Greetings!
You can now shop online for books of poetry or other quarantine reading
here
and support Grolier at the same time! While our physical store is temporarily closed, you can order and have books sent to you through Bookshop and Grolier will receive a small percentage.
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“One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today's literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection,
Incendiary Art
. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language-- "
her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses--one by one / by one she wrecks the casket's spray. It's how she / mourns--a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"
-- as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America's most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.”
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Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond
“Language for a New Century
celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the Diaspora. Some poets, such as Bei Dao and Mahmoud Darwish, are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes 400 unique voices--political and apolitical, monastic and erotic--that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature. Each section of the anthology--organized by theme rather than by national affiliation--is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and exhorts readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems. In an age of violence and terrorism, often predicated by cultural ignorance, this anthology is a bold declaration of shared humanity and devotion to the transformative power of art.”
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How to Wash a Heart
Bhanu Kapil's extraordinary and original work been published in the U.S. over the last two decades to create what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a 'Literature that is not made from literature.' During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers, whose books often defy categorisation, as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the U.K., depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.”
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When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry
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“This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Din poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.”
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“The Map of All My Youth": Early Works, Friends, and Influences
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“This is the first volume in a new series on the work of poet W.H. Auden. It includes a large amount of unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated by the poet and David Constantine, and the complete version of his important early essay, "Writing," with a new foreword by its original editor, Naomi Mitchinson. Substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender, E.R. Dodds, and Mrs. Dodds are presented with full annotation. Including essays about Auden, his mentors, and contemporaries by leading scholars in the field, and advice on collecting Auden's works, Auden Studies is indispensable for students, bibliophiles, and general readers interested in the great poet and his fellow writers.”
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Survival Is a Style: Poems
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“Survival Is a Style
, Christian Wiman's first collection of new poems in six years, may be his best book yet. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet's father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought. The cumulative effect is extraordinary. Reading
Survival Is a Style
, one has the sense one is encountering work that will become a permanent part of American literature.”
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The Front Matter, Dead Souls
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“This extraordinary new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, "a serial novel for publication in the newspaper" that collapses the distinction between documentary and fiction. Leslie Scalapino is widely regarded as one of the best avant-garde writers in America today. This extraordinary new book is essay-fiction-poetry, an experiment in form, "a serial novel for publication in the newspaper" that collapses the distinction between documentary and fiction. Loosely set in Los Angeles, the book scrutinizes our image-making, producing extreme and vivid images-hyena, Muscle Beach in Venice, the Supreme Court, subway rides-in order for them to be real. Countering contemporary trends toward interiority, Scalapino's work constitutes a unique effort to "be" objectively in the world. The writing is an action, a dynamic push to make intimacy in the public realm. She does not distinguish between poetry and "real events" her writing is analogous to Buddhist notions of dreaming one is a butterfly, and becoming aware that actually being the butterfly is as real as dreaming it. LESLIE SCALAPINO is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays, as well as the novel Dafoe (Sun and Moon,1994). Among her books of poetry are way (1988), that they were at the beach- aeolotropic series (1985), and Considering how exaggerated music is (1982), all published by North Point Press. She has taught most recently at Bard College and the Naropa Institute. "Challenging, bizarre, and, surprisingly, engaging language-, image-, and action-play. Scalapino caputures the flux and motion that is late-twentieth-century living, and she does so with freshness, daring, and subtle skillfulness."-- Booklist”
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Bastards of the Reagan Era
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“Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.“
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Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Jewish Studies. If there is a country named Celania as Julia Kristeva once proposed its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty.... The book in your hands is not intended to become one of those heavy scholarly tomes that serve as a "proof" of one's position in the literary/academic hierarchy. Rather, this is a collection of various works, directed at, or inspired by, the words of Paul Celan. What we wanted to make was a living anthology, in which authors observe the poet's work, read it deeply, penetrate and discuss it, but also play with it, remake it, and attempt to fit it into their own worldviews. A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to a thousand listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his privacy this poet creates a language in which he is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time."
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Leaving Tulsa
“
In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman's coming of age in a dislocated time.
Leaving Tulsa
, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems--fire, shell, highway, wing--gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost "self"--an "other" America--that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies. In
Leaving Tulsa
, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent. Foerster's journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.“
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Keep up with our quarantine book recommendations on our Bookshop recommendation list!
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Make a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Poetry Foundation
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