From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls "How the days went / While you were blooming within me"; Jorie Graham muses on her mother's sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in "Kaddish"; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother's empowering example- "Don't you fall now- / For I'se still goin', honey, / I'se still climbin', / And life for me ain't been no crystal stair." From Emily Bronte's "Upon Her Soothing Breast" and Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom" to Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

"As seen in the The New York Times Book Review ""In characteristically short lines and pithy, slippery language like predictive text from a lucid dream, Zapruder’s fifth collection grapples with fatherhood as well as larger questions of influence and inheritance and obligation."" —The New York Times “[Zapruder] presents powerfully nuanced and vivid verse about the limitations of poetry to enact meaningful change in a world spiraling into callousness; yet despite poetry’s supposed constraints, Zapruder’s verse offers solace and an invaluable blueprint for empathy.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review “Zapruder’s new book, Father’s Day, is firmly situated in its (and our) political moment, and is anchored by a compelling gravity and urgency.” ―The Washington Post The poems in Matthew Zapruder’s fifth collection ask, how can one be a good father, partner, and citizen in the early twenty-first century? Zapruder deftly improvises upon language and lyricism as he passionately engages with these questions during turbulent, uncertain times. Whether interrogating the personalities of the Supreme Court, watching a child grow off into a distance, or tweaking poetry critics and hipsters alike, Zapruder maintains a deeply generous sense of humor alongside a rich vein of love and moral urgency. The poems in Father’s Day harbor a radical belief in the power of wonder and awe to sustain the human project while guiding it forward. "

From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

In For My Father Falling Asleep at St. Mary's Hospital, award-winning poet Dennis Sampson writes of the myriad of emotions he experiences while coping with his father's slow death: loneliness, vulnerability, anger, futility -- all explored in unflinching detail. Walking a fine line between an awareness of evil and the promise of the dawn, the poems reflect the idea that real happiness sometimes comes from enduring unhappiness with fortitude. For those who are alone and coping with loss or tragedy, Sampson provides an empathetic voice.

Christian Latin poetry from the fourth to sixth centuries was hugely influential on English and French medieval literature. In this, the first substantial overview of this poetry, Carolinne White sets the works in their literary and historical context, including translations of over thirty poems and excerpts, many never translated into English before.

Presents an anthology of poetry that celebrates fathers and fatherhood from authors representing various cultures throughout history.

Offers a poetic meditation on the legacy of the atomic bomb and how those who played a minor role in its creation can come to terms with the past