both personal and global: the death of loved...