A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.

Collection of poetry from students across the United States, selected and arranged by author grade level from grade 3 through grade 12.

"These poems know a great deal about beauty and violence: 'twenty years / was about as much good as / circling / a black eye'. Kylie Gellatly shows us what vividness is, how it lives in our shapes, our pain, our imaginary (and real) selves: 'man taken / to be a trench / that might have been a cannon ball'. This poetry composes musics with silences. It is both a song and whisper, an erasure and exhalation. It is both a journey across us, and inward: 'the ship was the rib of reason / [...] the ship was beginning to be an alarm / the ship was right there on the floor while this book was written.' Herein history is envious of a dreamscape. And yet: the dream aspires to be dailiness, and fears it. Which is to say: this is a book of fevers the likes of which you feel most familiar with, yet have not seen before. Recognize yourself in them." -Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic "Musical and deeply felt, these poems-untitled and running wild-chase down the heart. No tangible space is without the immaterial here. The Elements are resilient, and I feel pushed and pulled by them. Gellatly's debut book is beautiful, haunted and mystical. Her poems are like 'the strange contrast between death and dawn, ' and 'the fool's divine spark / forever coming loose' in the reader's hands." -Bianca Stone, author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief "In Kylie Gellatly's The Fever Poems, water is silk that rubs against the night. Events are figments of the speaker's imagination and graves shape time. Extremely contemporary in their fixation on illness, isolation, and anxiety, these poems spill down and across the page like slate off a cliffside. There is an unwavering generosity to the introspection of this speaker: through her eyes, floating ash becomes 'hundreds of baled papers, bent up like two bears dancing.' This is a collection that understands and beautifully, painfully relays that what we have-with each other, with the land-is 'the last of the last.'" -Taneum Bambrick, author of Vantage "'I was sore at heart, ' writes Kylie Gellatly in The Fever Poems, and the reader is invited into a sprawling, curious, visionary, deeply empathetic, epic debut. Her poems shine goldly in the space between elemental earth-salt, rock, wind, weather-and the human, conscious choice of living. With echoes of Jorie Graham and W. S. Merwin, Gellatly navigates the complexities of language, 'a pledge made / into paper / weathered / in our hands, ' 'choked with the monsters of parentheses'. This is a collection for our time of pandemic, uncertainty, and an urgent need for a revision of our relationship with the natural world-Gellatly recognizes the swinging pendulum of power between the earth's force and human interference, and, without castigation, illuminates us." -Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal "Kylie Gellatly's The Fever works like a ship, navigating the tempests of our fragile moment. The poems enact a wandering/wondering through fire and fog, investigating meaning through a naturalist's lens, balancing an elemental pull with the fierce heat of being human. This collection is an invitation to a sensorial meditation, one where fever is less a symptom of sickness than a door to discovery." -Erin Adair-Hodges, author of Let's All Die Happy

Called “the master of the poetic one-liner” by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss—the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother’s failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing—along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are distinguished by their unsentimental but heartbreaking tenderness, pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, formal surprises, and exuberant sense of humor.

This riveting novel in verse, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Toni Morrison, explores American history and race through the eyes of a teenage boy embracing his newfound identity Connor’s grandmother leaves his dad a letter when she dies, and the letter’s confession shakes their tight-knit Italian-American family: The man who raised Dad is not his birth father. But the only clues to this birth father’s identity are a class ring and a pair of pilot’s wings. And so Connor takes it upon himself to investigate—a pursuit that becomes even more pressing when Dad is hospitalized after a stroke. What Connor discovers will lead him and his father to a new, richer understanding of race, identity, and each other.

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems. In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. “I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.