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The Bower (Phoenix Poets)

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? The Bower engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker’s year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with her young daughter. The speaker immerses herself in the history of Irish politics—including the sectarian conflict known as The Troubles—and gathers stories of a painful, divisive past from museum exhibits, newspapers, neighbors, friends, local musicians, and cabbies. Quietly meditative, brooding, and heart-wrenching, these poems place intimate moments between mother and daughter alongside images of nationalistic violence and the angers that underlie our daily interactions. A deep dive into sectarianism and forgiveness, this timely and nuanced book examines the many ways we are all implicated in the impulse to “protect our own” and asks how we manage the histories that divide us.

The Boy Who Cried Fabulous

"A young boy's fascination with everything he sees around him causes him to be late and upsets his parents, until they come to realize his special gift. So many colors, such a sight, it made him shriek with pure delight. "What a fabulous pie, can I have a slice? What a fabulous game, can I roll the dice?"

The Boy Who Lived in a Shell: Snippets for Wandering Minds

From the venerable John Himmelman comes something new—a collection of story poems perfect for fans of Shel Silverstein.Ivo lived in a great big shell.That floated in the sea.He wrote stories to make the time pass. Millions and millions of stories.More than a shell could hold.More than a boy&’s life could hold.A boy named Ivo lives in a giant moon snail shell on a beach. One day, a wave carries him out to sea. While he waits to be rescued, he makes the best of his time writing story poems on the walls inside the shell. In his poems, Ivo introduces you to characters such as dolphin, the nicest creature in the ocean who brings him a crayon when he needs a new one. Crab who takes over when Ivo sleeps and writes crabby poems. There&’s carrot boy who eats so many carrots that he turns into a rabbit. And two sibling pups taken in by different owners and can&’t stop looking for each other. John Himmelman&’s masterful collection of poems—each illustrated in full-color art—is filled with unforgettable characters and begs to be read time and time again.

The Boy Who Slept Under the Stars

"This a book about that place inside us all where bafflement meets mystery: a strange place, sometimes frightening and sometimes filled with stars and pines, clear flowing water and the deep joy of companionship."--Jim Moore Roseann Lloyd's new poetry collection takes us on a sister's unflinching exploration into grief for a brother lost on a solo hike in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. His clothes are found but not his body. How does one mourn without a body? This absence calls up memories of his life and mixed emotions; it evokes other disappearances--children missing in Iraq, climbers lost on Everest, a college student drowned. Even though I've said, for two years now, I don't need his bodyto do my mourning, I'm suddenly desperateto touch your arms, muscled and tan . . . Full of verbal energy and rich patterns of sound, Lloyd's lines are allowed to breathe and move about in always interesting forms: prose poems, found poems, section poems, swirling mosaics of time and place. Beautifully crafted, the poems are emotionally complex yet accessible. Roseann Lloyd has published eight books, including three poetry collections: Because of the Light (Holy Cow! Press), War Baby Express (Holy Cow! Press--awarded the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), and Tap Dancing for Big Mom (New Rivers Press). The anthology she co-edited with Deborah Keenan, Looking for Home: Women Writing About Exile (Milkweed Editions) was awarded an American Book Award. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Boy with Big, Big Feelings (The Big, Big Series)

“Meet a boy with a heart so big, his feelings glow from his cheeks, spill out of his eyes, and jump up and down on his chest. What good is this giant heart?"

The Boys At Twilight: Poems 1990–1995

The poems in this volume were selected by Glyn Maxwell from TALE OF THE MAYOR'S SON (published in 1990, when he was twenty-eight), OUT OF THE RAIN (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize), and REST FOR THE WICKED. Maxwell “is a formalist,” wrote Robert McIlwaine about his first book, “but . . . he is an outspoken anti-elitist social poet. His strenuous well-wrought poems . . . come from an English tradition of technical virtuosity with plain speech.” The Boys at Twilight shows, sometimes comically, men at war, boys at play, boys grown up, men overreaching and reverting. Other concerns are the dangers of authority and mob psychology, the absurdities of stardom and consumerism, the heroism of the decent, and the wisdom of doubt. His subjects range from biblical stories to the “Tale of the Chocolate Egg,” which is a long, “pitch-perfect description of a bored young man’s growing obsession with a new kind of candy” (Adam Kirsch, New Republic). Always in his work, “Maxwell knows that to see into is not necessarily to see through . . . His virtuosity has a ballast of sobriety” (Poetry Book Society).

The Brave Never Write Poetry

First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just twenty-six, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist's lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning 'poetry' on its head before its author (then known simply as 'Jones') swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible. This long overdue revised edition brings Jones' unforgettable voice to a new generation of readers and includes the complete text of the original collection (including Jones' own sardonic assessments of his own poetry) and a new postscript essay by poet/critic Kevin Connolly.

