The Secret Meaning of Things is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fourth book of poems.

Li-Young Lee is a leading American poet, born in Indonesia, whose poetry fuses memory, family, culture and history to explore love, exile, family and mortality. This selection, drawn from three collections and a memoir, shows Lee searching for understanding and for the right language to give form to what is invisible and evanescent.

A biography of the Sufi poet that’s “a dazzling feat of scholarship . . . the book restores Rumi to the glories and hardships of his momentous age” (The Washington Post). Ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born over eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around the world. He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge. In this breakthrough biography, New York Times–bestselling author Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name Rumi, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi’s life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch traces this epic journey from Central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family, displaced by Mongol terror, to settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz, who taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world’s greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine. Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi’s Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi’s devotion to a “religion of love,” remarkable in his own time and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.

Dear Reader, Life, love, and hope have a story, and each story has an explanation. The answer to the questions we might encounter in the journeys of our lives lies beneath the story behind the question. This is the pattern to find a truthful explanation regarding anything in life. This is a poetic self-help book written by an ordinary gardener who came to America as a teenager, searching for refuge and a better future. When reaching his destiny, he not only fulfilled his dream but also found something even greater that will bless our hearts! The Poem of Life is life itself telling us its story and love itself teaching us how to love! It is a forgotten treasure chest, full of patterns to help us understand our complicated world. It is one of the most intelligent insights into humanity. The gift of life is to be a human being, and our gift is even greater when we act like humans.

The Secret Life of Poems is a primer which offers a poem - or on occasion an excerpt - succeeding with commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase. This brief engagement with forty-seven poems is intended for students and readers of poetry, and seeks to explain how poetry works by bringing into view the hidden order of specific poems.

Young readers will fall in love all over again with Dennis Lee’s light-hearted verse, which embraces universal childhood experiences of every flavour, from digging holes to foreign lands to searching for the perfect pet. David McPhail’s gorgeous watercolour paintings capture Lee’s subtle celebration of multiculturalism and offer a colourful feast for the eye. Oh, the kids around the block are like an Ice cream store, ’Cause there’s chocolate and vanilla, And there’s maple and there’s more...

"Here is the mature work of a poet who has always managed to delight—but who now demands something more of us. He asks us to enter the twenty-first century with open eyes: attentive to the past, eager for the future, naming what we love."--Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review