Ryan O'Brian is riding a wave of inspiration with no shoreline in sight--he can't STOP writing poetry. In the cafeteria with french fries. In the bathroom with toothpaste. Even on the soccer field with mud! Has he reached an artistic crescendo with a sonnet on the staircase and a villanelle on the shower curtain? What next? In this innovative, inspiring picture book, you'll find a laugh-out-loud story poem full of hilarious antics, and, if you look carefully, you'll discover Ryan's own poems within the inventive illustrations. As a bonus, Ryan's helpful guide to fifteen poetic forms and five voices invites you to challenge your own poetic imagination. Ideal for reading aloud or acting out, here's the perfect book to celebrate the joy of poetry and spark creative thinking. Join in the fun!

Literary Nonfiction. Sparked by the only two letters--out of over a hundred-that López Medin's mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS traces a sequence of mothers-López Medin's mother, her mother's mother, herself as a mother-in a porous, restless gesture toward what's never fully grasped.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

The contemporary Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has a prestigious worldwide reputation-- many expect that he will someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Robert Bly, a longtime friend and confidant of Tranströmer’s, as well as one of his first translators, has carefully chosen and translated the finest of Tranströmer’s poems to create this collection.

This is one of the wisest books I've read in years... —New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act—the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle’s work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that’s vital and welcome, that doesn’t make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon Review Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... —Publishers Weekly This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. —Matthew Dickman The accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... —San Francisco Examiner Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.

"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.