Poetry Month

Thirty-seven LA writers map the scattered and diverse literary landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Stories, chronicles, and poems by both well-established and up-and-coming young writers about how it was to come to LA or what it was like to grow up there, about the ocean and the desert, the entertainment industry and earthquakes, riots and racism, fires and freaks. Contributors include: Jervey Tervalon, Aimee Bender, Benjamin Weissman, Sesshu Foster, Richard Rayner, Jeffrey McDaniel, Amy Uyematsu, Russell Leong, Aleida Rodriguez, Luis Alfaro, Bia Lowe, Amy Gerstler, and others. "The result of Ulin's labors is ... an engaging and satisfying collection of fiction, poetry, and essays about L.A.; the book features mostly unpublished work by both established writers like Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight), Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) and Richard Rayner (Los Angeles Without a Map), and by less well-known ones like Russell Leong, Aleida Rodriguez and Samantha Dunn."--New York Newsday "David L. Ulin has assembled the literary equivalent of the Watts Towers: a dazzling dreamscape made from the most ordinary, terrifying, and euphoric debris of L.A. life."--Mike Davis "This regional anthology is, in the best sense, all over the map. Broad in scope and varied in style, Another City offers some of the most exciting, unpredictable writing a reader could hope for."--Bernard Cooper "Los Angeles has been called America's first postmodern city, and David L. Ulin's brilliantly chosen cast of extraordinary writers brings that hypothesis exquisitely to life."--Carolyn See "Another City bids a long goodbye to the exile tradition of writing about Southern California that prevailed in the last century. Its contributors are Angelenos 'native or born-again' who embrace L.A. as hometown and body of fate. Their collective dispatches are confessional, nostalgic, tender, harrowing, often very funny, occasionally exhibitionistic, unfailingly vivid and evocative."--David Reid, editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A. David Ulin has lived in Los Angeles since 1991. From 1993-96 he was the book editor of the LA Weekly. He is a former Los Angeles Times critic and is an Assistant English Professor at the University of Southern California.

The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca has introduced generations of American readers to mesmerizing poetry since 1955. Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences--Spanish folk traditions from his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and his friends the surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel--stream throughout Lorca's work. Poets represented here as translators are as diverse as Stephen Spender, Langston Hughes, Ben Belitt, William Jay Smith, and W.S. Merwin.

Jose Garcia Villa was an elusive figure in American literary circles. At the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s, Villa was part of an elite literary circle that included Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. His first book of poetry, Have Come, Am Here, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1942, the first of many other awards. Yet, despite numerous accolades, he has been largely dismissed in the United States where his reputation was built and has been criticized in Asian American studies for not being "ethnic" enough. The Anchored Angel rediscovers the work of this fierce: conoclast by reprinting a selection of his writing and providing rich secondary materials, including a complete bibliography.

The Gorgeous Nothings -- the first full-color facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts ever to appear -- is a deluxe edition of her late writings, presenting this crucially important, experimental late work exactly as she wrote it on scraps of envelopes. A never-before-possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets. The book presents all the envelope writings -- 52 -- reproduced life-size in full color both front and back, with an accompanying transcription to aid in the reading, allowing us to enjoy this little-known but important body of Dickinson's writing. Envisioned by the artist Jen Bervin and made possible by the extensive research of the Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, this book offers a new understanding and appreciation of the genius of Emily Dickinson.

In 1952 and 1953 as he wandered around America, Jack Kerouac jotted down spontaneous prose poems, or "sketches" as he called them, on small notebooks that he kept in his shirt pockets. The poems recount his travels--New York, North Carolina, Lowell (Massachusetts, Kerouac's birthplace), San Francisco, Denver, Kansas, Mexico--observations, and meditations on art and life. The poems are often strung together so that over the course of several of them, a little story--or travelogue--appears, complete in itself. Published for the first time, Book of Sketches offers a luminous, intimate, and transcendental glimpse of one of the most original voices of the twentieth century at a key time in his literary and spiritual development.

Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The cliches of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse therefore contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas' body at the morgue of St. Vincent's Hospital.) Since its initial publication in 1953, this book has become the definitive edition of the poet's work. Thomas wrote "Prologue" addressed to "my readers, the strangers" -- an introduction in verse that was the last poem he would ever write. Also included are classics such as "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," and "Fern Hill" that have influenced generations of artists from Bob Dylan (who changed his last name from Zimmerman in honor of the poet), to John Lennon (The Beatles included Thomas' portrait on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band); this collection even appears in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road when it is retrieved from the rubble of a bookshelf.      And death shall have no dominion.      Dead men naked they shall be one      With the man in the wind and the west moon;      When their bones are picked clean and their clean bones gone,      They shall have stars at elbow and foot;      Though they go mad they shall be sane,      Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again,      Though lovers be lost love shall not:      And death shall have no dominion.              (From "And Death Shall Have No Dominion")

First published in 1886, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations?the work of a poet who had abandoned poetry before the age of twenty-one?changed the language of poetry. Hallucinatory and feverishly hermetic, it is an acknowledged masterpiece of world literature, still unrivaled for its haunting blend of sensuous detail and otherworldly astonishment. In Ashbery's translation of this notoriously elusive text, the acclaimed poet and translator lends his inimitable voice to a venerated classic. W. H. Auden recognized the strong affinities between Ashbery's poetry and Rimbaud's Illuminations in his 1956 introduction to Ashbery's first book, Some Trees, noting that "the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions." And it is here, in the "crystalline jumble" and "disordered collection of magic lantern slides" of Illuminations, as Ashbery writes in the Preface, that we can rediscover this essential lineage. "Absolute modernity" was for Rimbaud "acknowledging the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. [...] If we are absolutely modern?and we are?it's because Rimbaud commanded us to be." Ashbery's idiomatic and lyrical translations of these forty-four texts convey the originality of Rimbaud's vision to English-speaking readers of a new century.