The Brave Never Write Poetry

First published in 1985, when Daniel Jones was just 26, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the poet/critic/novelist's lone collection of poems, was a cult hit, turning 'poetry' on its head before its author (then known simply as 'Jones') swore off verse entirely. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible. This long-overdue revised edition brings Jones' unforgettable voice to a new generation of readers and includes the complete text of the original collection (including Jones' own sardonic assessments of his own poetry), a new preface by poet/critic Kevin Connolly, and postscript commentary from many of Jones' closest friends and literary colleagues.

The BreakBeat Poets

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

The Breitmann Ballads

The Bridge

Begun in 1923 and published 1930, The Bridge is Crane's major work. "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' ... The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity."

The Brimstone Journals

In a series of short interconnected poems, students at a high school nicknamed Brimstone reveal the violence existing and growing in their lives.

The Broadview Anthology Of Medieval Arthurian Literature

This teaching anthology collects texts from the vast archive of medieval Arthurian literature. It includes selections from mainstream canonical authors, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Malory, and more peripheral works, such as the Melech Artus (a twelfth-century Hebrew text) and the Dutch Morien (featuring a black knight). In this it differs from other anthologies of medieval Arthuriana: it is more inclusive and diverse than previous collections. Characters and authors showcase the diversity of race, religion, gender, and gender orientation of the Arthurian tradition. As well, this anthology and its accompanying website include a variety of genres, ranging from visual art to sculpture, from historical chronicles to romance and drama. Arthurian works, while concentrated in England, France, and Wales, are found across medieval Europe; this anthology therefore includes texts from Iceland to Greece. The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature is ideally suited to teaching: it includes full texts, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Knight of the Cart, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for classes that wish to study a whole work in depth; it also includes shorter excerpts of parallel incidents, such as the Uther and Igraine story, so that students can compare a story’s treatment by different authors. Marginal glosses assist students with the Middle English texts, while introductory notes and explanatory footnotes give students necessary background information.

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction

About the Anthology <p><p>Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. <p><p>Volume A, which covers Beginnings to 1820, is available separately or packaged together with Volume B; a concise volume covering Beginnings to Reconstruction is also available. Volumes covering Reconstruction to the Present are in development. <p><p>Highlights of Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction <p><p>• Complete texts of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; and Benito Cereno <p><p>• In-depth, Contexts sections on such topics as “Nature and the Environment,” “Expansion, Native American Expulsion, and Manifest Destiny,” “Gender and Sexuality,” and “Oratory” <p><p>• Broader and more extensive coverage of African American oral literature than in competing anthologies <p><p>• Full author sections in the anthology are devoted to authors such as George Moses Horton, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, José Maria Heredia, Black Hawk, and many others <p><p>• Extensive online component offers well over a thousand pages of additional readings and other resources Read less

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature: Volume A, Beginnings To 1820

Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. <p><p> Volume B, which covers 1820 to Reconstruction, is available separately or packaged together with Volume A; a concise volume covering Beginnings to Reconstruction is also available. Volumes covering Reconstruction to the Present are in development. <p><p> Highlights of Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 <p> <p>• Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette <p>• In-depth Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Rebellions and Revolutions,” and “Print Culture and Popular Literature” <p>• Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature than in competing anthologies <p>• Full author sections in the anthology devoted not only to frequently anthologized figures but also to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Briton Hammon, and many others <p>• Extensive online component offers well over a thousand pages of additional readings and other resources

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism

In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to matters such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. The full anthology comprises six bound volumes, together with an extensive website component; the latter is accessible by using the passcode obtained with the purchase of one or more of the bound volumes. Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism offers expansive representation of the era’s poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and William Wordsworth to Anna Laetitia Barbauld, James Macpherson, and John Clare. The volume also features a broad sampling of important longer works including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Castle Rackrent, Lady Susan, The History of Mary Prince, The Giaour, and Hyperion: A Fragment. Key currents in the literature and culture of the period are highlighted in “Contexts” sections addressing such topics as “The French Revolution,” “Gothic Literature,” “Reading, Writing, Publishing,” “The Natural and the Sublime,” and “Slavery and Its Abolition.”

The Broken String: Poems

One of the finest poets writing today, Grace Schulman finds order in art and nature that enables her to stand fast in a threatened world. The title refers to Itzhak Perlman's performance of a violin concerto with a snapped string, which inspires a celebration of life despite limitations. For her, song imparts endurance: Thelonious Monk evokes Creation; John Coltrane's improvisations embody her own heart's desire to "get it right on the first take"; the wind plays a harp-shaped oak; and her immigrant ancestors remember their past by singing prayers on a ship bound for New York. In the words of Wallace Shawn, "When I read her, she makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel that there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it."

