An accessible guide to the most important poems ever written-- from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Waste Land--and the poets behind them

Discover the key themes and ideas behind the most important poems ever written, and the poetic geniuses who wrote them.

The perfect introduction to poetry, The Poetry Book takes you on a fascinating journey through time to explore more than 90 of the world's greatest poetic works.

Discover poems in all their many guises and from all over the world, from the epics of the ancient world through Japanese haikus and Renaissance sonnets to modernist masterpieces such as The Waste Land, and the key works of the last 50 years--from And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou to Derek Walcott's Omeros.

Using the Big Ideas series' trademark combination of clear explanation, witty infographics, and inspirational quotes, The Poetry Book unlocks the key ideas, themes, imagery, and structural techniques behind even the most complex of poems, in clear and simple terms, setting each work in its historical, social, cultural, and literary context. 

Delve into the works of Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Eliot, and Neruda with in-depth literary analysis and fascinating biographies. Find out what odes, ballads, and allegories are. Trace recurring motifs, explore imagery, and find out how rhyme and rhythm work.

From Beowulf to Seamus Heaney's Bogland, The Poetry Book is essential reading for readers of poetry and aspiring poets alike.

“To read these poems is to be reminded again and again of our true allegiance to each other.” —from the introduction by Julia Alvarez
 

With a powerful and poignant introduction from Julia Alvarez, Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution is an extraordinary collection, rooted in a strong tradition of protest poetry and voiced by icons of the movement and some of the most exciting writers today. The poets of Resistencia explore feminist, queer, Indigenous, and ecological themes alongside historically prominent protests against imperialism, dictatorships, and economic inequality. Within this momentous collection, poets representing every Latin American country grapple with identity, place, and belonging, resisting easy definitions to render a nuanced and complex portrait of language in rebellion.

Included in English translation alongside their original language, the fifty-four poems in Resistencia are a testament to the art of translation as much as the act of resistance. An all-star team of translators, including former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera along with young, emerging talent, have made many of the poems available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Urgent, timely, and absolutely essential, these poems inspire us all to embrace our most fearless selves and unite against all forms of tyranny and oppression.

Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either is a debut poetry collection which seeks Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla as a means of reconnecting to the speaker's cultural identity. As Spanish language and culture becomes more accessible to non-Latinx populations, the speaker grapples with her own complex story of assimilation. Modern marginalization, appropriation, tokenizing, and fetishizing are examined in this multi-generational memoir tracking a Latinx family's journey to assimilation. This dynamic collection is far-reaching, exploring BIPOC experiences in predominantly white cultures.

from "Young Memoir"

di·as·po·ra

is silent. is spiritual. It is being robbed of memoir while you sleep in a suburb. it is nonconsensually sensual--it is a question. when it comes for you, what will you recover? what will you do to reclaim all that was forced lost?

 

"A rich, thoughtful anthology exploring centuries of Black poetry." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This deep and complex assemblage of Black poetry culminates in a joyful, painful, and emotionally rich experience." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An eclectic mix of Black experiences fills this unmatched anthology that features both modern poets, such as Nikki Giovanni and Ibi Zoboi, and 'the brilliant Black poets who are now ancestors'... A fresh canon for poetry studies."--ALA Booklist (starred review)

"An excellent collection of poetry that is an insightful read on the Black experience"--School and Library Journal

Starring thirty-seven poets, with contributions from acclaimed authors, including Kwame Alexander, Ibi Zoboi, and Nikki Giovanni, this breathtaking Black YA poetry anthology edited by National Book Award finalist Amber McBride, Taylor Byas, and Erica Martin celebrates Black poetry, folklore, and culture.

Come, claim your wings.

Lift your life above the earth,

return to the land of your father's birth.

What exactly is it to be Black in America?

Well, for some, it's learning how to morph the hatred placed by others into love for oneself; for others, it's unearthing the strength it takes to continue to hold one's swagger when multitudinous factors work to make Black lives crumble. For some, it's gathering around the kitchen table as Grandma tells the story of Anansi the spider, while for others it's grinning from ear to ear while eating auntie's spectacular 7Up cake.

Black experiences and traditions are complex, striking, and vast--they stretch longer than the Nile and are four times as deep--and carry more than just unimaginable pain--there is also joy.

Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them.

Edited by Taylor Byas, Erica Martin, and Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner Amber McBride, Poemhood will simultaneously highlight the duality and nuance at the crux of so many Black experiences with poetry being the psalm constantly playing.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection pick!

African-American poetry is an ever-growing and ever-changing art form--in coffee houses and night clubs, on music videos and in independent films, from the blues and be-bop to rap and hip-hop. "Catch the Fire!!!" introduces a new generation of African-American poets whose work constitute nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today.
 

