The poems in this volume are poems for your brave heart, little seeds of spirit that will hopefully speak to your strength and beauty and help you reconnect to the timeless love you and we all are. It is in stillness that we find our true soul, our real strength, and our lasting happiness. Poetry can give us stillness. Poems can be sweet and lovely. Poems can shake us deeply. Poems can speak what must be said. To take a moment with a poem, we experience the holiness of this divine creation. We encounter the beautiful, the painful, the timid, and the tall. We are not our physical circumstances. We are not the death of our loved one, for we will see them again one day. We are not poverty, lack, hate, or injustice. We are not illness or accident. We are not sorrow or desperation. We are not mistakes. But we must overcome these things from time to time. We must regain hope. To sit with a poem and to let the reading of the poem fill a quiet moment helps us see that we are eternal spirits of promise, love, kindness, and holiness. We all truly matter. We are timeless and limitless beings, and we connect with this in our quiet, still center. We are the seed of God placed here in creation to do good things. To connect with our capacity to create good and to know we are completely loved by our Creator is where peace comes from. To keep moving forward is a testament to our true nature. This book is dedicated to the brave heart we each have.

First read by Maya Angelou at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, this wise and moving poem will inspire readers with its memorable message of hope for humanity.

An Ancient Collection Reimagined Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”) contains the poems of the first Buddhist women: princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born into limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. The original authors of the Therigatha were women from every kind of background, but they all shared a deep-seated desire for awakening and liberation. In The First Free Women, Matty Weingast has reimagined this ancient collection and created a contemporary and radical adaptation that takes the essence of each poem and highlights the struggles and doubts, as well as the strength, perseverance, and profound compassion, embodied by these courageous women.

Cult bestseller The Invitation is more than just a poem. It is a profound invitation to a life that is more fulfilling and passionate, with greater integrity. This book is a word-of-mouth sensation, whose truths have resonated with people all over the world, and is now reissued with a beautiful new cover design.

A “raw and honest” (Los Angeles Review of Books) memoir from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. Narrating the complexities of betrayal and love, Crazy Brave is a haunting, visionary memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice.

Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in her new collection of poems "If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger," Mary Oliver once said in an interview. Finally, in her stunning new collection, Felicity, we can immerse ourselves in Oliver’s love poems. Here, great happiness abounds. Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person. She opens our eyes again to the territory within our own hearts; to the wild and to the quiet. In these poems, she describes—with joy—the strangeness and wonder of human connection. As in Blue Horses, Dog Songs, and A Thousand Mornings, with Felicity Oliver honors love, life, and beauty.