Poems Across America

A collection of poems evocative of seven geographical regions of the United States, including the Northeast, Southeast, Great Lakes, Plains, Mountain, Southwest, and Pacific Coast States.

The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity. Marketing Plans: o National advertising o National media campaign o National and regional author appearances o Advance reader copies o Course adoption mailing Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.

After presenting my wife with a picture of her, Mom and Dad's house, that I had an artist paint for her, and listening to the poem I wrote, "In this House," of their old home place, I stood proudly while my brother-in-law read the poem and 250 people sat with tears in their eyes and sobs in their tissues. I walked into my niece's house with a simple sheet of paper in my hand. She was preparing to attend her son's funeral and sat crying by the window. I handed her the paper on which I had written the poem, "Hand-in-Hand." She wiped her eyes and read it, then stood up and hugged me. "That is so beautiful Uncle Bob. How did you know, 'Lighthouses' were his favorite collection hobby? I had printed the poem on a paper, with a beautiful, faded lighthouse in the background. Poetry expresses what the spoken word sometimes can't!

An anthology of American poems, is arranged chronologically, from colonial alphabet rhymes to Native American cradle songs to contemporary poems. 50 illustrations, 20 in color.

Poetry. If one goes Googling John Repp; one soon learns that he is a native of the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey (a location that often appears in his work); but has since lived many places; attended many universities (picking up an MFA along the way); has worked at seemingly every sort of job from gravedigging to teaching creative writing (so at least some of them useful); and has an eclectic and eccentric list of interests. And that he has; over the past forty years; written many books of poetry and prose; garnering awards and critical recognition along the way. All of which finds its way into THE SOUL OF ROCK & ROLL; which serves as a âeoegreatest hitsâe selection from those four decades of poetry. Such an outsized life has yielded a commensurately wide-ranging body of work; and any attempt to gist it in few words would do it poor service; but a good point of entry is "The Tiny-Montgomery-Mother-Poem" in which Dylan's The Basement Tapes plays in the background while Repp's mother is dying; and his family rails at him for speaking of such things: "They say These things are private. Why do you keep / making these private things public? It's so long ago." Yes; he writes of private things; and of things from long ago; from a time of innocence and the rush to lose it; documenting not merely his life but that of his generation; a generation for which rock & roll provided the soundtrack and the thrum sounding throughout these pages; love and loss amid the worn crackle and hiss. It may be true; as William Carlos Williams observed; that it is hard to get news from poetry; but it's a good source of history; of understanding how we arrived where we are. Repp reports in one poem here that he learned of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in part from a Robert Pinsky poem. Now it is his turn to educate us; to share the lessons from his life and times. Not all may be the sort of things that people die for want of knowing (to complete the Williams quotation); but they can be comforting--and what a needful thing that is for these times. "Who doesn't climb from the mere world" he asks in "Ovaltine"--with the emphasis on mere; lest we take our lives too seriously; reminding us to dream--"to where Ponce de Leon and Wyatt Earp rein their horses / while you spur Silver to column's head? The wind hits you first; / wind unheard before that; nothing ahead but fire and new mountains."

A cultural “biography” of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost’s immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr’s The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem’s enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. “The Road Not Taken” seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking “the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering? What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, “The Road Not Taken” is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor. Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself—The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.