Twenty One Love Poems

Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just to say "I love you!" Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: "today our bodies became vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor...." Written on the paradisal island of Capri, where Neruda "took refuge" in the arms of his lover Matilde Urrutia, Love Poems embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. This wonderful book collects Neruda’s most passionate verses.

Relationships—partings/reconciliations, solidarities/ruptures, trust/betrayal, exposure/withdrawal—are the deep fabric of this forceful work. In the intimate address of "Axel Avákar," the black humor of "Quarto," and the underground journey of "Powers of Recuperation," compressed lyrics flash among larger scenarios where images, dialogues, blues, and song spiral into political visions. Adrienne Rich has said, "I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book." from "Ballade of the Poverties" There's the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you Can't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied There's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb The poverty of yard sale scrapings spread And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words There are poverties and there are poverties.

Pablo Neruda's two books - 100 Love Sonnets and Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair are kept in one book.

“Certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through sorrow and confusion” —Cheryl Strayed, Wild “The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody—language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this.”—Boston Evening Globe

Galaxy Love showcases the voice of a beloved and acclaimed poet, celebrating the passions and rhythms of life. The poems in this new volume by the winner of the National Book Award span countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history, and mortality. “Hamlet Naked” traverses Manhattan in the 1960s from a Shakespeare play on 47th Street to the cellar of a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village; “Thieves and Murderers” encompasses musings of the medieval French poet François Villon and Dwight Eisenhower; “Orson” recounts a meeting of the poet and Orson Welles, exiled in Paris. Gerald Stern recalls old cars he used to drive—“the 1950 Buick / with the small steering wheel / and the cigar lighter in the back seat”—as well as intimate portraits of his daily life “and the mussel-pooled and the heron-priested shore” of Florida. These are wistful, generous, lively love poems and elegies that capture the passage of time, the joys of a sensual life, and remembrances of the past.

An award-winning, multi-genre writer grapples with the pandemic, death of George Floyd, and other crises of our times in gnomic poems written from inside the purgatory (and sudden revelations) of quarantine. Writing from and toward “the endless desire / to be at home in the world,” Sarah Ruhl wrote Love Poems in Quarantine to mark the passage of time when all familiar landmarks disappeared. From the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to months of simultaneous quarantine and protest, this is—in free verse and form, lamentation and meditation—a book of days, a survival kit for spiritual malady. These poems find small solace in domestic absurdities. Even in global crisis, there is the laundry. The dog rolls in something putrid, the child interrupts a Zoom meeting, and dinner must get made, again and again. Using language to travel and touch when bodies could not, Ruhl has drawn with great care a portrait of a year unlike any other in history.

In the spirit of his wildly popular New Yorker pieces and the New York Times bestseller Love Poems for Married People, Thurber-prize winner John Kenney presents a hilarious new collection of poetry for people with children. With the same brilliant wit and hilarious realism that made Love Poems for Married People such a hit, John Kenney is back with a brand new collection of poems, this time taking on the greatest "joy" in life: children. Kenney covers it all, from newborns, toddlers, and sleep deprivation, to the terrible twos, terrible tweens, and terrible teens. A parent's love is unconditional, but sometimes that button can't help but be pushed. Between back to school shopping, summer vacations that never end, the awkwardness of puberty, the inevitable post-college moving back in, and more, a parent's job is never done, whether they like it or not.