This new book by the great Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange, exhibiting ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the ‘sycorax video style’ he’s been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: that of the afterlife. Brathwaite performs a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in his poetry and is is a poet of undeniable stature, writing the final poems of his career. Central to the book is a series of poems outlining the speaker’s (the poet’s) experiences with what he calls “Cultural Lynching.” These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies the racial politics and ageism underlying the events described. The speaker’s pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

The greatest American Jewish author of the nineteenth century, Emma Lazarus was a celebrated poet and humanitarian activist. This edition is a broad collection of her writings, including her essays, previously unpublished poems, her innovative late work, and, in its entirety, her most important book, Songs of a Semite (1882). Her best known poem, “The New Colossus” (the 1883 Statue of Liberty poem that made Lazarus a national icon), is also here, along with a selection of cultural documents that help contextualize her work in relation to contemporary debates about Jewish history, the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, immigration, and antisemitism.

With biographical sketch by her sister, Josephine Lazarus, originally published in Century magazine, Oct., 1888. cf. Jewish ency. Part of the poems are reprinted from the Century, Lippincott's magazine, the Critic, and the American Hebrew. CONTENTS.- I. Narrative, lyric, and dramatic.- II. Jewish poems: translations.

The debut volume of a Mexican-American poet exploring fundamental human predicaments.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award Emma Lazarus’s most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable story has remained a mystery until now. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980s, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity—as a feminist, a Zionist, and a trailblazing Jewish-American writer. Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus’s place in history as an activist and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today. As a stunning rebuke to fear, xenophobia, and isolationism, Lazarus's life and work are more relevant now than ever before.

The first important American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus is remembered above all for her classic sonnet “The New Colossus,” whose phrases (“Give me your tired, your poor.”) have become part of the American language. In this new selection of Lazarus’s work, John Hollander demonstrates that in her relatively brief life she achieved real poetic mastery in a variety of modes. In early poems like “Phantasies” and “Symphonic Studies,” she explored fluently imagined inner landscapes suggested by the music of Schumann. Later, her deepening interest in Jewish history and culture was expressed in such powerful poems as “1492,” “The New Ezekiel,” and “The Guardian of the Red Disk.” Influenced both by American models, among them her poetic mentor Emerson, and by the poets whose work she translated, including Heinrich Heine and the medieval Hebrew poets Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Judah ha-Levi, she forged a poetic style of high technical accomplishment and moral passion. Long neglected, her work is revealed in this volume as an important contribution to American poetry. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...Who wrote these words? And why? In 1883, Emma Lazarus, deeply moved by an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, wrote a sonnet that was to give voice to the Statue of Liberty. Originally a gift from France to celebrate our shared national struggles for liberty, the Statue, thanks to Emma's poem, slowly came to shape our hearts, defining us as a nation that welcomes and gives refuge to those who come to our shores. This title has been selected as a Common Core Text Exemplar (Grades 4-5, Poetry)