Features essays that represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs: their place in history and society, the role of women as composers and performers, poetic and musical structures, styles, and genres, relationships between poems and melodies, and written and oral transmission.

Poetry. Browning follows up her sold out debut, EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists." Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I'm here I didn't run "

Back cover: "With selections from Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, Sappho, WIlliam Carlos Williams, and many others, "Singing school" offers a bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past. Instead of offering rules, theories, or recipes, Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the eighty poems and brief introductions to each section respect poetry's mysteries, in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable."

Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music: three threads beautifully woven into one in Marianne Worthington's poetry collection The Girl Singer. The poet grew up in urban Appalachia, listening to country and folk music and letting it live within her. The speakers in The Girl Singer offer lyrical celebrations of the women who performed that music and recite their stories anew. The girl singer is also the poet—one who traces loss through turning seasons, monitors the patterns of neighborhood wildlife, and creates a sisterhood for singing old songs in new ways. The Girl Singer is part family history, part music, and part nature walk. Worthington's attentive eye and heart are reflected in the starkly striking and painful images she paints in the poems. Every poem, whether describing a connection with Appalachian wildlife, retelling the lyrics of a classic country tune, reflecting on the speaker's bloodline, or giving voice to famous musical figures of the past, strikes a powerful chord.

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.

Combining whimsical illustrations with poems of love, humour and celebration of the ups and downs of being a touring recording artist, Idiot Verse is a delightful book in the tradition of Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. It's a singer-songwriter's notebook to himself, and the world, and sure to impress fans especially, of which Henson has many.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Grammy Award–nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, she reveals never-before-seen poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder. In this debut collection, Halsey bares her soul. Bringing the same artistry found in her lyrics, Halsey’s poems delve into the highs and lows of doomed relationships, family ties, sexuality, and mental illness. More hand grenades than confessions, these autobiographical poems explore and dismantle conventional notions of what it means to be a feminist in search of power. Masterful as it is raw, passionate, and profound, I Would Leave Me If I Could signals the arrival of an essential voice. Book cover painting, American Woman, by the author.