English Poetry Literature

In Hop-Scotch Palooka's, Jackson Durocher invites listeners into a shadowy world of dive bars, rain-slicked alleys, and forgotten souls, where each poem pulses with the raw ache of human frailty. Drawing from personal battles with addiction—as glimpsed in pieces like "Olive Green, Soaked in Red"—this collection of poems explores the tender wreckage of love, regret, and mortality. From the suicidal introspection of "I am Hemingway" to the bourbon-soaked lament in "A Jockey Full of Bourbon," Durocher's words paint vivid portraits of palookas and dreamers stumbling through neon-lit nights.

The book is unique and unprecedented—uncovering the secret history, facts, insights and observations, eloquently and neatly composed, and beautifully presented as a narrative nonfiction. It opens the eyes of locals, visitors, guides on some of the most distinguished capital's thoroughfares and references some of the best and worst names of London streets. It acts as a guide to curious, romantic and poetically inclined wanderers of the streets of London.

21st Century Autoimmune Blues is multi-genre author Brent Terry’s fourth collection. Terry brazenly confronts subjects that are simultaneously political and personal. The undertones range from comedic to emotional, stimulating the head, heart, and gut. Every poem in this collection hums with an underlying anxiety caused by living in these fraught and sometimes dismaying times, but Terry never fails to paint a rhythmically sound image.

The poems in UNDER THE TENTED SKIN explore the experiences of women & girls through folkloric history, discursive memory, and spectacle. Visiting and re-visiting situations all-too-common, Kubasta asks the listener to inhabit close quarters, from early socialization of girls to rural teenagerhood, to adult womanhood and ts traps. She warns “I don’t throw the skins away / and I’ve been known to gnaw a bone.”

The Odyssey is the greatest adventure story ever written, and one of the great epic masterpieces of Western literature For almost 3,000 years, it has been a storehouse of ancient Greek folklore and myth. It is also our very first novel, if we think of it in terms of romantic plot development, realistic characterizations, frequent change of scene, and heroic dramatic devices.

Shadows of Me is a poignant mix of prose and poetry that delves deep into the raw realities of addiction. It is a journey that navigates through the labyrinth of despair, desperation, and heartbreak, painting a vivid picture of the relentless battle against the destructive force of addiction. The author, having lived through the harrowing experience, offers a unique perspective. The narrative is not just a story, but a shared experience, a common thread that pierces through every life affected by addiction.

The Arthurian legend of Camelot has been told many times, but never better than by Alfred Tennyson. Employing some of the most stirring and beautiful blank verse ever written, Tennyson crafted his version of the Knights of the Round Table over the course of nearly fifty years, completing it in 1885. Despite the length of time, Tennyson managed to maintain a high level of style and continuity throughout.

In "Gay Poems for Red States," Carver counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver's earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future -- and for a home -- in an often unwelcoming place.

The follow-up to the internationally best-selling sensation The Lost Words, The Lost Spells is an audio treasure that evokes the magic of the everyday natural world.

A dirty, skinny, dog shows up in Sam and Katie's neighborhood. They start to follow it, and they don't like what they see: The Wilson sisters yell at it because it goes in their garden and the Tracy twins chase it on their bikes and throw things at it. Sam and Katie want the dog to know they'll be its friends. They think it should have a name. Most of all, they want it to like them. But then they do something thoughtless, and after that, it's hard to make things right, especially because the dog now won't come near them.

Inspired by the #SayHerName campaign launched by the African American Policy Forum, these poems pay tribute to victims of police brutality as well as the activists insisting that Black Lives Matter. Elliott engages poets from the past two centuries to create a chorus of voices celebrating the creativity, resilience, and courage of Black women and girls.

This heart-wrenching novel in verse describes the life of a poor girl surviving the Irish Land War and the everyday challenges she experiences.

From award-winning Irish author Meg Grehan comes an accessible and beautifully crafted middle-grade novel-in-verse about Stevie, a young girl reckoning with anxiety about the many things she has yet to understand - including her feelings about her friend Chloe.

The Iliad is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the Odyssey, the poem is divided into 24 books and was written in dactylic hexameter. It contains 15,693 lines in its most widely accepted version. Set towards the end of the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, the poem depicts significant events in the siege's final weeks.

Drawing upon everyday incidents, common situations, and rural imagery, Robert Frost fashioned poetry of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism. His language is simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and wider significance. This brilliant collection features some of Frost's greatest works, including "The Road Not Taken," "Asking for Roses," "The Death of the Hired Man," "In the Home Stretch," "Into My Own," "Meeting and Passing," "Mending Wall," and more.

These poems pause for the spectacle - cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides - to describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that the notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living is like a movie we're not in.

Nature Poem follows Teebs - a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet - who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or "J") writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Illiad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘novel in verse’ is an epic poem that voices with enchanting beauty and literary courage the perspective of Victorian women. Aurora Leigh forges her own path to become a poet, successfully proving her worth, defying the ideals of her era, and rescuing her spirit from the suppression of a routine domestic life. Infusing the work with her own experience and passion, Browning produced a true masterpiece.

From Madonna to Deepak Chopra, celebrities have been recording and embracing Rumi's poetry for the past two decades, creating a resurgence of interest in this 13th century Sufi mystic. This beautiful collection of 196 of his poems, previously unavailable in English and now translated by native Persian speakers Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, will appeal to Rumi lovers everywhere who want a guidebook for their inner journey.