Eastern Poetry

A rich and varied collection of contemporary short stories, extracts from novels, and poetry that will go a long way toward informing the English-speaking world of the latest developments in Iranian literature. This sampling - or to use the Farsi term golchine, a bouquet - provides a window onto an important but sorely neglected segment of world culture. We hope it will also serve to awaken further interest in the work and in translations of Iranian novelists and poets.

Now available for the first time in ebook form. The vision of Laotzu, who saw the truth of the essential paradox in all things, who know that he governs best who governs least and that he knows most who never speaks, can still be of great help and interest to us today. His way of life was the way of poise, serenity, and complete assurance. His gentle warnings of the futility of egoistic struggle explain much of the quiet strength and perspective the East has and the West needs. Many have attempted to bring the reflections of Laotzu to the Western world. But Witter Bynner’s version is ...

The Narrow Road to the Interior and Hojoki are two of the best-loved works of their kind; famous for their beautiful, delicate verse and subtle insight into the human condition. It has been said of The Narrow Road that 'it was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it'. It takes the form of a travel diary, and traces the poet's journey from Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to the northern interior.

Learn how the life of this Lebanese immigrant has positioned him to artistically capture the hearts, minds, and souls of readers for generations, making him one of the world’s best-selling poets. In the collected works of poetry, poet, author, artist, and philosopher, Kahlil Gibran, shares his spiritual and moral views of life, purpose, love, and pain.

The hungry old lady gobbles a basket, a bow, some candy and other "egg-cellent" Easter items in this silly read along!

After living in the city of Orphalese for 12 years, a prophet is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a seeress and the people of the city, who ask him for his insights into life. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

A paperback original A vibrant collection of the lasting, essential work of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Wislawa Szymborska Wislawa Szymborska’s work is known for its precision, cleverness, deceptive simplicity, and the way the poet plays out domestic and human concerns against the tapestry...

An anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis. The Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote...

A Tale of Passion, Poetry, and Rebellion in 10th-Century Persia In the grand palace of Balkh, where power is absolute and tradition unyielding, Rabia bint Ka‘b—a noblewoman of striking intellect and beauty—dares to dream beyond the gilded cage of her birth. A gifted poetess, she weaves verses of love and longing, secretly pouring her heart onto parchment. But when her heart finds its true muse in Baktash, a captured Turkish warrior, their love becomes a crime punishable by death. Baktash, once a slave in the palace, rises to power as a commander, his unwavering spirit earning the ...

A unique collection of Azerbaijani proverbs and folk wisdom with English translations. Azerbaijani Proverbs and Bayatı presents a rich selection of traditional sayings and short folk poems from the Azerbaijani language, one of the major Turkic languages spoken across Azerbaijan, Iran, and the wider Turkic world. For centuries, Azerbaijani proverbs have carried the wisdom of everyday life — reflecting themes of patience, hardship, love, homeland, exile, and the passage of time. Alongside these proverbs, the book also includes traditional bayatı, short four-line folk poems that express ...

From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war. A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity...

The Poet X meets A Very Large Expanse of Sea in a bold novel-in-verse starring a Persian American teen navigating his first crush, his family’s post-9/11 dynamics, and the role of language in defining who we are. “A dazzling story with a whole lot of heart. Read it.” —Michael L. Printz...

Nafsi is a collection of poetry and prose, calling you to a spiritual revolution. This compelling work examines the conflict between the soul and the body: its desires, its pain, its love, and its hope. Through poetic allure, this collection will speak directly to your soul, in a way that is hauntingly beautiful.

Longlisted for the PEN Translation Award Best Spiritual Books of 2025 - Spirituality and Practice The first comprehensive English collection from one of the world’s most influential mystics—Attar—the twelfth-century poet Rumi called his master. Twelfth-century Persian poet Attar...

The 55 minutes you spend listening to this audiobook can be magical. Some of these stories and ponderings will be understood clearly, while others may elude you, but not to worry, you will want to listen several times, and the meaning will come to you. Like all great writing, these stories will remain with you.

The acclaimed poetic force celebrates the practice of poetry as healing and prayer in this vital, life-affirming collection about surviving the void and touching the divine—the second book in a creative collaboration between Amistad and Moore Black Press. At age fifteen, Barbara Fant...

Lawrence L. Schwartz has been writing poetry of one sort or another throughout his life, from the time he was in grade school. Many of these pieces come out what could be called a “spiritual insight,” and tend to reflect personal experience and include metaphysical ideas and philosophy or concepts as they apply to everyday life, with commentary on our common humanity, as seen through the lens of a student of Eastern thought and interfaith studies. Many are distilled into rhyming verse, belying the complexity and scope of the concepts covered but with the intention to communicate them ...

The poems in Something The River Says are inspired by and drawn from the philosophy of Vedanta and the words of John Muir, Emerson, Thoreau, Rumi, Hafiz, Tagore, Paramananda as well as other great poets and writers whose works reflect the mystical wonder and Divine nature of all creation. They are also the fruit of inspiration born of nature’s intelligence, beauty and transformative awakening power.

The spiritual/nature poems in this book are the mingling of inspiration from the natural beauty of the grounds of the Ananda Ashramas and the universal spiritual philosophy of Vedanta upon which the ashramas are founded. The selection of poems here is a compilation drawn from previously published books: The Mystical Dance, Whispers of Light and Something the River Says. Being truly present with nature arouses within us our own true nature. Our wholeness and oneness with all that is begins to bubble up inside like a freshwater spring when we are just present with nature. A crystalline moon ...

A tragic epic love story before Romeo and Juliet, by one of the greatest medieval Persian romance poets, in a modern-verse English translation by Dick Davis A Penguin Classic Based on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about...