What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry—and about how we read Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth's lakes. Poetry—even by the greats—is rife with mistakes. In The Poet's Mistake, critic and poet Erica McAlpine gathers together for the first time numerous instances of these errors, from well-known historical gaffes to never-before-noticed grammatical incongruities, misspellings, and solecisms. But unlike the many critics and other readers who consider such errors felicitous or essential to the work itself, she makes a compelling case for calling a mistake a mistake, arguing that denying the possibility of error does a disservice to poets and their poems. Tracing the temptation to justify poets' errors from Aristotle through Freud, McAlpine demonstrates that the study of poetry's mistakes is also a study of critical attitudes toward mistakes, which are usually too generous—and often at the expense of the poet's intentions. Through remarkable close readings of Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop, Heaney, Ashbery, and others, The Poet's Mistake shows that errors are an inevitable part of poetry's making and that our responses to them reveal a great deal about our faith in poetry—and about how we read.

IMPERFECT features 70 poems by 50 poets, covering all kinds of mistakes. The IMPERFECT poets, who include the 2017-2019 Young People's Poet Laureate Margarita Engle, have published hundreds of books between them and been anthologized in hundreds more.

In The Year of No Mistakes, Aptowicz goes cross country and tackles themes like love, lust, heartache and ambition in poems set in cities across the United States. While the backbone of the book is the slow break-up of her decade-long relationship, the heart remains Aptowicz falling in love with Americana. Sharply observant and unflinchingly truthful, her poems may be funny or heartbreaking, spare or lush, bright or dark, but they are always honest and engaging working class poems. Written during the fellowship year of her National Endowment for the Arts grant, poems from this collection have already been published in over four dozen literary journals and have been performed in venues across the country.

"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.

Poetry. In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often- vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn—to show, in the manner of a close friend, what the world has to offer, what it sometimes takes away, and what can and should matter most.

Sometimes only a poem will do. These poetic prescriptions and wise words of advice offer comfort, delight and inspiration for all; a space for reflection, and that precious realization - I'm not the only one who feels like this. In the years since he first had the idea of prescribing short, powerful poems for all manner of spiritual ailments, William Sieghart has taken his Poetry Pharmacy around the length and breadth of Britain, into the pages of the Guardian, onto BBC Radio 4 and onto the television, honing his prescriptions all the time. This pocket-sized book presents the most essential poems in his dispensary- those which, again and again, have really shown themselves to work. Whether you are suffering from loneliness, lack of courage, heartbreak, hopelessness, or even from an excess of ego, there is something here to ease your pain.

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.