To whom does a poem speak? Do poems really communicate with those they address? Is reading poems like overhearing? Like intimate conversation? Like performing a script? William Waters pursues these questions by closely reading a selection of poems that say "you" to a human being: to the reader, to the beloved, or to the dead. In any account of reading lyric poetry, Waters argues, there will be places where the participant roles of speaker, intended hearer, and bystander melt together or away; these are moments of wonder.Looking both at poetry's "you" and at how readers encounter it, Waters asserts that poetic address shows literature pressing for a close relation with those into whose hands it may fall. What is at stake for us as readers and critics is our ability to acknowledge the claims made on us by the works of art with which we engage. In second-person poems, in a poem's touch, we may come to see why poetry matters to us, and how we, in turn, come to feel answerable to it. Poetry's Touch takes as a central thread the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a writer whose work is unusually self-conscious about poetic address. The book also draws examples from a gamut of European and American poems, ranging from archaic Greek inscriptions to Keats, Dickinson, and Ashbery.

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven includes: • All 25 illustrations by Gustave Doré for Harper & Brothers’ 1884 edition • An informative Introduction • A detailed Biography of Edgar Allan Poe • The illustrated version and text-only version of the full poem No poem has ever received the kind of immediate and overwhelming response that Poe’s “The Raven” did when it first appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. It made Poe an overnight sensation (though his great fame never brought him much wealth) and the poem, a powerfully haunting elegy to lost love, remains one of the most beloved and recognizable verses in the English language. The illustrations that accompany this Top Five Classics edition are reproductions of the renowned French artist Gustave Doré’s steel-plate engravings created for Harper & Brothers’ 1884 release of The Raven. It would be Doré’s last commission as he died shortly after completing the 25 illustrations in January 1883. His illustrations would become famous in their own right, evoking as they do the lyrical and mystical air of Poe’s masterpiece.

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.