A major bilingual anthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. During a century of extraordinary change, poets became the chroniclers of deep polarizations. From Rubén Darío's quest to renew the Spanish language to César Vallejo's linking of religion and politics, from Jorge Luis Borges's cosmopolitanism to Pablo Neruda's placement of poetry as uncompromising speaker for the downtrodden, and from Alejandra Pizarnik's agonies of the self to Humberto Ak'Abal's examination of all things indigenous, it is through verse that the hemisphere's cantankerouscollective soul in an age of overhaul might best be understood. A brilliant, moving, and thought-provoking summation of these forking paths, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetryinvites us to look at an illustrious literary tradition with fresh eyes. Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and a distinguished translator, goes beyond easy geographical and linguistic categorizations in gathering these works. This bilingual anthology features eighty-four authors from sixteen different countries writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, and Spanglish. The poems are rendered into English in inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. In these pages the reader will experience the power of poetry to account for a hundred years in the life of a restless continent.

This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

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.

Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. Cummings, and e e Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. He is associated with modernist free-form poetry, and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings for poetic expression. M. L. Rosenthal wrote that "The chief effect of Cummings' jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage.... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace." For Norman Friedman, Cummings's inventions "are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'one of our ageless radicals and truebards', has gathered four decades of poetry in his inimitable everyman's voice, including more than fifty pages of new work.
Contents
New Poems -- Selections from. Pictures of the Gone World ; A Coney Island of the Mind ; Starting from San Francisco ; The Secret Meaning of Things ; Back-Roads to Far Places ; Open Eye, Open Heart ; Who Are We Now? ; Northwest Ecolog ; Landscapes of Living & Dying ; Endless Life ; European Poems & Transitions.

The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.  

A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.

Arab-American poetry is an especially rich, people-involved, passionate literature that has been spawned, at least until recently, in isolation from the American mainstream. This anthology reflects the current renaissance in the literature of what may be the latest ethnic community to assert itself. Twenty poets are represented in this collection, fifteen of them living, five of them women. They start with Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran and include celebrated contemporaries who write in Arabic or English or both. Contributors: Kahlil Gibran o Ameen Rihani o Jamil Holway o Mikhail Naimy o Elia Abu Madi o Etel Adnan o D.H. Melhem o Samuel Hazo o Joseph Awad o Eugene Paul Nasser o H.S. (Sam) Hamod o Jack Marshall o Fawaz Turki o Doris Safie o Ben Bennani o Sharif Elmusa o Lawrence Joseph o Gregory Orfalea o Naomi Shihab Nye o Elmaz Abinader.

"This volume presents translations of Armenian women's poetry beginning with old lullabies and ancient magic chants, continuing with poems from the eighth century and proceeding through time to works by contemporary poets - all gathered for the first time and translated by Diana Der-Hovanessian."--Provided by publisher.

The Armenian poetic tradition is rich in both language and spirit, and this bilingual anthology presents the reader with the opportunity to enjoy, in modern English, a sampling of that richness. Representative poems of sixteen centuries are chronologically arranged; there are hymns from the classical period, medieval mystical and love poems, poems of war and agonized witness, and poems of socialist realism. The collection also includes the complete text of the Hovhanness Toumanian version of the folk epic "David of Sassoun." The Armenian text of each poem faces its translation, so the book will be useful to the Armenian student and scholar alike. But whether the reader speaks English or Armenian, or both, he will find here treasures of a varied and little-known literature.

"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."--Leonard Cohen, songwriter The Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America's most influential poet. To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was--and remains--a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women, that spoke to his fans as "real" and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous. The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works of Bukowski's later years, edited by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, including the last of his new, never-before-published poems.

The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal Best Books of 2015 - NPR Books 16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing, dreaming and back again. "[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a ladder of hope ..."--Ada Limón, The New Yorker "Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place in American letters."--David Tomas Martinez "At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children, old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo! Bravo!"--Al Young "While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul."--Ishmael Reed "I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse cultures."--Janice Mirikitani "Herrera is ... a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone ... Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."--The New York Times "Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."--National Public Radio

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."

Award-winning poet Ruth Thompson's channeled conversations with trees, bees, faeries, dragons, and a host of other beings. Refreshingly unsentimental and lyrical, Quickwater Oracles is a delightful companion for daily meditation, writing, and discussion.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * A "rich hybrid of memoir and history" (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion "Bennett...transport[s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited...an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves...Shines with a refreshing dynamism." --The New York Times In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom.     A celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what--and whom--the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry guides the young poet toward a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in his or her life, while also introducing the art in an exciting new way. Using such poems as Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," the Primer encourages young writers to approach their "thresholds"--those places where disorder meets order, where shaping imagination can turn language into urgent and persuasive poems. It provides the poet with more than a dozen focused writing exercises and explains essential topics such as the personal and cultural threshold; the four forces that animate poetic language (naming, singing, saying, imagining); tactics of revision; ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry; and how to locate and learn from our personal poetic forebears.