The Beauty


Book Description

The Beauty, an incandescent new collection from one of American poetry’s most distinctive and essential voices, opens with a series of dappled, ranging “My” poems—“My Skeleton,” “My Corkboard,” “My Species,” “My Weather”—using materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by; reflecting on advice given her long ago—to avoid the word “or”—she concludes, “Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life.” Hirshfield’s lines cut, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability, her tender consciousness of the unjudging beauty of what exists, her abiding contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings, sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For this poet, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.” Hirshfield’s riddling recipes for that world (“add salt to hunger”; “add time to trees”) offer a profoundly altered understanding of our lives’ losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.







Early Modern English Poetry


Book Description

This text features 28 essays written by important international scholars on the major poems of the English Renaissance. It offers scholarship on subjects ranging from the invention of English verse, Petrarchism, pastoral, elegy, and satire, to women's religious verse, the place of homoeroticism and Cavalier poetry.




Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001


Book Description

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.










Intrusive Beauty


Book Description

Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty reckons with reluctant ecstasy and the improbable forms that beauty assumes. In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one’s life and one’s livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one’s vision of the world. Whether a young father who won’t lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one’s assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they’re uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.




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