“S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka’s own evolution as a poet-activist” (The Washington Post). Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century (The New York Times). Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka’s rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history. A New York Times Editors’ Choice “A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka’s poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure.” —William J. Harris, Boston Review “The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work.” —Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review

Represented in all modern anthologies by his great poem on Irish history A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Derek Mahon is regarded with Heaney and Longley as the leader of the resurgence of Irish poetry from the late `60s onwards. He writes lyric poetry of enormous wit, elegance and scepticism. Penguin published his first Selected Poemsin 1990 - this new, expanded edition revisits the older work but also contains important new work from his most recent volume, Harbour Lights.

New Collected Poems is an updated version of Collected Poems (1999). It brings together, in a new form, the poems the author wishes to preserve from the work of half a century. Duly praised at home and abroad, they range in time and space from the early Ulster poems and 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' to two ambitious sequences, 'New York Time' and 'Decadence'. Also included are the great recent flourish of Harbour Lights, Life on Earth and An Autumn Wind, and a group of previously uncollected poems, among them 'Monochrome', 'The One-Thirty' and 'Dreams of a Summer Night'

Michael Hartnett (1941-1999) had a distinguished and highly respected career in his native Ireland. Even before the publication of his 1968 collection with the Dolmen Press, Anatomy of a Cliche, his poems earned critical esteem and, in time, they were recognized by the Irish Poetry Prize in 1980, a Poetry Ireland Choice in 1987, and awards from the Irish-American Cultural Institute and the American Ireland Fund. He was a member of Ireland's distinguished arts academy, Aosdana. From brief early lyrics to more extended meditations, and including a number of unpublished gems, this collection represents forty years of coruscating art.

Collection of poetry by Rochelle Owens. Introduction by Susan Smith Nash.

"Thirty writers selected a poem by Derek Mahon and provide an essay on their choice"--Page 4 of cover.