Alone and Not Alone

Nikki Giovanni

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems

"One of her best collections to date." -- Essence Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American poetry and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni's poetry has influenced literary figures from James Baldwin to Blackalicious, and touched millions of readers worldwide. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea , Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.

The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations

The astonishing collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than fifty years, introducing foreign poets to American readers for the first time. Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Bly introduced Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, Jimenez, Trastromer, and Rumi. His most recent translations include Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, and the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two renowned and lesser-known poets from around the world are brought together. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly "is one of the leaders of a poetic revival that has returned American literature to the world community."

Charles Bukowski

Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems

"Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and The Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther."-- Los Angeles Times Book Review "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."--Leonard Cohen, songwriter Los Angeles slums, bars, and more are featured in Slouching Toward Nirvana , the third of five books of unpublished poems from Charles Bukowski, considered by many to be America's most imitated and influential poet.