Poetry Books

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues--frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse's eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In...

Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak, an...

Marabou, Jane Yeh's first book of poems, is a meditation on the nature of artifice, and on the self. Her snapshots freeze fraught instants in the lives of a broad cast of characters: the horror movie mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker, a flock of Cumbrian...

This new collection of essays on American poetry by Donald Davie (1922-1995) displays again 'the scale and range' of one of the great 'understanders' of poetry of our century, here fulfilling his chosen role as bridge-builder between poets, poetries and...

Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkins...

Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age...

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets, devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants. As John Kinsella writes in his introduction, 'she looked inwards into...

The memories from which Fred D'Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aime Cesaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in...

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limn."I have always been too sensitive, a...

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion-both toward and away from us-and...

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the...

""The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas, much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at the age of 29 in 1978... Stanford was a hell of a...

Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously,...

In Jeffrey McDaniel's second book, it is hard to separate the humor from the pain. Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day...

Pier Paolo Pasolini (19221975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a...

While Cernuda's verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life's journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and...

"At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and...

Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan's third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan's poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other...

Horace has long been revered as the supreme lyric poet of the Augustan Age. In his perceptive introduction to this translation of Horace's Odes and Satires, Sidney Alexander engagingly spells out how the poet expresses values and traditions that remain...

'She separates herself. There are different voices here, andseparations. Cutting awayfrom her past, from varied, acceptable and permissible futuresdreamed into expectations by others on her behalf. Fromalways being a dangerous difference in a...

G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a prayer of thanks for a broken world.Alan Fyfe's debut collection employs a core of Jewish philosophy to explore themes of love, metaphysics, the self-destructive impulse, trauma, and the transcendent. With a boisterous...

One of the most important books of illustrated poetry in English literature, William Blake's Songs of Innocence was meticulously relief-etched, printed and coloured in 1789. A unique work of composite art, it contains some of Blake's most enduring and...

Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, the poems of Katrina Porteous's latest collection address current issues of social and environmental change. 330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to...

Covering the most productive period of J.H. Prynne's career, this new volume collects all of the recent poetry of Britain's leading late Modernist poet.Prynne's austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to...

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry PrizeFrom one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.FadyJoudah's...

Beautifully illustrated in Imtiaz Dharker's distinctive style, Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy.Imtiaz Dharker's new collection pays...

Thirty-seven writers from First Nations, migrant and refugee backgrounds reveal the true wealth and beauty of Australia's cultural melting pots.Australia is often referred to as The Lucky Country - a land of economic opportunity and vast natural...

Darkness Spoken is the most complete volume of Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry in English and German. Considered one of the premiere poets of her generation, Bachmann's various awards include the Georg Bchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award,...

Drawing on powerful and universal themes, The Penny Dropping traces the journey of a relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up.Distance and maturity give retrospective access to moments of revelation which went fatally unacknowledged or...

Through moving and incisive poetry, Crystal traces the arc of one woman's experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth.In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an...

Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generationsThe ancestors that walk with us, sing us our song. When we get quiet enough, we can hear them sing and make them audible to people today. In Anishinaabe Songs for a New...

A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life. "Dawn Lundy Martin's poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can't do," writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions...

Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden's National Book Awardwinning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers.The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H...

An illustrated work of lyric poetry and prose on drinking green tea as a meditation.An Homage to Green Teais an illustrated collection of poetry and prose on the beneficence of green tea, and ways to experience that beneficence. It collects two works of...

"Cuadros died of AIDS in 1996, two years after chronicling the disease in City of God, a book of poems and stories about queer Los Angeles. His belated follow-up takes the same form, with the same bracing urgency."-The New York Times"Without doubt one of...

Courtney Conrad's powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her...

Soul Feast is a companion to the hugely popular poetry anthology Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.The original Soul Food anthology (2007)...

Reflecting a life spread across two continents, Taylorcontinues a restless probing of the contradictions of life and language.  Here are love poems, poems about language andsilence, an elegy for a cat and an interview with a querulous musician...

National Book Awardwinner Arthur Sze presents a one-of-a-kind anthology that vividly traces Chinese poetry from its centuries-old lyrical traditions up to the present day.In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Awardwinning poet Arthur Sze presents a...

An elemental, uncanny collection of poems translated from one of Sweden's most influential and beloved poets. In Lonespeech, Ann Jderlund rewires the correspondence between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan into a series of stark, runic poems...

A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss. In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of...

Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon's fifth book of poetry,All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it."You almost let your ego go," he writes, "but oh-/maybe tomorrow." Revolving through...

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Awardwinning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz...

Alogia is a condition of reduced or absent speech. Poiesis is making. Alogopoiesis therefore forges a poetics of the unstated, a making of meanings from what's not there. Poems in this book explore experiences of domestic violence, queer heartbreak, and...

In her debut poetry collection Christine Shamista reflects on her experiences living in Sri Lanka, England and Australia as part of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Shamista's poems reveal layers of the self through her journey leaving her ancestral home...

Discover the tranquil wisdom of Chomei's 13th-century masterpiece, Hojoki, as it unveils the beauty of imperfection and the serenity of a simple life amidst the chaos of existence.Hojoki is an introspective poem written in the 13th century by...

A Blind Salmon engages in Julia Wong Kcomt's characteristically unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, exploring mothering, multilinguality, and madness.Tusn writer Julia Wong Kcomt's sixth collection of...

Kuracca - meaning white sulphur crested cockatoo - is a multi-lingual anthology featuring eleven Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women writing poetry, prose, songs and stories about their unique lives. All contributors are members of Canberra's...