Poetry

A collection spanning the range of the Nobel Prize-winning writer's career includes his first published poem, "In My Eighteenth Year"; his first widely celebrated verses on the violence in Africa; his mature work from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces from White Egrets.

The 17th book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of Different Hours looks at the ridiculousness and absurdities of daily life, as compared to the life we imagined.

Each three-stanza poem in this collection contains the voices of an old woman full of memories, a glamorous tulip and an earthy dog who always has the last word.

The New Testament is Jericho Brown's second collection of poetry.

Kevin Young's poems reflect on the loss of his father and the birth of his son.

These poems follow a middle-aged man who decides to become a priest in the Episcopal Church.

This collection gathers poems from over five earlier books, representing close to twenty-five years of work by Peter Gizzi.

This collection counters dread with wit and reminds us that suffering is "small//compared to what?"

The Pedestrians combines prose poems from a variety of settings with lyrics about life in New York City.

Matthea Harvey's new book combines poetry with visual art.

A collection of the award-winning writer's definitive poems spans more than four decades of his writing life and explores such themes as family, the bonds of friendship and the environment, in a volume that includes letters written during his work with prisoners in Chino State penitentiary and his meditations on the significance of freedom.

This new edition of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca includes translations by W. S. Merwin, Stephen Spender and Langston Hughes.

Nikki Giovanni pays homage to gatherings of friends, family and lovers where, at the center, is food as sustenance, as aphrodisiac and as memory.

A poet, author and English literature professor retells the story of Adam and Eve in three sequences of verse that reflect his own spiritualism and describe the ancient and powerful human urge to recapture what is lost.

This first-ever volume of new and selected poetry from Charles Simic collects close to 400 poems that draw inspiration from a vast array of topics including folktales, marriage, war, ordinary life and American blues.

Fire — its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms — is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's series on the elements. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis and street movements for social justice. She gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism.

Black Aperture is an elegy writ large, a book mourning the suicide of the poet's brother. The collection is not born out of the rawness of fresh loss: "You have been dead / half of my life," Matt Rasmussen writes in "Burial." Instead, Rasmussen focuses on the strange complexities of building a life after tragedy. One of several poems entitled "After Suicide" opens, "A hole is nothing / but what remains around it." What is left around the vacancy of a brother's violent death? Burned letters, parties warped by absence, ghostly answering-machine voices to be erased.

Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight champion, is a figure of mythological proportions; in this new collection, poet Adrian Matejka gives the boxer a voice that's wholly human. The poet examines race and racism from Johnson's singular perspective: the son of slave-born Southerners, the opera-loving international celebrity, the abusive playboy arrested for dating white women, the wealthy world champion who couldn't get served at restaurants. Matejka's unflinching verse conveys Johnson's bravura and his bravery, and both the power and the vulnerability of a bleeding, breakable body in the ring.

Ten years after her debut collection, Mary Szybist returns with this long-awaited second book, a skeptic's consideration of the spiritual. Mixing the profane and the divine, she presents several unusual Annunciations; blurring the lines between herself and the Virgin, she provides an "Update on Mary." The poems are experimental in form — lines radiating out from an empty center, a poem consisting of a diagrammed sentence — and meditative in tone, finding beauty, sorrow and the divine in unexpected corners of modern life.

Many of Frank Bidart's most famous poems have been long dramatic monologues in the voices of the doomed and disturbed — the anorexic Ellen West, the pedophilic murderer Herbert White, the brilliant dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. But in the shorter poems in Metaphysical Dog, the poet takes on his own persona: an aging, accomplished poet, perennially fascinated by humanity's uneasy blend of philosophical minds and animal bodies.

This deluxe, large-scale edition features full-color reproductions of the reclusive Amherst poet's writings on scraps of envelopes exactly as she wrote them and accompanying transcriptions of 52 of these works.

The Sufi master's work is translated here in a comprehensive volume designed to bring all the magic, mysticism and wisdom of the great Persian poet to an English-speaking audience.

Lucie Brock-Broido's new collection is, in many ways, about the noncorporeal: Death, mourning, the tangled intangibles of language and the power of poetic imagination, like the "illusions" of the title, haunt this book. But Brock-Broido's work is simultaneously lush, tactile and physical — full of fabrics, flavors and colors, building up layers of objects and perceptions.

Urban Tumbleweed is an exploration of spaces representing a convergence between the city and the natural world, inspired by the author's daily walking practice. It adapts the traditional Japanese tanka form to consider environmental transitions and humanity's role in nature.

The founder of The Best American Poetry series draws from material produced over the course of more than 40 years.