Contains in English translation over one hundred quatrains derived from the works of the medieval Arab poet Abu'l-Ala of Ma'arri. The quatrains are a joy to read, and serve as quotations for various religious and secular topics.

Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled "Zither." Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In Autobiography, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood-especially of years spent in Asia-experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion. " Zither opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes,''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.

Sin puertas visibles is a fully bilingual anthology that features emerging women poets whose work provides a taste of the adventurous new spirit infusing Mexican literature. All eleven poets represented have had at least one book published in Mexico, yet none of their work has been translated into English until now.Featuring the work of: Cristina Rivera-Garza, Carla Faesler, Ang\u00e9lica Tornero, Ana Bel\u00e9n L\u00f3pez, Silvia Eugenia Castillero, M\u00f3nica Nepote, Dana Gelinas, Mar\u00eda Rivera, Ofelia P\u00e9rez Sep\u00falveda, Dorantes, and Laura Sol\u00f3zano. Mexico poesses one of Latin America's most important poetic traditions, but its depth and range are virtually unknown to readers north of the border. Reflecting the diversity and complexity f contemporary mexican poetry, the poems presented here are by turns meditative and explosive, sensuous and inventive, ironic and tender--in short, they are subversive, provocative, and bold.

The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times--his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness. Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventheenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.

Long for This World features the best of Ronald Wallace's work from his previous collections of poetry--Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks , Tunes for Bears to Dance To, People and Dog in the Sun, The Makings of Happiness, Time's Fancy and The Uses of Adversity--along with a generous selection of twenty-six new poems. If Wallace's recent poems sometimes seem darker and deeper, more meditative and complex, less sanguine about the tragedies of daily life, they never sacrifice the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become his hallmarks.

A mixed-media tour de force, Alphabet Theater breaks open the page to extend poetic practice into the realms of visual art and performance. Its complex and innovative format layers poetry, video stills, drawing and collages in pieces that range from performance art to opera and political theater. The book's four distinctive sections encompass four separate performances. In "The Poor Body," first performed in collaboration with choreographer Elizabeth Lahey, the text alternates with video stills of movement. "The Lightning Hive" is a "semiotic opera" swarming with letters and bees in motion, accompanied by staging notes and drawings. The performance space "The Still Place" is the page itself, exploring the fragile border between the "I" and the "not-I." Finally, "Read My Apocalypse," is a performance that tracks the months preceding the Gulf War in a kind of desperate vaudeville with material and references ranging from Milton and apocalypse psychology to Pat Robertson, Love Canal and W.C. Williams. This book is a thoroughly engaging transit through the landscapes of contemporary culture and relationships.

Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.

In Rachel Zucker's re-imagining of the Greek myth, Persephone is a daughter struggling to become a woman. Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds-light and dark, innocence and power, a mother's protection and a lover's appeal-Persephone describes the strangeness of the Underworld and the problems of transformation and transgression. The arrangement of Zucker's poems reflects Persephone's travels between the Underworld and the Surface. Both spare and lyrical, they are written as entries in Persephone's diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. The language-strange, urgent, direct-is pulled and changed as Persephone journeys from one world to another revealing the struggle of unmaking and remaking the self.

Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.

Edited and with an Afterword by David St. JohnWhen Larry Levis died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years earlier recognized Levis as \u201cthe most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes. .

In his Rider trilogy, Mark Rudman perfected a mixed genre form - combining dialogue, lyric and prose. While employing some of the same techniques that have become "signature Rudman" - the compact, colloquial line, dazzling shifts from popular culture to classical history - The Couple also breaks new ground. This new book is a collection of discrete poems organized around four poem sequences, "Long-Stemmed Rose," "The Shallowness of the Lake," "Perseus Surprised, Andromeda Unbound," and "Fragile Craft. " As the title suggests, the theme of relationships, both dark and erotically-charged, emerges here as Rudman's focus. The couples in the book include parents, lovers, a young boy and girl in elementary school, Perseus and Andromeda, Mary Ure and Robert Shaw, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

A collection of seven pre-Islamic Arabic poems, the Mu`llaqat form the most celebrated forms of poetry. A tool for students of Arabic literature, this book gives the Arabic text, a literal translation of these poems, and a commentary.

Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem PrizeSelected by Marilyn NelsonFinalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize"Imagine Leda black—" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.In Van Clief-Stefanon’s powerful voice, last night’s angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits. " She remembers a child’s innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.

Best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative on nature and eternity, Annie Dillard writes fiction and nonfiction, as well as poetry, that explore abstract and sensory phenomena, the role of the artist in society and the creative process. The poems gathered in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, first published in 1974, show us that the concerns of the author have not changed since she was in her twenties. Hers is a poetry of fact - of science and nature, eternity and time, and how we know what we know. Often commended for their precise imagery, these poems speak of the love between people, storytelling and poetry's form.