The poems and stories in this book deal with everyday situations, and place them in a framework that transcends time. They highlight the special feelings and events of the life cycle: the birth of a child, the death of a parent, and all of the rites of passage that intervene. The focus is on commonalities: the shared feelings of human beings across the great divides of culture, continent, and time.

A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 One of Oprah Magazine's "Ten Best Books of 2017" "This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood. . . . These exquisite poems defy categorization." —The New Yorker The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.

First-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studies—including the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic "I-voice." In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part by the "New Lyric Studies," I, the Poet will appeal not only to scholars of Latin literature but to readers across a range of literary studies who seek to understand the Roman contexts which shaped canonical poetic genres.

"In this book, scholar Thorpe Running shows that a skeptical approach to both language and poetry places eight poets from three countries in Latin America within a strain of poetry prefigured by Stephane Mallarme." "Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz, Alejandra Pizarnik, Alberto Girri, Juan Luis Martinez, Gonzalo Millan, and David Huerta span three different generations. In addition to their age and geographical differences, their poetry bears no obvious similarities. All eight, however, are poetas pensantes, or thinking poets, and underlying the work of these probing writers is the disturbing question: Does language do what it is supposed to do? The answer is negative for all these poets who see their poems as being made up of words that don't work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Facets are known in all lives, in our subtle thoughts that speak as a silent voice within, and yet they somehow have the amazing power to change courses and rewrite destinies. Some reflective, some striking a poignant nerve ever reminding us of our own humanity found in these truths felt from a paralleling universe of abstract experience. This is where the magic is found-in the unmined landscape of the artist's imagination. Facets is a journey through this reality of poetry and art. A collection of poems and writings designed to awaken the poet in all of us. Sometimes it takes a lonely walk somewhere to find that a vast and remote landscape is the perfect canvas for a soul to paint light with darkness, heaven with hell, and realize that in the center of all things is this human condition. A muse where had it not been this poetry surely would have lacked the poignant and reflective passion, the true depth of love, and all the deep madness of expression as we paint with hearts in our own statement of this truth. Here we are, from every heartbreak to reprieve and always just as human as we can possibly be.

"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere—in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."—Adrian Matejka Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences. From "Agenda": I. While two women kissed in their house I watched a jury hide bullets in a Black boy's body, all rigor mortis and bass line. I landed in Chicago, a lead box. The airport showed CNN and a Black mother could not be heard over gate changes, bistro jazz. Subtitles gathered and faded like gossip while I made my mouth vacant in my hometown. I carried a fever of insufferable noise that skin, illuminated by a hoodie, held close, a forced kin. Phillip B. Williams has authored two chapbooks: Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Poetry, the Southern Review, West Branch , and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry.