Contemporary American Poetry

You’re Not a Girl in a Movie is a new collection of powerful poems by Hala Alyan, winner of the Arab American Book Award in Poetry and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In these nine extraordinary poems, Alyan wrestles with the intimate themes that have driven her acclaimed body of work to date: the aching loss of homeland, the image and worth of women, and the violence of love. In Beirut, Brooklyn, and roads in the American West, she unravels the effects of decades of war and displacement on love and human worth and identity.

With lively writing and illuminating examples, David Caplan argues that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of America's major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country's distinctiveness. They advocate for novelty and for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign.

From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in 12 years. Aimless Love combines new poems with selections from four previous books— Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard with every word, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience.

By any measure, Ed Zahniser is one of the truest poets in America in this century. If you love mountain poetry and wilderness on the page, Adirondack Mountain & Cabin Poems is your next read. Ed Zahniser writes from the Adirondack cabin he's visited since the 1940s. Here is the mountain experience rendered by the poet’s words and beyond. Encounter the bird that reads the poet’s note on the tree and startles away. A harvest of wilderness after-thoughts, Ed’s mountains restore the reader time and again: Paper Birch Scribble scribble scribble idly on white birchbark Leave these on the ...

When the future of Grandeur nears the brink of collapse in the face of band rivalry, Tess finds to her chagrin that she must team up with Brandon in a desperate attempt to revive the company. As Tess and Brandon spend more time together, Tess begins to wonder if everything she thought she knew might not be so certain after all….

Prepare to be immersed in the heart and soul of African American poetry; a vital cornerstone of American literature that transcends borders and communities worldwide. African American poets have an unparalleled ability to celebrate their heritage by forging deep connections across the vast African Diaspora. Their craft is a unique tradition, intricately woven with the rhythms of jazz, the pulse of hip-hop, the soul of rhythm and blues, and the energy of rock and roll. These verses resonate with the echoes of churches, the camaraderie of barbershops, and the vibrancy of urban life. Dive into...

"Where are you from . . . ? No—where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt.

Poetry can sometimes be elusive, the real meaning layered beneath another. In this volume American poets give voice to their nation, their hopes, and their aspirations. Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson are joined by Poe, Holmes, Dunbar, and others to pleasure our ears and minds with a rambling stroll through their works. It doesn’t define America, but it captures her mood and the flavours of her soul in the early days of the American dream.

Library of Small Catastrophes, Alison Rollins's ambitious debut collection, interrogates the body and nation as storehouses of countless tragedies. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to offer a lyric history of the ways in which we process loss. "Memory is about the future, not the past", she writes, and rather than shying away from the anger, anxiety, and mourning of her narrators, Rollins's poetry seeks to challenge the status quo.

Passionate and evocative, "Love Letters to Sophie’s Mom" traces a relationship from the first dance of love at a coffee shop to its tragic demise as mental illness overtakes the narrator’s beloved. Inspired by a diverse array of writings, including the verse of Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, and Bob Dylan, the collection’s 34 poems touch upon an array of themes including nature, and Southern California and Northwoods motifs.