While Merwin's poetry as a whole is grounded in the poetic forms of many eras and societies, this first collection is inspired by classical models. Writing in American Poetry Review, Vernon Young traces the poems to "Biblical tales, Classical myth, l...

The first of seven books of poetry published during Dugan's lifetime, "Poems" examines the unusual details of everyday subjects, including waterfalls, house plants, love, war, religion, and the Irish. Explorations inevitably arouse feelings of aliena...

Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is "the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". After the publication of "Some Trees", selecting j...

In an essay on his own work in "19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate", Jack Gilbert writes that "I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection... One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means...

At the funeral the priest said, our sister enters the gates of paradise in a company of angels. Mom, were you waiting? I have no mother, your mother's gone, and the you that lives on, me, I must learn she is enough. From this room I see snow. Snow. T...

This book of poems presents a cross-generational conversation between Sally Hemings and the contemporary narrator about what it means to be a black woman in their respective landscapes, while at the same time demonstrating how little the ways in whic...

For the first time, "The Mystic and the Lyric" brings together the classic work of four women poets from Kashmir who have shaped its literary imagination: Lalded, Habba Khatun, Arnimal, and Rupa Bhavani. These women inhabit not just the collective me...

Deftly making use of historically specific events, "Raghead" examines the Gulf War, relaying untold narratives of occupation and warfare, as well as addressing the violence the war inflicted on the female body and on the land itself. In these poems,...

These are the people we are. Saint Friend, carry me when I am tired and carry yourself. Let's keep singing the songs we don't live by let's meet tomorrow. "Saint Friend" is a book of empathy. Its ten lyric poems are troubled with the prospect of sat...

This collection of poems by Jesus Papoleto Melendez reads as a poetic autobiography of a hopeless romantic. "Borracho" invites us to find the essence of a man's character laid bare in the foibles of his desire and passionate pursuit of love. Spanning...