Survival of the Young Poet is a fascinating work that combines narrative of a novel with poetry. It tells the story of a poet, focusing more on verse than it does on plot and characterization. Written in prose, it is frequently interspersed with verse. The protagonist is the title character, and other characters speak and write to each other in beautiful, flowing poetry. From the legend of human hours to the dim time of struggle lies the strive of aging pain of poets. When the day dies to live no more, that's when the story begins: the fighting pen of poets and the humiliation of struggle. Survival of the Young Poet portrays untold stories of poets struggling to survive in an unveiling society.

An intimate first book of personal essays and incisive commentary from the editor of Poetry.

Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world.

"In Young's work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."—Toronto Star "Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."—Booklist Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today." From "Even Funnnier Looking Now": If someone had asked me then, Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said or No way! Never would I have said, What could you possibly be talking about? I had just gotten to the twentieth century like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower. My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch. I knew I was made of glass but I didn't yet know what glass was made of: hot sand inside me like pee going all the wrong directions, probably into my heart which I knew was made of gold foil glued to dust . . .

Describes a unique approach for eliciting poetry from people of many ages and backgrounds--particularly underprivileged urban kids and the elderly. The process--from dialogue to self-expression to publication to public event--illuminates the urgency and meaning of releasing the spirit captured in each man and woman and child's experience.

Poetry is one of the best instruments for self-expression, and Jax King, a young non-binary author in search of their authentic self, plays that instrument beautifully. This Is My Coming Out Poem is a collection of poetry focused on queer identity, love and heartbreak, personal growth, mental illness, and gender transition—with an emphasis on ideas, rather than imagery. “Maybe sometimes / You have to lose yourself completely / Before you can be found”—from Jax’s poem “Identity.” Rendered in twenty-five poems of varying length, each is evocative of the intelligence, creativity, and humor of the author, as suggested by these titles: “My Depression: The Amazing Rational Parrot” “My Body Is Not My Friend” “Bong Hits and Tinder Swipes” “The Four Rules of Gun Safety” “To the Man Who Works at Jiffy Lube” “A Survival Guide for the College Queer on Winter Break” This book will be of interest to readers of queer literature, aged mid-teen and up. LGBTQ+ folks, young adults, and fellow poets going through a difficult time, navigating the additional stresses of queer youth, perhaps even contemplating suicide, may particularly find themselves reflected in these poems, as they search for their own authentic self.

"An unflinching reckoning with the traumas of one's life and those inherited through a history of exacted injustices "Some men find nothing, and others/ find omens everywhere," writes C. Dale Young in Prometeo, a collection whose speaker is a proverbial "child of fire." In poems that thrive off of their distinct voice, the speaker confronts generational and lived trauma and their relationship to his multi-ethnicity. We are presented with the idea of the past's burial in the body and its constellatory manifestations-both in the speaker and those around him-in disease and pain, but also in strength and a capacity for intimacy with others and nature. Grounded in precise language, Young's examination of the past and its injuries turns into a celebration of the self. In stark, exuberant relief, the speaker proclaims "...I was splendidly blended, genetically engineered/ for survival." Resilient, Young's poems find beauty in landscape, science, and meditation"--