It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul. Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.

Alex Dimitrov’s third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure—specifically, the twelve months of the year—Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.

In the spirit of his New York Times bestseller Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People with Children, as well as his wildly popular New Yorker pieces, Thurber Prize-winner John Kenney presents a hilarious new collection of poetry for anxious people. With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People and Love Poems for People with Children such hits, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on one of the most common feelings in our day-and-age: anxiety. Kenney covers it all, from awkward social interactions and insomnia to nervous ticks and writing and rewriting that email.

'The New Faber Book of Love Poems' presents some of the most emotive and memorable lyric poems produced in the English language from the Renaissance to the present.

“I see now that no person who has ever loved has ever been spared from tears. Tears of joy and tears of sorrow. Of the most intimate union and of letting go.” Poignant, timeless and true. This book is a personal collection of poems about love and letting go. Whether it be a newfound love, a love that endures a lifetime, or a love that will soon be saying goodbye, one can find in these pages something like a mirror that tells the story of one’s own heart. Are you in sorrow because of a broken heart? Are you in grief because your are mourning the death of a loved one? Dying is painful, but so is the loss of a love that broke your heart. Yet in all these, if one has loved true, one has found meaning in life. Healing is never far away for as long as hope is kept alive in one’s heart. Let these poems of love comfort you, inspire you and remind you of the beauty of love. To love is to be rapt in bliss, to be torn asunder and to be healed and made whole again.

According to the Kama Sutra, the erotic handbook written two thousand years ago, when the wheel of ecstasy is in motion “there is no textbook at all, and no order.” Indian Love Poems is a unique gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalog the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora. Indian Love Poems features works from the classical languages of Sanskrit and Tamil and such later languages as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali, and English. Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire–both male and female–in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.

Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just to say "I love you!" Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: "today our bodies became vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor...." Written on the paradisal island of Capri, where Neruda "took refuge" in the arms of his lover Matilde Urrutia, Love Poems embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. This wonderful book collects Neruda’s most passionate verses.