Leaping Poetry is Robert Bly's testament to the singular importance of the artistic leap that bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought in any great work of art; the process that Bly refers to as "riding on dragons." Originally published in 1972 in Bly's literary journal The Seventies, Leaping Poetry is part anthology and part commentary, wherein Bly seeks to rejuvenate modern Western poetry through his revelations of "leaping" as found in the works of poets from around the world, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Chu Yuan, Tomas Transtromer, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, while also outlining the basic principles that shape his own poetry. Bly seeks the use of quick, free association of the known and the unknown-the innate animal and rational cognition-which, he maintains, have been kept apart in the development of Western religious, intellectual, and literary thought.

A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.

This collection, Morton’s tenth, is a bold book of poetry delving into risks. It’s the moving forward; the constant discovery of new things. Using a combination of quotes, mythological images, and exquisite metaphors from nature, Morton delivers poems that describe the absolute urgency of giving one’s heart over to life, the burning drive to have faith in the world, the insistence that everything, in its own way, is holy. This book is unfettered joy. Tending Fires I wanted to write a sonnet last night, because that’s what lovers do, but the fire needed tending, and all I could think of were your shoulders, and that’s not romantic, so I put on another log, and thought about that hot summer day underneath that oak, when our shoulders brushed, and I blushed at the nearness of you, and how we made love that night . . . still . . . that’s not what I wanted to write . . . But it’s you; you, my love. You are my night and my morning, and the hot coals beneath these logs . . . hear them hiss and whisper like cicadas—cicadas of the trees, and the summer, and of all things that burn.

Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardener, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.