“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

*Over 90,000 copies sold* Long an anchor text for college and junior college writing classes, this illuminating and invaluable guide has become a favorite for beginning poets and an ever-valuable reference for more advanced students who want to sharpen their craft, expand their technical skills, and engage their deepest memories and concerns.This edition adds Steve Kowit’s famous essay on poetics “The Mystique of the Difficult Poem,” in which he argues stirringly and forcefully that a poem need not be obscure to be great. Ideal for teachers who have been searching for a way to inspire students with a love for writing--and reading--contemporary poetry. It is a book about shaping your memories and passions, your pleasures, obsessions, dreams, secrets, and sorrows into the poems you have always wanted to write. If you long to create poetry that is magical and moving, this is the book you've been looking for. Here are chapters on the language and music of poetry, the art of revision, traditional and experimental techniques, and how to get your poetry started, perfected, and published. Not the least of the book's pleasures are model poems by many of the best contemporary poets, illuminating craft discussions, and the author's detailed suggestions for writing dozens of poems about your deepest and most passionate concerns.

Crystal Lightner writes in this anthology of poetry about life as seen through her eyes. Influenced by her many experiences, trials, tribulations and events in her life; she shares her views and messages of hope, pride and compassion through her words which she calls Life Poetry.

A PASSION FOR POETRY Why poetry? Why has this ancient craft existed throughout time, continuing even into our fast-paced age of moderncy and technology? Perhaps two reasons: 1) The human condition still demands we ask who we are, what we are and why we are; and 2) space is limited in this form of writing requiring the poet reduce his thoughts into a quick-read format. Puns, pundits, quotes, poetry and prose capsulate 90% of everything the human race believes to be important and true Poets are avatars who define the nature and meaning of our roles. They reduce the fabric of our existence to the simplest ingredients of mind, soul, bones, sinew and desire. It is the forum that speaks to all, reaches all, touches all, teaches all, questions all, answers all.

An autobiographical collaboration of subsequent journal entries of a poet delves behind the scenes of solitary tedium and introspection when a spark catches between the heart and brain and transforms into a pulsing literary song on the printed page. Based in Brooklyn, New York in the twentieth century, the written word comes alive through a city dweller that gives his life for his art in the all-too-often darkness of poverty and the clash with social expectations. While a friendly narrative of a life story threads into a likeable character, the poetic expressions, observations, and essays surpass politics, social issues of the day, and religion and exposes the richness of beauty and the limitations of being human. Melancholic in tone, the writing dares to challenge the astute reader to explore the deeper and unspoken aspects of the human condition.

More than 200 poems collected from Adrienne Rich's first six books, plus a dozen others of those decades. From their first publication, when Rich was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of her poetry have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory. In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

Sixty years of poems from pioneering writer, activist, and intellectual Adrienne Rich—“the Blake of American letters” (Nadine Gordimer). Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. This generous selection from all nineteen of Rich’s published poetry volumes encompasses her best-known work—the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including “Diving into the Wreck,” “Planetarium,” and “The Phenomenology of Anger”—and offers the full range of her evolution as a poet. From poems leading up to her feminist breakthrough through bold later work such as “North American Time” and “Calle Visión,” Selected Poems celebrates Rich’s prophetic vision as well as the inventiveness that shaped her enduring art.