Poetry. "You've stumbled upon the best travelogue you'll ever find...a book for the ages, and for our age and place." Laura Kasischke "The tag-team poetry of Buckley and Ott is as much a kin to the works of John Ashbery and Edward Field as it is to the radio skits of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Their euphonious cacophony of wordplay, ingenious turn-of-phrase concoctions, and steady stream of pop/cross-cultural references create an erudite mix of levelheaded nonsense and harebrained smarts." Paul Fericano "John F. Buckley and Martin Ott are extremely talented poets, schooled in their craft, who are already well on their way to the 'A List' of their generation, and are thought by many myself included to be there already. This comprehensive collection will be on the shelves and in the hands of those readers who endeavor to chart the course of poetic art in our time." Gerald Locklin"

Giant fiberglass statues of Paul Bunyan. Enormous balls of twine. A hiking trail atop a manmade mountain of contained nuclear waste. This is the landscape of an American oddities roadtrip, and it is also the poetic muse for John Wojtowicz, a clinical social worker, adjunct professor, and outdoorsman. Where other people may see a photo opportunity, John sees deeper truths and rolls them out in poems that are entertaining, profound, and well-crafted. In this edition, the poems are richly illustrated with color images of the attractions he describes.

Sonny was fifteen when he met Jack Kerouac at Murphy's Bar in his hometown of Northport, Long Island in 1964. Later, he hitchhiked and jumped boxcars across thousands of miles of America. At the end of the rainbow in California, Doug Weston hired him to tend bar at the Troubadour, where he hosted musician barflies such as Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, David Lee Roth, Gene Clark, and Glenn Frey. Nights off he drank and traded poetry with Charles Bukowski at the No Name Bar on Yucca and Vine. Kenneth Sonny Donato lives in Hollywood. Dedicated To: Harry Dean Stanton and Mario Maglieri "The Pope Of Sunset Strip" " 'A Poet's Guide To The Bars' has a strut and clarity of image and language which is a welcome vacation...A double shot of imagery with a water back in the face." - Michael Ironside

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over. Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art. Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.

Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology that ties in with the BBC series of the same name. Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, our land. He has chosen six powerful poems, all personal favourites, and all poems that have become part of the way we see our landscape. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series itself, while also offering paper chains of poems about the landscape and nature of Britain, transcripts of contemporary poet interviews, and a short introduction to each lead poem.

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.” –RAINER MARIA RILKE In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence. The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way: Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.” Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.” Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.” Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.” Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.