Showing titles in Themes & Styles

The power and the beauty of The Iliad resound again across 2,700 years in Stephen Mitchell's exciting new translation, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam flowed in every word. And we are there with them amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful.

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 Limón.

In a powerfully intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships—his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife.

"The happiness I feel in offering these to you is vast as a savanna," Pablo Neruda wrote his adored wife, Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, in his dedication of 100 Love Sonnets. Set against the backdrop of his beloved Isla Negra, these joyfully sensual poems draw on the wind and tides, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wildflowers, and the hot sun and salty scent of the sea to celebrate their love.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war, beauty, and so on) is as changeable as the beings that inhabit its chapters. The sustained thread is power and how it transforms us, both those of us who have it and those of us who do not.

More than 100 years after his birth, Pablo Neruda's poetry is as vital and beloved as ever. This collection presents 50 of the most essential poems by one of history's greatest poets in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world's leading Neruda scholars.

In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'". It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared.

Rupi Kaur performs the first-ever recording of the sun and her flowers, her second number one New York Times best-selling collection of poetry and prose. This production was recorded in 2021 along with the brand-new audio edition of milk and honey and the debut audio recording of home body. Divided into five chapters, this volume is a journey through the life cycle of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms.

Take a look into the mind of the undead bohemian Jack Townson, an artist who found himself trapped in a world of nightmares, a life without sunlight, never to feel the warmth of day or the permanence of true love. Jack dives inward to put pen to paper, filling each minute with forbidden secrets—from the loves he's lost, to the friends he's made, to the villains who have plagued him, and the dreams of tomorrow. Step into the shoes of a child of dusk trying to find his way back into the dawn.

Alice Walker shares a timely volume of nearly 70 works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she’s urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us....

Rupi Kaur performs the first-ever recording of home body, her third number one New York Times best-selling collection of poetry and prose. This production was performed and recorded in 2021 along with the brand-new audio edition of milk and honey and the first audio recording of her second collection, the sun and her flowers.

Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions, read by the author herself.

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. At its centre is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader, Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - although knowing this will ensure his own early death.

Paradiso gives our imagination a hint of the beauty to come, by uncovering the deepest reality of the life we are living now. God is the same, eternity past to eternity future; He is the same God today. The great crescendo that is His beauty, dance, song, joy, holiness, and glory we hear but dimly, as from a distance land; but it undergirds and gives meaning to everything we know and experience.

Sixteen-year-old Mary Swan Middleton is devastated when her artistic mother is killed in a plane crash. The family maid, seeing Mary's loneliness and desperation, suggests she volunteer to help the poor. Soon, Mary realizes there is more to life, love, and faith, than she ever knew.

Soul Vagina is a debut collection from the fearless South African poet Nomxolisi Ndlangana who takes the reader on a woman's pilgrimage to the core of self identity. The work speaks of a love of self and the love of another as the author masterfully synthesizes the nuances and complexities of a five-year relationship into a single poem.

With work that ranges from the laugh-out-loud funny to the silence and rage of loss, Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction is a must read. This is a collection of work that asks itself for forgiveness while becoming an instruction manual on how listeners can follow suit. These complex and passionate poems make space for a narrative about the self in the wake of destruction. It explores American culture and examines how Singer's identity as a Jewish American underpins daily life.

From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.

Mind Platter is a compilation of reflections on life as seen through the eyes of an educator, student, and human who experienced her early days in silence. It is written in the words of a woman who came from Lebanon to Canada at the age of 16 and experienced what it was like to have fate push her to a place where she didn't belong. It is written in the voice of every person who has felt unheard, mistreated, misjudged, or unseen.

The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.