Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America. “A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.”—The Village Voice This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. Includes poems that inspired the libretto for Eady’s music-drama Running Man, a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’.

At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley was the first black American poet to publish a book. Her elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses of the beginnings of African-American literary traditions. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

This is a book for children, with fun poems, the poems have been written with children in mind, and can stimulate their imagination, curiosity and development. The inspiration behind these poems came from my own experiences when I was a child, and what I would have enjoyed. Hopefully these poems will be read by children worldwide and they enjoy reading them, and would be encouraged to expand their imagination. BOOK RECOGNITIONS: Award Winner, First Place Royal Dragonfly Book Award Children's Poetry Award Winner, Honorable Mention New England Book Festival Poetry Award Winner Story Monsters Approved! Book of the Year Early Readers (Ages 5-9) Nonfiction Award Winner Story Monsters Approved! Book of the Year First Time Author Award Win for Purple Dragonfly Book Awards Award Win for Firebird Book Award 2022 New York Book Festival Award

Presents an illustrated poem from Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses."