This collection of poems takes young readers to a day at an urban farmers’ market. Who to see, what to eat, and how produce is grown—it’s all so exciting, fresh, and delicious. Readers are invited to peruse the stands and inspect vendors’ wares with poems like “Farmer Greg’s Free-Range Eggs,” “Summer Checklist,” and “Necessary Mess.” Bright and vibrant, this is the perfect guide for little ones to take with them on marketing day to inspire literacy and healthy eating. A pleasing window into the world of the farmers’ market — School Library Journal, starred review Sprightly illustrations and engaging rhymes will leave readers eager to sample market bounty — Kirkus Reviews This cheerful collection of verse offers an enticing introduction to farmers’ markets — Booklist

Clever poems tell the story of one inquisitive child's quest to start just the right collection to share at school. While everyone else is excited about presenting their treasures, one creative elementary schooler is stressed about her class's show-and-tell assignment. How is she supposed to share her collection if she doesn't collect anything? Polling her parents, visiting with Granny and Grandpa, and searching for the secret behind her siblings' obsession with baseball cards, she discovers she does, in fact, have something to share: a collection of stories and poems!

A literary cookbook that celebrates food and poetry, two of life's essential ingredients. In the same way that salt seasons ingredients to bring out their flavors, poetry seasons our lives; when celebrated together, our everyday moments and meals are richer and more meaningful. The twenty-five inspiring poems in this book—from such poets as Marge Piercy, Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield—are accompanied by seventy-five recipes that bring the richness of words to life in our kitchen, on our plate, and through our palate. Eat This Poem opens us up to fresh ways of accessing poetry and lends new meaning to the foods we cook.

Take a trip to the Farmer's Market in this book filled with vibrant and delicious poems! Poetry can be as fresh and delicious as the farmers' market produce it celebrates in this bright collection. Unexpected, ingenious imagery and enticing artwork will inspire young readers and their imaginations. In these vivid poems, blueberries are "flavor-filled fireworks," cucumbers are "a fleet of green submarines in a wicker sea," lettuce tastes like "butter and pepper and salt," but sometimes "I crunch into a leaf the very same flavor as rain." Kid-friendly recipes are included at the end of the book!

An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.

A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voice A sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age. In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.

This collection of poems by Mary Oliver once again invites the reader to step across the threshold of ordinary life into a world of natural and spiritual luminosity. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" (one of the poems in this volume) Winner of a 1991 Christopher Award Winner of the 1991 Boston Globe Lawrence L. Winship Book Award This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the available covers.