"Devin Becker's Shame | Shame is a brilliant debut collection. Here, the prose poem has been re-imagined as a cinematic vignette, yet rooted as deeply in the American Northwest as anything in Richard Hugo and David Lynch. Raw, intimate, and elliptical in its metaphysics, Devin Becker's poetry captures an idiomatic recklessness while navigating those angular narratives of our contemporary lives."—David St. JohnDevin Becker grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, an...

"When you're dumb enough for long enough, you're gonna meet someone too smart to love you, and they're gonna love you anyway, and it's gonna go so poorly," Neil Hilborn writes in his debut full-length collection, OUR NUMBERED DAYS. In 2013, Hilborn's poem "OCD" went viral, and has amassed over 11 million views to date. While this collection ruminates on love, heartbreak, and mental illness, these poems are anything but saccharine. Hilborn uses the same humor and self-deprecation that prope...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This inspiring meditation on kindness from the author of Lincoln in the Bardo is based on his popular commencement address.Three months after George Saunders gave a graduation address at Syracuse University, a transcript of that speech was posted on the website of The New York Times, where its simple, uplifting message struck a deep chord. Within days, it had been shared more than one million times. Why? Becaus...

In Drops Like Stars, the New York Times bestselling author of Love Wins explores the complex relationship between suffering and creativity. Rob Bell (“One of the country’s most influential evangelical pastors” —New York Times) suggests that art can be found in the agony of our lives. Fans of the thought-provoking works of Donald Miller, N.T. Wright, Brian McLaren, and Timothy Keller will find true enlightenment in this thoughtful and engaging book from this vibrant, progressive voice for a...

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well.In this fortuitous collaboration, two spirited poets, themselves teachers of poetry, offer guidance to aspiring beginners and those who have already published. Brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing are each followed by distinctive writing exercises. ("Compare an actual family photograph with one that was nev...

How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into LiteratureFrom drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers.Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same f...

Most poets are or have been at one time or another members of what Mark Strand here calls “The Midnight Club”: they are insomniacs, or feel most productive in the middle of the night, or, if nothing else, are people whose work requires an openness to the dreams, visions, and scraps of inspired language that may drift across our path in the wee hours. In this selection, drawn from Knopf’s Poem-a-Day program (the daily e-mails we’ve sent to our fans every April for the last dozen years or mo...

An “optimistic, warm, unpretentious” (San Francisco Chronicle) guide to unlocking your inner poet, blending thoughtful anecdotes and practical exercises to foster inspiration and promote creativity“This is a wonderful book—smart, wide-eyed, joyful, helpful, inspiring. You’re going to love it, and love writing poetry more for having read it.”—Anne Lamott, author of Bird by BirdIt’s impossible to teach anyone to write a ...

The Little Soul and the Sun is a simple and powerful story that brings children a very profound truth: there is not absolute good or bad--that underneath all that happens in the world, all that we call "good" and all that we call "bad," is love. Your child will discover a God that she or he can love, because God is love, as are all the Little Souls who are a part of God. And perhaps parents, too, will rediscover who they really are.

Writing in Community is a book of inspiration and encouragement for writers who want to reach deep within themselves and write to their fullest potential. There is magic in a successful writing group. This book helps writers tap into that magic, and with gentle wisdom and humor, experience unprecedented breakthroughs in creativity.

When Patti Smith was plagued with writer’s block — “scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems” — playwright Sam Shepard advised her, “When you hit a wall, just kick it in.” In these pages, Abercrombie shows readers how to do just that. Like a workout with a top trainer, her writing exercises warm up, stretch, and build creative muscle. Quotes from famous writers inspire each day’s exercise. Though Abercrombie says readers need only commit five minutes to eac...

Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry is an exciting collection from poets who teach both in and outside academia. Fifty-eight poets in various stages of their careers have contributed sixty-one exercises ranging from quick and simple to involved and multi-layered. In seven chapters, ranging from "Springboards to Imagination" to "Chancing the Accidental" to "Complicating the Poem," each exercise includes not only clear step-by-step instructions, but numerous poems that exemplify the su...