The Broken Word

An extraordinary poetic sequence that animates and illuminates the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, eventually becoming a meditation on the inheritance of conflict and its consequences. It is a thrillingly original, profound and lyrical work.

The Broken Word

The stunning debut from "one of the best British writers to emerge in the past decade." (Julian Barnes) With a voice that is at once fierce and lyrical, Adam Foulds tells the story of the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule in 1950s Kenya. Tom, a young man who has returned to his family's farm, rapidly becomes caught up in the intensifying events of violence and brutality in a conflict Foulds illustrates as both utterly contemporary and yet deeply burdened by the history of race and empire in this region. The Broken Word was the recipient of the Costa (Whitbread) Poetry Award, and Foulds's The Quickening Maze was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

The Bronte Sisters: Selected Poems (Fyfield Books)

Although the Brontës have long fascinated readers of fiction and biography, their poetry was all too little known until this pioneering selection by Stevie Davies, the novelist and critic. Charlotte (1816-1855) is certainly a competent poet, and Anne (1820-1849) developed a distinctive voice, while Emily (1818-1848) is one of the great women poets in English. Read together with their novels, the poems movingly elucidate the ideas around which the narratives revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions of the sisters' personalities: Emily's rebelliousness, for example, is counterbalanced here by great tenderness. This selection of over seventy poems gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling within each author's work, and of the way in which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each other.

The Browning Cyclopaedia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning (Routledge Revivals)

Robert Browning, the great Victorian poet, is often claimed to be hard to understand, largely on account of the obscurity of his language, the complexity of his thought, and his poetic style. The Browning Cyclopaedia, first published in 1891, presents an exposition of the prominent ideas of each poem, as well as its tone, its sources – historical, legendary or fanciful – and a glossary of every difficult word or allusion which might obscure the poem’s meaning. This volume remains indispensable for students of Robert Browning, as well as those interested in the general aesthetic climate of Victorian poetry.

The Brush: Poems

A wise, visionary debut on ecological and human resistance, perfect for readers of Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith, and fans of the earth-body artwork of Ana MendietaThe Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma – and its horrific relevance in today&’s Colombia, where mass killings continue. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández-Pachón&’s poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square.Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling &“like a cat in his throat.&” Meanwhile, his wife Ester – a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets – slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández-Pachón&’s vivid and prophetic triptych.The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.

The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin Wakashu (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies #5)

Senshi was born in 964 and died in 1035, in the Heian period of Japanese history (794–1185). Most of the poems discussed here are what may loosely be called Buddhist poems, since they deal with Buddhist scriptures, practices, and ideas. For this reason, most of them have been treated as examples of a category or subgenre of waka called Shakkyoka, “Buddhist poems.” Yet many Shakkyoka are more like other poems in the waka canon than they are unlike them. In the case of Senshi’s “Buddhist poems,” their language links them to the traditions of secular verse. Moreover, the poems use the essentially secular public literary language of waka to address and express serious and relatively private religious concerns and aspirations. In reading Senshi’s poems, it is as important to think about their relationship to the traditions and conventions of waka and to other waka texts as it is to think about their relationship to Buddhist thoughts, practices, and texts. The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess creates a context for the reading of Senshi’s poems by presenting what is known and what has been thought about her and them. As such, it is a vital source for any reader of Senshi and other literature of the Heian period.

The Bumblebee and the Ram

A character-building story humorously presented. A bumblebee who--by laws of physics--should not be able to fly is fixed for flight by Ram, the computer, only to find that he never had to change at all in order to fly.

The Bungler

"A mischievous new translation by the poet Richard Wilbur, [The Bungler] is great good fun and should open the gate for the play to be presented with the regularity it deserves."--Bruce Weber, The New York Times"My notion of translation is that you try to bring it back alive. Speak-ability is so important. . . . I came to see that a line that simply says 'I love you,' at the right point in the show, is entirely adequate, that a great deal of verbal sophistication is not necessarily called for."--Richard WilburPoet Richard Wilbur's translations of Molière's plays are loved, renowned, and performed throughout the world. This volume is part of Theater Communications Group's new series (with cover designs by Chip Kidd) to complete trade publication of these vital works of French neoclassical comedy. The Bungler is Molière's first recognizably great play, and the first to be written in verse. The charming farce is set in Sicily and born of the great Italian tradition of the commedia dell'arte: Loyal valet Mascarille schemes to win the lovely Celie away from rival Leadre, and into the arms of his master Leslie. Molière himself originated the role Mascarille, self-described as "the rashest fool on earth," who naturally bungles the job along the way.Richard Wilbur is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His publications include six volumes of poetry and two collections of selected verses, a collection of prose, and two books for children.