Poetry Month

Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), one of the most influential and widely-read poets of the nineteenth century, wrote Records of Woman in 1828 at the height of her long career. In the series, which includes nineteen poems about exemplary lives, Hemans explores what it means to be a woman, challenging traditional beliefs while at the same time reinforcing persistent stereotypes. Her work celebrates the lives, events, and imagined thoughts of unremembered women from different cultures and time periods whose deeds show nobility of spirit and inner strength. In her introduction, Paula Feldman examines how Hemans's poetry shaped and was shaped by nineteenth-century literary tastes, and she reconsiders the aesthetic value of Hemans's work and the current understanding of the nature of Romanticism.

In this first book-length study of the works of Chicano women writers, Marta Ester Sanchez introduces the reader to a group of Chicanas who in the 1970s began to reexamine and reevaluate their gender and cultural identity through poetic language. The term 'Chicana' refers here to women of Mexican heritage who live and write in the United States. The works of four contemporary Chicana poets---Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, and Bernice Zamora---are the focus of this volume.

An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination--a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity. In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities--poets, philosophers, and critics--and from the sciences--psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chapter with a poem--by poets including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, and Pablo Neruda--and then widens the discussion to broader notions of metaphor and mind. Holyoak uses Whitman's poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider" to illustrate the process of interpreting a poem, and explains the relevance of two psychological mechanisms, analogy and conceptual combination, to metaphor. He outlines ideas first sketched by Coleridge--who called poetry "the best words in their best order"--and links them to modern research on the interplay between cognition and emotion, controlled and associative thinking, memory and creativity. Building on Emily Dickinson's declaration "the brain is wider than the sky," Holyoak suggests that the control and default networks in the brain may combine to support creativity. He also considers, among other things, the interplay of sound and meaning in poetry; symbolism in the work of Yeats, Jung, and others; indirect communication in poems; the mixture of active and passive processes in creativity; and whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity. Guided by Holyoak, we can begin to trace the outlines of creativity through the mechanisms of metaphor.

The first international anthology to document a radically new poetry which takes language beyond the confines of the printed page into a non-linear world of digital interactivity and hyperlinkage. The work of the poets discussed in this book challenges even the innovations of experimental poetics. It embraces new technologies to explore a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinkage, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatiotemporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo, multiple simultaneities, and many other innovative procedures. This new media poetry, although defined within the field of experimental poetics, departs radically from the avant-garde movements of the first half of the century, and the print-based approaches of the second half. Through an embrace of the vast possibilities made available through new media, the artists in this anthology have become the poetic pioneers for the next millennium.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

One of the most celebrated poetry books of the year: The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016 New York Times, Critics Pick Boston Globe, Best Books listing NPR, Best Books listing Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year Library Journal, Best Books of 2016 Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "The poems in Mr. Vuong''s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds...possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson''s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words...There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong''s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things." "Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--The New Yorker "The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible.... Highly recommended."--Library Journal, starred review "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."--Buzzfeed''s "Most Exciting New Books of 2016" "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world."--2016 Whiting Award citation "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."--LitHub "Vuong''s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity."--Slate "In his impressive debut collection, Vuong writes beauty into--and culls from--individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity."--Publishers Weekly Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night--sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side-- waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.

Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. Jennifer Haupt, editor and curator of this anthology, and Central Avenue Publishing, as well as all contributing authors, are donating net profits to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community. In response to the pandemic, Ms. Haupt rallied more than 90 authors to contribute their work to Alone Together, free of charge, to support struggling independent booksellers forced to close their doors. The roster of diverse voices includes: Faith Adiele, Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch.