A celebration of the extraordinary life of Ezra Jack Keats, creator of The Snowy Day. The story of The Snowy Day begins more than one hundred years ago, when Ezra Jack Keats was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. The family were struggling Polish immigrants, and despite Keats’s obvious talent, his father worried that Ezra’s dream of being an artist was an unrealistic one. But Ezra was determined. By high school he was winning prizes and scholarships. Later, jobs followed with the WPA and Marvel comics. But it was many years before Keats’s greatest dream was realized and he had the opportunity to write and illustrate his own book. For more than two decades, Ezra had kept pinned to his wall a series of photographs of an adorable African American child. In Keats’s hands, the boy morphed into Peter, a boy in a red snowsuit, out enjoying the pristine snow; the book became The Snowy Day, winner of the Caldecott Medal, the first mainstream book to feature an African American child. It was also the first of many books featuring Peter and the children of his — and Keats’s — neighborhood. Andrea Davis Pinkney’s lyrical narrative tells the inspiring story of a boy who pursued a dream, and who, in turn, inspired generations of other dreamers.

A celebration of the extraordinary life of Ezra Jack Keats, creator of The Snowy Day. The story of The Snowy Day begins more than one hundred years ago, when Ezra Jack Keats was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. The family were struggling Polish immigrants, and despite Keats’s obvious talent, his father worried that Ezra’s dream of being an artist was an unrealistic one. But Ezra was determined. By high school he was winning prizes and scholarships. Later, jobs followed with the WPA and Marvel comics. But it was many years before Keats’s greatest dream was realized and he had the opportunity to write and illustrate his own book. For more than two decades, Ezra had kept pinned to his wall a series of photographs of an adorable African American child. In Keats’s hands, the boy morphed into Peter, a boy in a red snowsuit, out enjoying the pristine snow; the book became The Snowy Day, winner of the Caldecott Medal, the first mainstream book to feature an African American child. It was also the first of many books featuring Peter and the children of his — and Keats’s — neighborhood. Andrea Davis Pinkney’s lyrical narrative tells the inspiring story of a boy who pursued a dream, and who, in turn, inspired generations of other dreamers.

Acting Out and chem & other poems are two remarkable pamphlets joined together in one beautiful collection. Scapello's voice is brave and intimate, his poetry laden with desire and shame, telling tales of the naked male body and pushing lyricism into strange and fantastic spaces. Intense and meaningful experiences drip from every single line. An unforgettable debut.

The most accessible and joyous introduction to the world of poetry! The Random House Book of Poetry for Children offers both funny and illuminating poems for kids personally selected by the nation's first Children's Poet Laureate, Jack Prelutsky. Featuring a wealth of beloved classic poems from the past and modern glittering gems, every child who opens this treasury will finda world of surprises and delights which will instill a lifelong love of poetry. Featuring 572 unforgettable poems, and over 400 one-of-a-kind illustrations from the Caldecott-winning illustrator of the Frog and Toad series, Arnold Lobel, this collection is, quite simply, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of poetry.

Poetry. With setting moons, talking tulips, and the peacefulness found in a horse's mane, the poems in Christian Schlegel's debut collection HONEST JAMES might be as difficult to describe as the layered notes of an ancient perfume. "A famous notion twirled and froze. I made it mine. / Again it twirled." This unabashedly lyrical collection, which never shies away from rhyme, includes various cameos, including Goethe in its second section, with the end result being what John Ashbery calls "one of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time." "In Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES you'll find literary mannerism lightly wielded, gesture for its own sake, a bit of lace at the cuff. The title a reference to Wordsworth's Prelude reflects the antiquing and old world light in these pages. Schlegel knits his syntax to invite the savor of the micro-novelistic vignettes he evokes. Period mood is produced with snippets of Latin and German, a few variations on Goethe. Were it not for his tendency to slip into four-beat rhythm and use rhyme, one could think these poems fragments of memorable lines torn from pre-twentieth-century European fiction. Time to dim the sconces and start dreaming." Jennifer Moxley "One of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time, Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES seems to draw inspiration from the back corridors and anterooms of poetry. One senses echoes of Kipling, Browning, Landor, even Robert W. Service, and other late 19th-century hot shots, but it doesn't seem to be a question of Schlegel taking cues from other poets, rather his magpie-like attraction to bits of history imbedded in forgotten texts. In a note he tells of using a volume of 'plain prose translations' from Goethe 'consulted sparingly and departed from liberally.' Students of the archaic will find much to detain them here. It's as though a new process of influencing has been unearthed." John Ashbery "Of equal parts wariness and devotion, music and restraint, wit and loss, these moving poems mark Christian Schlegel as a poet with an astonishing feel for the English language, a living relationship with its literatures, and the gift of a precise wisdom." Susan Wheeler"

Minding the Darkness is the final volume of Peter Dale Scott's landmark trilogy Seculum. Following Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle, it brings stunning, triumphant conclusion to a remarkable and sui generis poem. "There is nothing quite like these books," as the American Book Review remarked: "Scott's trilogy, only two-thirds completed as yet, is certain to be one of the most remarkable and challenging works of our rime." Scott's hypnotic epic poem concerns the political and the personal, and their darkly powerful relationships. With its riveting images, Poundian collage, tight three-line stanzas, and eerie, accumulated juxtapositions, Minding the Darkness fully hears out James Laughlin's opinion that "Not since Robert Duncan's Groundwork and before that William Carlos Williams Paterson, has New Directions published a long poem as important as Peter Dale Scott's."

"A sequel of sorts to "Ziggurat," published in the Phoenix Poets series in 2010, the title poem from "Ozone Journal" recounts the memory of the speaker's excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a TV journalist crew in 2009. The speaker "dreams back," as it were, to the 1980s, when, as a young man in his thirties and caring for a young daughter after a recent divorce, he is having to juggle both personal and cultural/historical complexities living as a single parent in Manhattan. The poems create a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience, with the speaker struggling with the nature of memory as the poems move constantly back and forth to the Syrian desert, the dissolution of his marriage, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS, and encounters with famous jazz producers at Columbia Records to discuss music. In this book, Peter Balakian aims at the bigger picture of humanity's history of atrocity and trauma, but through short vignettes grounded in everyday situations, and in particular times and places"--Publisher's info.