This heartwarming and heart-wrenching collection of stories, memoirs, and poems celebrates the beautifully complex world of sisters. A relationship like no other, the unbreakable link between sisters can be at once sweet and loving, fierce and cruel. From childhood to old age, rivalry to devotion, hysterical laughter to tears of grief, the inescapable bonds between sisters create a unique journey. Sisters is for anyone who knows sisters, wishes they had a sister, adores her own sister, or would, on occasion, like to trade her in. Contributors include: Joyce Armor, Margaret Atwood, Joan Baez, Claire Bateman, Simone de Beauvoir, Robin Becker, Jane Bowles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lan Samantha Chang, Marilyn Chin, Catherine Chung, Lucille Clifton, Clare Coss, Edwidge Danticat, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Rita Dove, Delia Ephron, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Glass, Barbara L. Greenberg, Jane Hirshfield, Cynthia Hogue, Beverly Jensen, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ana Maria Jomolca, Mary Karr, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Tsipi Keller, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Kumin, Jeanne M. Leiby, Audre Lorde, Grace Paley, Dorothy Parker, Martha Rhodes, Muriel Rukeyser, Myra Shapiro, Ali Smith, Misty Urban, Alice Walker, Wendy Wasserstein and Daisy Zamora.

What Comes Down To Us features twenty-five of Kentucky's most accomplished contemporary poets. Together they serve to illustrate the diversity and richness of poetry being written today in the Commonwealth. The poems were collected by Jeff Worley, a poet who has lived in Kentucky for more than two decades. Although the subject matter of the poems transcends the state's borders, the collection communicates a strong sense of Kentucky as a place. Worley's introduction places contemporary Kentucky poetry in the context of the state's rich literary tradition, and the poet biographies include their reflections and, often, their poetic approach and technique.

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."

Alicia Ostriker seizes the opportunity to take us where too few poets have been able to take us: into a domain of what our fabulists like to call the \u201cgolden years.\u201d as we live longer, we become inevitably curious about the actual texture of these late years, curious about what happens in the soul. Out of that curiosity is a new kind of poetry born, an elderstile that has passion and irony, wisdom, folly, clarity and tenderness. In her keen engagement with the self and the world, Ostriker offers us a voice and a perspective that explore the territory of seventy and beyond.

An accessible new and selected collection of poems for poetry insiders and general readers. Powerful, passionate, humorous, and often complex, yet fun to read. They go down easy, but pack a whallop.

Kirby Flower Smith explores the development of Greek and Latin elegiac meter from its origins to Imperial Rome.

Wilfred Mustard finds references to Vergil's Georgics in a variety of English authors from the 15th to the 19th century.

This groundbreaking, transgenre work-part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past-is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Temper is at once violent and controlled, unflinching and unforgiving in temperament. The poems are mercilessly recursive, placing pressure on the lyric as a mode of both the elegiac and the ecstatic. The result is an enforced silence, urgent with grief.

Persephone Rising is the story of the Greek goddess Persephone that brings to life the ancient world of Greek myth to a modern audience. Involved in a passionate love-triangle, the story of Persephone moves through mythic realms and brings light into the darkness of personal and universal journeys.

The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century\u2019s prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon.

This collection of the works of ancient Arabic poets encompasses the original three volumes of the collection by Ahlwardt from 1902 and 1903. The substantial introductions and comments are in German while the works referenced appear in the original Arabic. The three volumes contain material from al Asma Iyyat of al Asmai, al Ajjah, az Zafayan, and Ruba ben al Ajjaj, poets of the pre-Islamic period. This title, bound into one volume for affordability, is increasingly difficult to acquire. The selections of the poems themselves are essential reading for any historian of Arabic poetry while the comments of the editor add interpretive value to the original material from the hands of the poets themselves.

This collection of the works of ancient Arabic poets encompasses the original three volumes of the collection by Ahlwardt from 1902 and 1903. The substantial introductions and comments are in German while the works referenced appear in the original Arabic. The three volumes contain material from al Asma Iyyat of al Asmai, al Ajjah, az Zafayan, and Ruba ben al Ajjaj, poets of the pre-Islamic period. This title, bound into one volume for affordability, is increasingly difficult to acquire. The selections of the poems themselves are essential reading for any historian of Arabic poetry while the comments of the editor add interpretive value to the original material from the hands of the poets themselves.

This collection of the works of ancient Arabic poets encompasses the original three volumes of the collection by Ahlwardt from 1902 and 1903. The substantial introductions and comments are in German while the works referenced appear in the original Arabic. The three volumes contain material from al Asma Iyyat of al Asmai, al Ajjah, az Zafayan, and Ruba ben al Ajjaj, poets of the pre-Islamic period. This title, bound into one volume for affordability, is increasingly difficult to acquire. The selections of the poems themselves are essential reading for any historian of Arabic poetry while the comments of the editor add interpretive value to the original material from the hands of the poets themselves.

Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in Open Interval locate the self in the interval between body and name.

“An artist who moonlights as a dentist. A worm who's eternal. A farmer who milks his cow to death. Not to mention the guy with a belly button for an eye. Russell Edson, self-named Little Mr. Prose Poem, returns with See Jack, a book of fractured fairy tales, whose impeccable logic undermines logic itself, a book that champions what he has called elsewhere 'the dark uncomfortable metaphor.' 'What better way to die,' he writes in the final prose poem, 'than waiting for the fat lady to sing in the make-believe of theater, where nothing's real, not the fat lady, not even death . . . ' See Jack may be Edson's best book yet—proof that his imaginative powers keep growing. What a deliciously scary thought!” —Peter Johnson