"The general end, therefore, of all [The Faerie Queene], is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read." Hailed as one of the most influential poems in the English language, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is an epic masterpiece of Arthurian romance. Broken into...

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning...

"A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams...

"The poems in Carl Dennis's thirteenth collection are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible to the light of day, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination, whether we focus on ourselves, on people close at hand, or on the larger society. Only if we imagine alternatives to our present selves, Dennis suggests, can we begin to grasp who we are. Only if we imagine what is hidden from us about the lives of others...

"Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work. The protagonist, "One," is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors...

A new collection from a poet who has made "a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Glück). Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from disbelief at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to...

"Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro's collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the "tertulia") and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism, and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history"--