This is my first published book that contains my most sacred thoughts in poetic form.

“The heart of Orr’s poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry.”—San Francisco Review This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the “Book,” an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics—both poems and songs—ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives. I put the beloved In a wooden coffin. The fire ate his body; The flames devoured her. I put the beloved In a poem or song. Tucked it between Two pages of the Book. How bright the flames. All of me burning, All of me on fire And still whole. There is nothing quite like this book—an “active anthology” in the best sense—where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them. Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya's debut poetry collection, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice, and bliss. Seeking a way home, Ramayya discovers that homecoming - the impossible return - is a process of make-believe and magical thinking across Britain, India, and the infinite expanse. Ramayya's visionary poetry traces an opalescent, treacherous world by way of heritage, ritual, and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. Meditating on diasporic identity and relationships, her writing roams the Indo-European language family, finds consolation in genealogies of decolonial and anti-racist resistance, and roots itself in the movements between ancient Sanskrit texts and contemporary feminist prose poems. In Ramayya's hands, the body assumes many forms as love produces many states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self. Desire, eroticism, and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury, and destruction. Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power - the poems in this book never leave love's hold.

The stimulating mix of academics and practising poets that have contributed to this volume provides an unusual and illuminating integration of critical and creative practice and a vibrantly diverse approach to questions of poetry and sexuality. Each section of essays is complemented by poems which creatively illustrate or develop the theme with which the essays critically engage. Rather than being limited to a specific genre, tradition, time or place, this collection seeks to make a virtue of contrast, comparison and juxtaposition. The collection is arranged into sections that range broadly across the thematic ground of dichotomies, traditions and revisions, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, women and embodiment, and the notion of play and performance. Positioning eighteenth-century tinkers ballads alongside medieval Hebrew lyrics and the Blues of Gorgeous Puddin’, or making Dionysus rub shoulders with Sharon Olds and Mrs Rochester provides new perspectives on familiar material and valuable insights into more obscure work and the nature of sensual poetry as a mode of expression. As the editors suggest, the essays and poems presented collectively argue that writings about sexuality are always already about the way poets see and represent our bodies, the world and poetic language itself.

"Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange." —Natasha Trethewey Chang’s poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history. From "The Winter's Wife": I want wild roots to prosper an invention of blooms, each unknown to every wise gardener. If I could be a color. If I could be a question of tender regard. I know crabgrass and thistle. I know one algorithm: it has nothing to do with repetition or rhythm. It is the route from number to number (less to more, more to less), a map drawn by proof not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not conclude with darkness. I conclude. Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, which was a finalist for the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers and listed by Hyphen Magazine as a Top Five Book of Poetry for 2008. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Cult bestseller The Invitation is more than just a poem. It is a profound invitation to a life that is more fulfilling and passionate, with greater integrity. This book is a word-of-mouth sensation, whose truths have resonated with people all over the world, and is now reissued with a beautiful new cover design.

Lateef McLeod writes some of most daring poetry I have seen. This is poetry that is finely crafted and, oh yes, clearly has something to say. The best poets, to be sure, have something to say, they are artist and philosophers. Langston Hughes; Let America be America Again O, let America be America again--The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME Now Lateef has been added to Langston Hughes' list of "the land where every man is free." He proclaims it all over this book. Invisible Man, Revisited I am the transparent mirage in your mind's eye./The image you want to hold, /but with time/will simply forget. Lateef, you are not forgotten. -- John Peterson, Publisher, Poetic Matrix Press