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

An anthology that explores the power and beauty of rivers through poems from around the world and through the ages. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.

Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations—the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India’s Ganges, Egypt’s Nile, the Yellow River of China—and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it’s natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents.

In this collection, British poets from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald mingle with American voices ranging from verses by the indigenous Klallam people and the African-American spirituals “Deep River” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” to such recent poets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Natasha Tretheway. Walt Whitman’s iconic “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Emily Dickinson’s tersely erotic “My River Runs to Thee" stream alongside poems from ancient Babylon and Egypt. Contributions from India, Nepal, Japan, China, Thailand, France, Germany, Russia, Serbia, Chile, Mexico, the Congo, and Nigeria round out this celebration of the rivers of the world.

Includes:
• “My River Runs to Thee" by Emily Dickinson
• “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
• “Ol’ Man River” by Oscar Hammerstein II
• “The Golden Boat” by Rabindranath Tagore
• “The River God” by Stevie Smith
• “The River Bends but the Water Does Not” by Buddhādasa Bhikkhu  
• “The Niagara River” by Kay Ryan
• “Amazon” by Pablo Neruda 
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

"Printer's ink is the greater explosive."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World--and within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then, poems by Kenneth Patchen. But it was the success and scandal of Number Four, Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956), that put City Lights on the map, positioning the Pocket Poets Series at the forefront of the literary counterculture.

A landmark sixtieth retrospective celebrating 60 years of publishing and cultural history, this edition provides an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected a handful of poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Pasolini, Voznesensky, Prévert, Mayakovsky, Cortázar, O'Hara, Ponsot, Levertov, di Prima, Duncan, Lamantia, Lowry, and more, all of the Pocket Poets Series' innovative, influential, and often ground-breaking American and international poets.

A historical timeline of more than four hundred 20th-century poems. “[A] prodigious harvest . . . an entire universe of poetry lives here” (Booklist, starred review).


This groundbreaking anthology presents in chronological order over four hundred poems written during the twentieth century. The authors, both published poets themselves, give an overview of each period of history, while notes to the poems place each one in its historical context and trace the century’s poetic development. Concise biographies for each poet complete the anthology. By organizing the poems in chronological order, readers will see poets in a new light. Here A. E. Houseman, for example, rubs shoulders with T. S. Eliot, showing that traditional forms can hold their own against the modernist orthodoxy. All the major events of the twentieth century are reflected in the choice of poems within these pages. Including poems by Noël Coward, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, among a host of others, this richly rewarding collection captures the history of the twentieth century within one monumental volume.

This wide-ranging collection of inspirational poetry and prose offers readers solace, perspective, and the courage to persevere.

In times of personal hardship or collective anxiety, words have the power to provide comfort, meaning, and hope. The past year has seen a resurgence of poetry and inspiring quotes—posted on social media, appearing on bestseller lists, shared from friend to friend. Honoring this communal spirit, How Lovely the Ruins is a timeless collection of both classic and contemporary poetry and short prose that can be of help in difficult times—selections that offer wisdom and purpose, and that allow us to step out of our current moment to gain a new perspective on the world around us as well as the world within.

The poets and writers featured in this book represent the diversity of our country as well as voices beyond our borders, including Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, Danez Smith, Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alice Walker, Adam Zagajewski, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, Anna Akhmatova, Yehuda Amichai, and Robert Frost. And the book opens with a stunning foreword by Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem “Praise Song for the Day,” delivered at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, ushered in an era of optimism. In works celebrating our capacity for compassion, our patriotism, our right to protest, and our ability to persevere, How Lovely the Ruins is a beacon that illuminates our shared humanity, allowing us connection in a fractured world.

Includes poetry, prose, and quotations from:
Elizabeth Alexander • Marcus Aurelius • Karen Armstrong • Matthew Arnold • Ellen Bass • Brian Bilston • Gwendolyn Brooks • Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Octavia E. Butler • Regie Cabico • Dinos Christianopoulos • Lucille Clifton • Ta-Nehisi Coates • Leonard Cohen • Wendy Cope • E. E. Cummings • Charles Dickens • Mark Doty • Thomas Edison • Albert Einstein • Ralph Ellison • Kenneth Fearing • Annie Finch • Rebecca Foust • Nikki Giovanni • Stephanie Gray • John Green • Hazel Hall • Thich Nhat Hanh • Joy Harjo • Václav Havel • Terrance Hayes • William Ernest Henley • Juan Felipe Herrera • Jane Hirshfield • John Holmes • A. E. Housman • Bohumil Hrabal • Robinson Jeffers • Georgia Douglas Johnson • James Weldon Johnson • Paul Kalanithi • Robert F. Kennedy • Omar Khayyam • Emma Lazarus • Li-Young Lee • Denise Levertov • Ada Limón • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Nelson Mandela • Masahide • Khaled Mattawa • Jamaal May • Claude McKay • Edna St. Vincent Millay • Pablo Neruda • Anaïs Nin • Olga Orozco • Ovid • Pier Paolo Pasolini • Edgar Allan Poe • Claudia Rankine • Adrienne Rich • Rainer Maria Rilke • Alberto Ríos • Edwin Arlington Robinson • Eleanor Roosevelt • Christina Rossetti • Muriel Rukeyser • Sadhguru • Carl Sandburg • Vikram Seth • Charles Simic • Safiya Sinclair • Effie Waller Smith • Maggie Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Leonora Speyer • Gloria Steinem • Clark Strand • Wisława Szymborska • Rabindranath Tagore • Sara Teasdale • Alfred, Lord Tennyson • Vincent van Gogh • Ocean Vuong • Florence Brooks Whitehouse • Walt Whitman • Ella Wheeler Wilcox • William Carlos Williams • Virginia Woolf • W. B. Yeats • Saadi Youssef • Javier Zamora • Howard Zinn

