For The Love Of Poetry

Poets through the ages offer interpretations of love's changing moods and forms.

Love by Night begins with anxious hesitation and nervous attraction, grows into tender affection, blossoms into passionate love, delves deep into whimsical dreams, and finally builds an image of an idyllic future together, as the reader develops along with the two characters of this poetic story. Written as a conversation between two points of view in constant change and flux with each other, this book invites the reader into the conversation about the love that connects one person to another, but also all of us to each other. Through this written testament to the emotional journeys books can take us on, S. K. Williams breaks down stereotypes, sexism, relationship roles, and brings awareness to mental health, grief, anxiety, depression, how to move forward, how to love in a healthy way, and, most of all, how to love yourself when it feels impossible.

A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives. How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. "The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read as poem is: Ecstatically."—Boston Book Review

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.

Award-winning Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr presents a pulsating collection of poetry that interrogates the bonds and borders of family, faith, queerness, and nationality. Visceral and energetic, Sakr’s poetry confronts the complicated notion of “belonging” when one’s family, culture, and country are at odds with one’s personal identity. Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a fierce, urgent collection from a distinct new voice.

Michael Farrell is the most adventurous and experimental of contemporary Australian poets, continually pushing the boundaries of what poetry can do. Highly regarded for the playful rhythms and comic, gestural qualities of his poetry, his poems set language, syntax and punctuation in motion. His eye for metaphor and the unexpected combination, for punning and the letter – in both its verbal and visual aspects — gives his poetry its unique humour and energy. In poems like ‘AC/DC As First Emu Prime Minister’, ‘Sheep, Golden Syrup, Elizabeth Bishop’, and ‘Cate Blanchett And The Difficult Poem’, I Love Poetry scrambles a landscape of colloquial and obscure images. Michael Farrell’s collections include living at the z, ode ode (shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award), BREAK ME OUCH, a raiders guide (published by Giramondo in 2008), thempark and thou sand. His second collection with Giramondo, Open Sesame (2011) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo 2015) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He was the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He is the author of a work of literary criticism, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan).

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Subtly capturing the innocence and imagination of childhood, this magical poetry collection captures the innocence and imagination of childhood focuses on the importance of family. Deftly translated verse captures the lyrical rhymes of the original Portuguese while providing a whimsical escape for the entire family to enjoy. A free, downloadable booklet with suggestions for further activities is available at www.wingedchariot.com.