Poetry Style

DEFG is Volume 2 of The Alphabet Soup series by Aaron LaLux, the creator of Circular Pop Poetry—a style that blends rhythm, insight, and relevance into something entirely its own. This collection invites you to explore the raw, tangled threads of life, where meaning is found not in neat answers, but in the complexities that weave us together. From Dalai Lama Spaceship to Gypsy Friends & Fig Leaves, LaLux creates 100 poems that pulse with emotion and thought.

Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral.

The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, Bella Thorne’s collection of illuminating and inspiring poems chronicles her personal struggles, relationships, and wild-child lifestyle, all with her trademark wit and wisdom.

Fever of Unknown Origin opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: “the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . .” What follows is an urgent tour of landscapes—environmental, political, and personal—that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the listener into “An empire of rags and photons” where we must look to the past to clarify our futures.

The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly laughing in the therapist's office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, and ruthless, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and déjà vu.

Shakespeare's timeless sonnets, which describe love in all its aspects, represent one of the finest bodies of poetry ever penned. They include the star-struck Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), the witty Sonnet 103 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"), the despairing yet hopeful Sonnet 29 ("When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state"), and more. Read by the legendary Sir John Gielgud.

La Epopeya de Gilgamesh (2500-2000 a. C) es una narración acadia en verso sobre las peripecias del rey Gilgamesh. Está basada en cinco poemas independientes sumerios, que constituyen la obra épica más antigua conocida. Al comienzo, Gilgamesh es el despótico rey de Uruk, cuyos súbditos se quejan a los dioses. Estos atienden el reclamo creando a Enkidu, un hombre destinado a enfrentarse a Gilgamesh. Cuando ambos entraban en combate, en vez de darse muerte se hacen amigos para siempre y emprenden peligrosas aventuras. Como castigo a sus actos, los dioses hacen que Enkidu muera en plena juventud.

“When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.” So ends Kate Baer’s remarkable poem “Things My Girlfriends Teach Me”. In “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels” she challenges her listener to consider their grandmother’s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem “Deliverance” about her son's birth she writes, “What is the word for when the light leaves the body/What is the word for when it/ at last, returns”.

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet and novelist who was one of the founders of the Imagist movement, which includes such poetic luminaries as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, with both of whom Doolittle had romantic relationships.

The Iliad, set 9 years into the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he wearily travels home from the war. The two epics provide the basis of Greek education and culture in the classical age. They have long remained among the most significant poems of European tradition. Produced here in full cast arrangement and narrated by Rob Goll, one can experience these age-old stories in a brand new way.

Having spent ten years fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus embarks on his journey back to Ithica. To get there he must deceive a giant Cyclops, face Poseidon’s wrath, escape cannibalism, defeat the witch-goddess Circe, skirt the land of the Sirens, sail between a six-headed monster and a raging whirlpool, and escape captivity on the island of Calypso. But perhaps his biggest threat is his prolonged absence from home, as 108 suitors are vying for his wife’s hand in marriage.

Among his many other attributes, James Elroy Flecker was a skilled linguist and an expert translator of Latin poetry. In 1913, he planned to write a book to be entitled An interpretation in blank verse of Virgil, Aeneid VI, based on the poetic value of the sounds, together with Latin text and ten prefaces. The surviving translation consists of lines 1-19 and 264-547 from book six, which describe Aeneas' encounter with Sibyl and his visit to the underworld.

Alice Walker shares a timely volume of nearly 70 works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude. Whether she’s urging us to preserve an urban paradise or behold the delicate necessity of beauty to the spirit, Walker encourages us to honor the divine that lives inside all of us....

The secret of their identities has fueled debate for hundreds of years: Who are the nameless nobleman and the dark-haired mistress? And what did they do to inspire the creation of more than 150 deeply intimate poems? Whether William Shakespeare's sonnets are pure fiction or the lingering echo of an autobiographical account, this exquisitely written collection defied traditional love poem conventions to explore the many layers of romance, the dangers of lust, and the nuances of beauty.

My reason for writing this book of inspirational poetry, is in hope for people to be encouraged and to exalt the name of Jesus; that souls might be saved and people will know that God's word is the truth. My hope is for them to see that God answers prayers, Jesus saves, and salvation is in no other name than the name of Jesus. The need for salvation paramounts everything else in this life, because Jesus is soon to come and judgement day is nearer than ever. It's time to repent.

Herons, sparrows, owls, and kingfishers flit across the page in meditations on love, artistry, and impermanence. Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments. At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.

One of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to American readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People’s Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as “Little Siberia” with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei.

The final installment in a long journey of healing is the fieriest of them all. Out of the Ashes offers a roadmap for listeners seeking to emerge from devastation. Divided into seven sections—The Destruction, The End, The Quiet, The Wrath, The Transformation, The Arising, The Resurgence—this very personal and engaging new collection from prolific poet Courtney Peppernell illuminates a powerful journey of resilience and survival. It masterfully charts the process of rising again after your life has been burned to the ground.

Following on his bestselling collections, The Truth of You and The Secret of You, Thomas’s latest volume of over two hundred poems examines how we find the faith to carry on when everything has been stripped away and all that remains is the core of who we are. The Heart of You explores fear, bravery, intimacy, what we keep, and what we leave behind.

Debut poet and devout Christian Kilgore attests that although he penned the poems in his ecclesiastic collection, “God is the true author,” and that the purpose of his poetry is to “bind hearts back to God” so that his listeners may find their own connection to Christ. Kilgore is most successful in this ambitious endeavor when he dramatizes his own spiritual euphoria, like in “Latter Rain,” which builds to these potent declarations: “This feeling that enraptured me // And shook my whole of frame, // Was God descending on my soul // His spirit’s Latter Rain.”