This landmark anthology gathers together almost two-hundred vibrant English-language love poems by living writers of Arab descent.

We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets —Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them—and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic—a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.

A showcase of poetry from some of the darkest and most lyrical voices of women in horror. A follow-up to the award-winning poetry showcase Under Her Skin, UNDER HER EYE features the best in never-before-published dark verse and lyrical prose from the voices of Women in Horror, themed on domestic horror and the terror women too often experience in their own homes. Edited by Lindy Ryan and Lee Murray, UNDER HER EYE celebrates women in horror from cover to cover. In addition to poems contributed by over one hundred poets worldwide, the collection features poems from Stephanie M. Wytovich, Jessica McHugh, and Marge Simon, with cover art by noted horror artist Lynne Hansen and an introduction by Bram Stoker Award(R)-winning poet Sara Tantlinger. This showcase is produced in partnership with The Pixel Project, a global non-profit organization focused on ending violence against women globally.

A charming, clever, and original collection of more than 100 spine poems-a popular form of found poetry composed by arranging book spines--illustrated with 110 full-color photographs.

Easy to create and share online, spine poems--also known as collage poems or centos--have become a fun and popular way of writing poetry. Spine Poems is a delightful, illustrated collection of more than 100 spine poems that range from hilarious to heart-rending to profound.

Award-winning creative director and former bookseller Annette Dauphin Simon has arranged the poems in categories that resemble those found in a bookstore: Art, Biography and Memoir, Business, Cooking, Home and Garden, Music, Parenting, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture, Science Fiction and Fantasy, and True Crime. Each poem pulls from a wide variety of book genres and ranges from the short and quippy to lengthier and poignant.

Ridiculous / Hilarious / Terrible / Cool

Other Words for Home

Elisha Cooper / Jasmine Warga

Eek!

My Heart

Is Was

Torpedoed

Hundred Percent

Wonderstruck

Didn't See That Coming

Restart

Julie Larios and Julie Paschkis / Corinna Luyken / Deborah Freedman / Deborah Heiligman /Karen Romano Young / Brian Selznick / Rachel Hollis / Gordon Korman

Every poem is visually captured in a color photograph of stacked book spines taken by the author and is presented in a text version on the opposite page. Each spread also includes a list of the authors and artists whose titles make up the poem, and features quotes, fun facts, and other related literary and popular culture miscellany.

Spine Poems is a wonderful keepsake and gift book for all lovers of words, books, and poetry.

This long-awaited, indispensable volume contains more than 1600 poems drawn from dozens of languages and cultures, and spans a period of more than 4000 years from ancient Sumer and Egypt to the late twentieth century. World Poetry encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more. While World Poetry includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer'ore than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right. This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.

The Original Poem a Day has sold more than fifty thousand copies and is still going strong. It is a perennial gift-giving favorite and a word-of-mouth sensation among those who want poetry to be a greater presence in their lives. Like its predecessor, Poem a Day, Volume 2 offers a verse for each day of the year along with brief, often amusing, always interesting anecdotes about the poets and their poems. Laurie Sheck, a prize-winning poet in her own right, carries on the Poem a Day tradition by selecting a wide range of great poems that are short enough to memorize, substantive enough to be read again and again, and accessible enough to be enjoyed and appreciated by a wide readership. On the whole, Poem a Day, Volume 2 is a bit more modern than the original collection, a bit more international. Included are Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Czeslaw Misloz, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, William Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Rumi, Bertolt Brecht, Henry David Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Yusef Komunyaaka, Octavio Paz, Adrienne Rich, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Tru Vu . . . the varied list goes on and on. Every day is different, a surprise, and an adventure led by a knowledgeable guide whose love of all good verse shines through on every page.