Makes available, for the first time in English, the work of a major modern Arab poet, providing a framework for understanding his experience not only as an Arab writer but as a postcolonial one.

Makes available, for the first time in English, the work of a major modern Arab poet, providing a framework for understanding his experience not only as an Arab writer but as a postcolonial one.

Caldecott Honor Book Today Show Best Book for the Holidays ALA Notable Book for All Ages ALSC Notable Children's Book NCTE Notable Poetry Book Evanston Public Library's Top 100 Great Book for Kids Nerdy Award Winner for Single Poem Picture Book Bank Street Best Books of the Year In this powerful, affirming poem by award-winning author Zetta Elliott, a Black child explores his shifting emotions throughout the year. There is a place inside of me a space deep down inside of me where all my feelings hide. Summertime is filled with joy—skateboarding and playing basketball—until his community is deeply wounded by a police shooting. As fall turns to winter and then spring, fear grows into anger, then pride and peace. In her stunning debut, illustrator Noa Denmon articulates the depth and nuances of a child’s experiences following a police shooting—through grief and protests, healing and community—with washes of color as vibrant as his words. Here is a groundbreaking narrative that can help all readers—children and adults alike—talk about the feelings hiding deep inside each of us.

A collection of poems centered around life in Appalachia addresses topics ranging from the marginalization of the region's people to the environmental degradation it has endured throughout history.

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

This astonishing, self-assured debut leads us on an exploration to the stars and back, begging us to reconsider our boundaries of self, time, space, and knowledge. The speaker writes, “...the universe/is an arrow/without end/and it asks only one question;/How dare you?” Zig-zagging through the realms of nature, science, and religion, one finds St. Francis sighing in the corner of a studio apartment, tides that are caused by millions of oysters “gasping in unison,” an ark filled with women in its stables, and prayers that reach God fastest by balloon. There’s pathos: “When my new lover tells me I’m correct to love him, I/realize the sound isn’t metal at all. It’s not the coins rattling/ on concrete, but the fingers scraping to pick them up.” And humor, too: “...even the sun’s been sighing Not you again/when it sees me.” After reading this far-reaching, inventive collection, we too are startled, space struck, our pockets gloriously “filled with space dust.”

For most Urdu speakers in the Indian subcontinent, Iqbal has long been one of the most loved and admired poets. Much has been written about his poetry and philosophy . This book stays away from his politics. Iqbal first received recognition in the West in 1920 when his translation of Asrar-e-Khudi by R. A. Nicholson (The Secrets of the Self) first appeared. Most of the recurring criticism was on his concept of Khudi which Iqbal addressed then and later, explaining the basic nature of influence of much older Sufi philosophy on khudi versus Nietzsches bermensch. Several authors, both from the subcontinent and the West, have translated Iqbals poetry before, and in this book have highlighted the positive outcomes over some controversies and confusion. This book presents translation of well over 150 of Iqbals Urdu poems from Kuliyaath-e-Iqbal and about 30 or so from Payam-e-Mashriq (PM), in Persian. Iqbal offered PM as a response to Goethes West-stlicher Diwan, in German. Goethe had long been interested in Eastern (rather, Middle Eastern) culture and his Divan was inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez/Hafiz/Hafis, which also involved some literary traverse through a different religio-philosophical territory. Translation from Urdu or Persian to English across a vast cultural, prosodic, and linguistic gulf presents enormous problems. Section On Translation discusses some of these issues. Although Iqbals philosophy has been covered from by many others before, some of Iqbals own explanation of Khudi in a larger historical Sufi context are discussed here. In addition, Iqbals own contribution to what Goethe called Weltliteratur (or world literature), is recognized in PM (mostly) and elsewhere in his Urdu Kuliyaath. Iqbal not just brought various Western themes and figures to Urdu literature, but presented them, with his own comments and interpretation, to a readership that may have been largely unfamiliar with these Western themes. The Appendices include important recognition Iqbal received in Germany.