Poetry Month

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.

A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice.

Pop-culture characters--from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires--deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

While hardly leaving her familial home, Emily Dickinson still drank in the wonder of nature and life, writ large. Dickinson’s poetry is honest but not too revealing; her lines are gnomic but not too enigmatic; and her punctuation, erratic but not too insensible. One of my favorite poems by Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (sadly not in this collection), reminds us how we should communicate with one another: Life should not cede to endless dialogue; rather, we should commune and converse with one another—and with the world—in a leisurely or limited fashion, so that we might take in the full delights of the day. Dickinson is a “superb surprise” herself, and I hope you enjoy reading her works in this collection.

Redesigned in an easy-to-read format that preserves the favorite features of the original, including an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare, an introduction to the individual play, and a note on the text used.

No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost. From "The Road Not Taken" to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," he refined and even defined our sense of what poetry is and what it can do.

Hughes--who was just twenty-four at the time of The Weary Blues's first appearance--spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in American literature, beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa."