Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many...

"A funny, over-the-top new spin on the classic Christmas poem! A hysterical new version of "The Night Before Christmas"! David Ercolini's over-the-top illustrations will have readers saying, "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Creatures of all shapes and all sizes will be stirring with laughter in this overly decked out, Christmas-splendored illustrated picture book! Ercolini breathes new life into an unrivaled classic with his vibrant illustrations featuring fun, accessible...

"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem) -- "I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa" -- Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their...

Poems in praise of the impossible, wild world and its beauty. Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man's land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a ghost in a garden. Coyotes cry out on the hill, and lovers find themselves kissing, "bee-stung, drunk" in the middle of...

In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro.--Amazon.com....

This book includes work from the author's first five books--Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials--as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas.--From...

Loosely based on the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, "The Waste Land", which first appeared in 1922, is a landmark work of Modernist poetry. Containing hundreds of allusions and quotations from other works, The Waste Land is marked by a disjointed structure which moves between voices and imagery without a clear delineation for the reader, a hallmark of Modernist literature. Arguably Eliot's most famous work, the theme of the...

A collection of poems that find meaning in a world where we are "so tired of meaning nothing", "Fuel" covers topics ranging from the border families of southern Texas to small ferns and forgotten books to Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

National Book Award finalist's third volume is layered with quick changes, false starts, and continuous reorientation.