Mutlu Konuk Blasing is Professor of English at Brown University. She is the author of The Art of Life, American Poetry, and Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual...

"Our politics are broken; our world is melting; the next catastrophe looms. Enter James Parker, who for years now has been writing odes of appreciation on subjects from the seemingly minor ("Ode to Naps") to the unexpected ("Ode to Giving People Money") to the seemingly minor, unexpected, and hyperspecific ("Ode to Running in Movies"). Finally collecting Parker's beloved and much-lauded odes in one place, this volume demonstrates the profound power...

The collected works of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer explores her transfigured landscapes and offers insight into her unique form created to reflect the human drive to release the past in order to realize the yet-unimagined.

"Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists insisting that Black Lives Matter. Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls." -- Amazon.com

A collection of Joyce Kilmer's poetry, featuring his best-known poem, Trees.

Overview: Nikki Giovanni's poetry has spurred movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a healer and as a national treasure. But Giovanni's heart resides in the everyday, where family and lovers gather, friends commune, and those no longer with us are remembered. And at every gathering there is food--food as sustenance, food as aphrodisiac, food as memory. A pot of beans is flavored with her mother's...

From the award-winning author of Kettle Bottom, a sequence of fairytale-inspired narrative poems concerning the life of a troubled girl. Once upon a time, there lived a girl whose story was not her own ... So the story goes: Neglected and abused by her family, eclipsed by her elder and more beautiful sister, a young girl longs for happily-ever-after, for something, someone to rescue her. She is soon swept away into the next chapter of her life:...

"In Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric, Virginia Jackson argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. This is not a history of American poetry that begins with the Puritans and stretches to the present, or that jumps from the British Romantics to Walt Whitman, or that restricts the influence of African...

"Sappho's thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years - certainly a record for poetry of any kind - and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English. In the...