Featured Ebooks

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair is the latest book by author William Evans, founder of Black Nerd Problems. Evans is a long-standing voice in the performance poetry scene, who has performed at venues across the country and been featured on numerous final stages, including the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam. Evans's commanding, confident style shines through in these poems, which explore masculinity, fatherhood, and family, and what it means to make a home as a black man in contemporary America.

Permutations of a Self

Permutations of a Self grapples with issues of belonging and connection, all from the perspective of someone who does a lot more observing and ruminating than living in the present. Most of the poems draw from Nguyen's imperfect memory of himself and others as it changes throughout time. In many ways, the poet feels like an outsider in his own family because he has gradually forgotten how to speak Vietnamese, his native language that he once knew so well. 

Smash Poetry Journal

A Poetry Journal to Poem Your Days Away! Don't wait for inspiration to strike! Whether you're an aspiring or published poet, this book will help you get in a frame of mind to make creative writing a consistent part of your life. With prompts from Robert Lee Brewer's popular Writer's Digest blog, Poetic Asides, you'll find 125 ideas for writing poems along with the journaling space you need to respond to the prompt.

The Boy in the Labyrinth

In a long sequence of prose poems, questionnaires, and standardized tests, The Boy in the Labyrinth interrogates the language of autism and the language barriers between parents, their children, and the fractured medium of science and school. Structured as a Greek play, the book opens with a parents' earnest quest for answers, understanding, and doubt. Each section of the Three Act is highlighted by "Autism Spectrum Questionnaires" which are in dialogue with and in opposition to what the parent perceives to be their relationship with their child. 

The Hymns of Zoroaster

A new translation of the foundation texts of the Zoroastrian religion, the Gathas (songs) composed by Zoraster himself, together with the Liturgy in seven chapters composed shortly after his death some 2600 years ago. After a substantial introduction to Zoroaster's religious thought, West presents the translations with facing page explanations of the meaning of each verse.

Captain Cook in the Underworld

Originally commissioned as the libretto for a work by composer John Psathas for the 50th birthday celebration of the Orpheus Choir, this book-length poem offers fresh perspectives on the familiar story of Cook's Pacific explorations. 

Rainbow Soup

From the author of the best-selling Words Are CATegorical(tm) series, this playful poetry collection includes limericks, puns, palindromes, and more. Short annotations explain the various forms and terms of poetry used.

Alive Together

Winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

In a collection of writing that represents 35 years of her writing life, Lisel Mueller explores a range of subjects which include her cultural and family history, and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language.

Sightlines

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award.

From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus.

Divine Honors

A transcendent account of the effects of breast cancer.

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Winner of the 2015 National Book Award.

Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self.

Neon Vernacular

Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam.

Selected Poems

Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it.

The Tradition

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.

Sinuosities, Lesbian Poetic Politics

Jeffner Allen shapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. The surprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbian lives--a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women--informs these reflections.

The Dead Are So Disappointing

The Dead Are So Disappointing is a daughter's unflinching meditation on the days immediately preceding and following her father's death--and an interrogation into the lasting impact his life has had on her own.

At the Site of Inside Out

The poems in this volume are electric with energy and rich with linguistic invention. Anna Rabinowitz's voice, which ranges from reflective to prophetic, from passionate to wry, shapes and reshapes language to complete the partial, retrieve the lost, and salvage what remains when the human body and the bodies of family, culture, and history threaten to collapse.

Country Music

Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry

Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977.

Buckdancer's Choice

Winner of the 1966 National Book Award.

Whoever looks to a new book by James Dickey for further work in an established mode, or for mere novelty, is going to be disappointed. But those who seek instead a true widening of the horizons of meaning, coupled with a sure-handed mastery of the craft of poetry, will find this collection satisfying indeed.

Complete Poetry and Prose

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid.