Fiction

When she receives the news in late 1944 that her baby's father was shot down in the South Pacific, Amelia Richards loses hope. Jobless and broke, she has nowhere to turn for help but her infant's paternal grandparents. The only problem is, they don't know that she Cor their grandson Cexists. When Amelia discovers that the family is wealthy and influential, dare she disclose the truth of her relationship with their son? Or could the celebration of the arrival of another unexpected baby nearly two thousand years ago be the answer to her dilemma?

Powerful necromancers are on the move and Cal is caught in the crossfire. Without his faithful Wisp, Dani, Cal's mind slips and he begins creating traps and monsters that go against his already loose morals. After a direct threat from an unexpected force causes Cal's mind to stabilize, he throws all of his resources into keeping his thoughts clear while he funds searches for his lost companion. When others fail him again and again, Cal decides to take matters into his own hands. Deadly occurrences remind Dale that no matter how well he does in his small community, he is still considered a weakling in the greater world. Though he continues his physical and mental training, he decides to gain strength by any means necessary... even if these decisions are killing him.

BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors-like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten-as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the major American poets of this century and the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1950). Yet far less critical attention has focused on her work than on that of her peers.

This is a study in oral poetic composition. It examines how oral poets compose their recitations. Specifically, it is a study of the recitations of 17 separate master poets from the Island of Rote recorded over a period of 50 years. Each of these poets offers his version of what is culturally considered to be the 'same' ritual chant. These compositions are examined in detail and their oral formulae are carefully compared to one another. Professor James J. Fox is an anthropologist who carried out his doctoral field research on the Island of Rote in eastern Indonesia in 1965-66. In 1965, he began recording the oral traditions of the island and developed a close association with numerous oral poets on the island. After many subsequent visits, in 2006, he began a nine-year project that brought groups of oral poets to Bali for week-long recording sessions. Recitations gathered over a period of 50 years are the basis for this book.

In this revolutionary and highly original work, poet-scholar Glazier investigates the ways in which computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of poetry.

When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind-pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

The three writers examined in Richard Arnold's Trinity of Discord, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and William Cowper, are known as famous poets, but are also the greatest and most popularly compiled and used hymn-writers of all time. While masters of their kind, they were so remarkably different, considering they were working in the same (and quite new) genre. Moreover, when considered in their poetic-historical contexts, it is noteworthy that Watts can be seen as an archetypal Neoclassicist (not unlike Pope and Johnson), Wesley as a transitional pre-Romantic (not unlike Gray and Collins), and Cowper a thoroughgoing Romantic (not unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, but with a much sharper psychological edge). Most noteworthy is that Watts, Wesley, and Cowper come before their later counterparts and their respective movements: their importance to mainstream or canonical literary history cannot be overestimated.

Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond shines light on traditional divisions of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry and awakens the reader to work that blurs these boundaries. Many of the texts and topics taken up in these enlightening essays have been difficult to categorize and have consequently been overlooked or undervalued. The boundaries between genres (Eddic and Skaldic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern), or cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, Continental) may not have been as sharp in the eyes and ears of contemporary authors and audiences as they are in our own. When questions of classification are allowed to fade into the background, at least temporarily, the poetry can be appreciated on its own terms.

Poetry doesn't matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters.

Presents George Eliot's shorter poetry. This volume includes an introduction, which discusses Eliot's interest in poetry verse and its relation to her prose and prose fiction; her recurring themes and motifs; the poetry's critical reception and its value to modern readers.

A quirky collection of illustrated vignettes about love in its many forms

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a leading Victoria poet, known for his innovative style, is considered as influential as T.S. Eliot in initiating the modern movement in poetry. This edition is edited by Robert Bridges, poet laureate, and lifelong friend of Hopkins.

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the "talk poem." He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses

Masterworks of early Chinese poetry

The reign of the Flavian emperors (69-96) saw the production of a large and varied body of Latin poetry: the epics of Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus and Statius, the Silvae of the same Statius, and the Epigrams of Martial. This poetry, long seen as derivative or decadent, is now increasingly appreciated for the daring originality of its responses both to the Latin literary tradition and to the contemporary Roman world

This Companion contains thirteen new essays from leading international experts on William Carlos Williams, covering his major poetry and prose works - including Paterson, In the American Grain, and the Stecher trilogy. It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and discusses a wide variety of topics: Williams and the visual arts, Williams and medicine, Williams's version of local modernism, Williams and gender, Williams and multiculturalism, and more. Authors examine Williams's relationships with figures such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and H. D. and Marianne Moore, and illustrate the importance of his legacy for Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, and numerous contemporary poets. Featuring a chronology and an up-to-date bibliography of the writer, The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams is an invaluable guide for students of this influential literary figure.

Ovid devoted about half of his poetic career to the production of several collections of amatory verse, all composed in elegiac couplets. Indeed, his irrepressible interest in love, sex and elegiac poetry is one of the defining features of his entire output. Here Rebecca Armstrong offers a thematic examination of some important aspects of the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Starting from an investigation of the narrator's self-creation and presentation of other characters within his amatory verse, she assesses the importance of mythical and contemporary reference, as well as the influence of the erotic on Ovid's later works. By looking at the Ars and Remedia alongside the Amores, the continuities and contradictions in the poet's elegiac outlook are revealed, and a complex picture is formed of the Ovidian world of love. Ovid's erotic works present the reader with a glimpse inside the minds of both poets and lovers, mediated through eyes which are frequently inclined to comedy and even cynicism, but always sharp, perceptive and above all fascinated by human behaviour.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winner and nineteenth US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The Best American Poetry 2017 brings together the most notable poems of the year in the series that offers "a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable" (Robert Pinsky). Librarian of Congress James Billington says Natasha Trethewey "consistently and dramatically expanded the power" of the role of US Poet Laureate, holding office hours with the public, traveling the country, and reaching millions through her innovative PBS NewsHour segment "Where Poetry Lives." Marilyn Nelson says "the wide scope of Trethewey's interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary." With her selections and introductory essay for The Best American Poetry 2017, Trethewey will be highlighting even more "elegant and necessary" poems and poets, adding to the national conversation of verse and its role in our culture.

Against the background of Socrates' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging. Despite popular portrayals of mid- and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poiesis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections-that constitute our inner worlds. At its center is the conviction that although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful matter is critical to our development in the second half of life.