As this collection adeptly illustrates, nursery rhymes not only evoke innocence, discovery, and joy for children of all ages, but they also can educate and celebrate tradition. Ring Around the Moon features original rhyming poems in a time-honored Appalachian style that acknowledges the importance of the region and its rich heritage while introducing readers to the whimsical and enchanting world of Mommy Goose.With Kentucky-flavored language and subject matter, this volume brings together the words, art, and music of Appalachia. The poems present classic Appalachian subjects -- leaving the homeplace to find work, mountain folklore, country life versus city life -- and touch on a wide range of broader themes, such as bullying, gender roles, the power of language, and the power of kindness. This work is illustrated with more than 170 hand-painted carvings by renowned folk artist Minnie Adkins, often referred to as America's most important female wood carver. With sheet music for the original song "Ring Around the Moon" complementing the text, this multifaceted book entertains while capturing the spirit and expanding the range of traditional Appalachian nursery rhymes to reach a new generation of readers.

Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet’s husband during the six months following his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet’s grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.

A tour de force, Aaron Smith’s fourth collection of poetry, The Book of Daniel, resists the easy satisfactions of Beauty while managing the contemporary entanglements of art, sex, and grief. Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning, these poems depict not only the complications of representation in the age of social media but a critique of identity. Taking on subjects as diverse as the literary canon, his mother’s incurable cancer diagnosis, gay bashing, celebrity gossip, bigotry, violence on TV, and Alexander McQueen’s suicide, Smith proves that the confessional lyric is not dead. In tangents as wild as they are reigned, with his characteristic blend of directness, vulnerability and humor, these poems take on the world as it is, a world we love even as it resists all intimacy.

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli−Palestinian conflict. Yonatan Berg is a poet from Israel and the youngest person ever awarded the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize. This collection brings together the best poems from his three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider’s perspective on life in Israel today.

When Hurricane María unleashed its devastation onto Puerto Rico, thousands of lives were lost to the storm in what was the island's worst natural disaster on record. With so much of the recovery still underway and the scars still fresh, its citizens continue to contend with the reality that life on the island has fundamentally changed.In his first collection of poems written in English, La Torre Lagares journeys through his memory in an effort to recompose his shattered land. Together, these poems form a poignant, personal account of a man facing the tragic destinies of his family and his country in the aftermath of a natural disaster. For example, the deaths of the mother and the father are resignified as the death of the poet's personal relationship, which at the same time evokes the rupture between individuals and their sense of place.Drawing from both American and Latin American poetry, as well as global influences, to articulate a language of loss and devastation in search of a new identity, this collection illuminates a chaotic and confusing landscape that is not only physical but also cultural, social, and political. Taken together, this work serves as a stirring reminder of the dislocation and fractured attachment that speaks to many Americans, including transnationals and immigrants. Ultimately it speaks to coping with physical loss and emotional pain in the face of human adversity.

Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.

The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.

In this micro-book, acclaimed “Poetry-Witch” Annie Finch harvests her Spells, spun at the intersection of magic, word, and world. These ritual poems invite readers to experience words not just in the mind, but also in the body and spirit. Celebrated for her extraordinary love and knowledge of poetic craft and commitment to female, earth-centered spirituality, Finch has created a haunting innovative voice and radically traditional aesthetic.

Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.

Writing a biography about Pessoa is a seemingly impossible task. The great Portuguese poet did not have just one life, but his existence virtually exploded in over a hundred different personalities. Only by placing oneself close to Pessoa, only by becoming almost one with him, is it possible to trace the life of this poet who was himself a multitude. José Paulo Cavalcanti has done such a thing, sewing together a path that runs through Pessoa's multiple voices and personalities, seamlessly moving in and out of the poet's work, daily habits and interactions. Following the great success of the Brazilian edition, "Pessoa. A quasi Memoir" is the first English translation of the book, and it provides new insights on the complex nature of the Portuguese poet.

Death of a Poet is rhyming couplets meet etched illustrations in this whimsically dark chapbook about poets and their deaths.In hyperbolic fashion, the preface to Thirty Polite Things to Say reads, "There are times in the lives of us all in which we are at a loss for words. This volume attempts a partial solution. " What follows are thirty things perhaps we shouldn't say, but find ourselves saying anyway. The book is pointedly funny.Dog Truths includes absurd graphs, charts, and diagrams that tell the truth about dogs—their size, attitude, and likeability is laid bare for all to read and enjoy.

Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves . . . / be the call and response of all people living on the earth?" A descendant of the New York school and the second wave, Greenbaum "spills" details that she simultaneously replaces-through the spiraling revelations only poems with an authentic life-force of humanism can nurture.

A new collection of poetry from a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.

Author of two previous collections of poetry: BLACK HOPE (1997) and ANTIDOTE FOR NIGHT (2015). de la O is also the publisher of the journal ASKEW.Keats at Fourteen She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen’s border,a hectic rose flaming each cheek. Her lips move, no words. The boy is guardian spirit, no one but he enters this sickroom where his mother fades, home finally after six years—failures,disgrace. Scarlet daughter, neighbors hiss, slave to appetite, but John is single-minded—she will live. No one but he gives her the tincture of mercury—one tenth of a grain daily, dabs the sweat of her fevers away, a basket of withered poppies at his feet. He pierces each capsule with a needle, drops it in a small glazed crock to warm near the stove, sweat out the opium. Then he’ll add wine, saffron, nutmeg. It takes time, the hour darkens. He cups his hand to light the votive. She moans a furred voice from webbed lungs, a cup of black blood brimming, the pilgrim is fleeing the City, he leans in closer, the City of Destruction, takes her clammy hand, that place also where he was born, so close now he’s breathing her, “Johnny,” she cries, “lift me up, Johnny, your father is here in the room.

11 / 22 / 17A good day for a drive to the country underneath the apple tree with Carmen McRaeproving you can sing and talk at the same time“and hear the bluebirds sing” she sings as if there were a hyphen separating “blue” from “birds”and we “shoot up” with summertime

In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016–2018, try to find out just how changed my dear city and how troubled my days.”