An in-depth handbook for the advanced student of poetry

A multicultural anthology of contemporary American poetry, featuring works by over one hundred famous and lesser-known writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Simon Oritz, and Ray A. Young Bear.

A major new guide to writing and understanding poetry

The National Book Award finalist author of Jelly Roll presents an evocative collection of food poetry that meditates on the role of food in everyday life, identity and culture and includes pieces by such writers as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg. 15,000 first printing.

The poems in Ears crackle with aplomb and verve as they try to measure the distance between the ear, an organ of touch, and the often chaotic and sometimes orderly vibrations the ears permit the body to receive; in that gap between trust and faith is this collection of poems--a devotional book that prays to the senses for mercy. It's tricky.

Anna Journey’s The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey’s music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.

Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.