Books, Literature & Fiction, United States, Poetry

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Maya Angelou
Letter to My Daughter
by Random House (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-09-23)

For a world of devoted readers, a much-awaited new volume of absorbing stories and inspirational wisdom from one of our best-loved writers.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou’s path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, ...

Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet
by Penguin USA (P) (Paperback)

Sylvia Plath
Bell Jar
by Caedmon (Audio Cassette) (Release Date: 1998-08-05)

Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-10-28)

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that “you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend.” The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling “picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry,” and she once begged him, “Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I’ve been re-reading Emerson) for several days.” Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell’s death in 1977. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of ...

Billy Collins
Ballistics: Poems
by Random House (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-09-09)

A Billy Collins poem is instantly recognizable. “Using simple, understandable language,” notes USA Today, the two-term U.S. Poet Laureate “captures ordinary life–its pleasure, its discontents, its moments of sadness and of joy.” His everyman approach to writing resonates with readers everywhere and generates fans who would otherwise never give a poem a second glance.Now, in this stunning new collection, Collins touches on a greater array of subjects–love, death, solitude, youth, and aging–delving deeper than ever before. Ballistics comes at the reader full force with moving and playful takes on life. Drawing inspiration from the world around him and from such poetic forebears as Robert Frost, Paul Valéry, and eleventh-century poet Liu Yung, Collins drolly captures the essence of an ordinary afternoon: All I do these drawn-out daysis sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridgewhere there are no pheasants to be seenand, last time I looked, no ridge.Collins reflects on his ...

Jack Spicer
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry)
by Wesleyan (Hardcover)

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

Maya Angelou
Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
by Schwartz & Wade (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-09-23)

“ANGELS AND Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” Maya Angelou writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.” Angelou’s moving poem is a radiant affirmation of the goodness of humanity. First read at the 2005 White House tree-lighting ceremony, it comes alive again as a fully illustrated children’s book, celebrating the promise of peace in the holiday season. In this simple story, a family joins with their community—rich and poor, black and white, Muslim and Jew—to celebrate the holidays.

Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Bantam (Mass Market Paperback) (Release Date: 1983-04-01)

W.S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius
by Copper Canyon Press (Hardcover)

Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS. Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly. “Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review "[Merwin's] best book in a decade—and one of the best outright... The poems... feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom." —Publishers Weekly "Merwin's gentle wisdom and attentiveness to the world are alive as ever. These deeply reflective meditations move through light and darkness, old love and turning seasons to probe the core of human existence." —Orion The nuanced mysteries of light, darkness, presence, and memory are central themes in W.S. Merwin’s new book of poems. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound—the distinct qualities of autumn light, a conversation with a boyhood teacher, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” In ...

Clement C Moore
The Night before Christmas
by Longstreet Press (Hardcover)

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