English Poetry Literature

Jodie and Bethan are about as different as two young women can be, but growing up they develop a strong bond of friendship in the quiet town of Harmony, North Carolina. As the world plunges into war, though, their friendship is tested by a devastating loss.

Throughout her illustrious career in letters, Maya Angelou gifted, healed, and inspired the world with her words. Now the beauty and spirit of those words live on in this new and complete collection of poetry that reflects and honors the writer’s remarkable life.

In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

Prelude to Bruise is a song from a tightrope, balancing ecstatic existence and the chaos that always threatens to engulf a life on the margins. How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

44 Poems on Being with Each Other is a new volume that offers immersive reflections on the human connection. With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other articulates the power of poetry itself.

Annie Zook, the Amish preacher's daughter, is caught between two worlds. Living with shunned friend Esther, Annie longs to return to her forbidden art and the idyllic days spent with Englisher Ben Martin, before her father ordered her never to see him again.... Stunned when family secrets come to light, Ben determines to solve the mystery of his past. Will his future include Annie--or will the Brethren always stand between them?

When Linda Ellis wrote her poem, "The Dash", in one afternoon twelve years ago, it would change her life forever. In 239 words, she captured the "Simple Truths" of why we were put on this earth. Since then, The Dash has been published hundreds of times in books, newspapers, magazines and company newsletters. It has also been read countless times at company meetings, graduations and funerals.

Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. The New York Post called it "rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal." Now a new audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.

Mohammad Iqbal was a poet and political philosopher who is known both for his poetry and his ideas that were influential in the creation of Pakistan. Mohammad Iqbal was born in Sialkot, Punjab, in 1877 and graduated from Government College, Lahore, with a master's degree in philosophy. He then taught there until 1905. This book presents a collection of some of the best poems and ghazals of Iqbal, along with their English translation as well as transliteration so that the listeners can enjoy the original flavor of Urdu poetry.

A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker is a celebratory selection from 100 years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New Yorker. Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology.

Nature Poem follows Teebs - a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet - who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.

When 12-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone - left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned. With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.

The definitive anthology of Jim Morrison's writings with rare photographs and numerous handwritten excerpts of unpublished and published poetry and lyrics from his 28 privately held notebooks.

In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us.

Jericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive.

Need Machine clamors through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumor. Honest, irreverent, and sharply indifferent, this audiobook will "hogtie you with awe."

Part of the #TwentyIn2020 collection for Black British writing, In Her Voice is an anthology that celebrates five poetry collections. This includes Locating Strongwoman by Tolu Agbelusi, Where the Memory Was by Hibaq Osman, Jamakespeare by Brenda Garrick, The First Collection by Sarah Lipton-Sidibeh and On Reflection by Adjoa Wiredu.