Recommendations based on "Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)"

So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne is a testament to the love that inspired the passion and creativity of one of the greatest English Romantic poets. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Jane Campion, Oscar-winning director of the film Bright Star. John Keats died aged just twenty-five, leaving behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and love letters ever written, inspired by his great love for his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time apart - separated by Keats's worsening illness, which forced a move abroad - Keats wrote again and again about and to his love, right until his very last poem, called simply 'To Fanny'. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death. So Bright and Delicate contains the love poems and correspondence composed by Keats in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cruelly cut short. John Keats (1795-1821) lost both his parents at an early age. His decision to commit himself to poetry, rather than follow a career in medicine, was a personal challenge, unfounded in any prior success. His first volume of poetry, published in 1817, was a critical and commercial failure. During his short life he received little recognition, and it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism began to be understood, and not until this century that it became fully appreciated. If you enjoyed So Bright and Delicate, you might like Keats's Complete Poems, also available in Penguin Classics.

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller"If you want your breath to catch and your heart to stop, turn to Kate Baer."--Joanna Goddard, Cup of JoA stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships of being a woman in the world today, and the many roles we play - mother, partner, and friend.“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 reader 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?”Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate Bear proves herself to truly be an exemplary voice in modern poetry. Her words make women feel seen in their own bodies, in their own marriages, and in their own lives. Her poems are those you share with your mother, your daughter, your sister, and your friends.

As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven left in her wake a ripple that is becoming a rip -- one hundred years after she exploded onto the New York art scene. As an agent provocateur within New York's modernist revolution, "the first American Dada" not only dressed and behaved with purposeful outrageousness, but she set an example that went well beyond the eccentric divas of the twenty-first century, including her conceptual descendant, Lady Gaga. Her delirious verse flabbergasted New Yorkers as much as her flamboyant persona. As a poet, she was profane and playfully obscene, imagining a farting God, and transforming her contemporary Marcel Duchamp into M'ars (my arse). With its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, her poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself. Her love poetry muses graphically on ejaculation, orgasm, and oral sex. When she tired of existing words, she created new ones: "phalluspistol," "spinsterlollipop," "kissambushed." The Baroness's rebellious, highly sexed howls prefigured the Beats; her intensity and psychological complexity anticipates the poetic utterances of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Published more than a century after her arrival in New York, Body Sweats is the first major collection of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poems in English. The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and coeditor Suzanne Zelazo have assembled 150 poems, most of them never before published. Many of the poems are themselves art objects, decorated in red and green ink, adorned with sketches and diagrams, presented with the same visceral immediacy they had when they were composed.

This book of poems has the cumulative impact of a good novel. It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight formal structure, and brilliantly effective imagery. But she makes her singular claim on our attention by the fact that she has important things to tell us and tells them dramatically.

Of all the lasting innovations that William Wordsworth (1770-1850) brought to our literature, it is his discovery of nature and his fresh vision of human lives in the context of nature that have most influenced our cultural climate. Here, collected in this volume, are Wordsworth’s finest works, some of the most beautiful poems ever written: from the famous lyrical ballads, including “The Tables Turned” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” to the sonnets and narrative poems, to excerpts from his magnum opus, The Preludes. By turning away from mythological subjects and artificial diction toward the life and language around him, Wordsworth acquired for poetry the strength and new sources of inspiration that have allowed it to survive and flourish in the modern world.

A magnificent hardcover collection of song lyrics and poems from across the storied career of one of the most daring and affecting poet-songwriters in the world.In the more than half century since his first book of poems was published, Leonard Cohen has evolved into an international cult figure who transcends genres and generations. This anthology contains a cross section of his five decades of influential work, including such legendary songs as “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and “I’m Your Man” and searingly memorable poems from his many acclaimed poetry collections, including Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady’s Man. Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy."Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

An indispensable collection of the groundbreaking poet’s most masterful and innovative work, celebrating a bold early voice of female liberation, independence, and queer sexuality—featuring a new introduction by poet Olivia Gatwood, author of Life of the Party Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation as one of the most critically acclaimed poets of the Modernist era. Her work pushed boundaries within the literary canon for its lyrical expression of female embodiment and progressive feminist politics, and she was honored as only the third woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay demonstrates Millay’s legacy and influence on contemporary poetry. Sometimes satirical, often sharp, and always striking, the poems in this collection span Millay’s remarkable career, from the success of Renascence and Other Poems to the sting of A Few Figs from Thistles, and Second April, as well as “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. Millay’s incandescent poetry continues to inspire today as broadly and deeply as during her lifetime. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions. These compelling poems take us on a wild ride through the life of a man child in the rural South. Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, the poems have "authority, daring, and] a language of color and sure movement," says series judge W.S. Merwin. From Seven Chimeras The way Booth makes a love story: same as a regular story, except under one rock is a trapdoor that leads to a room full of belly buttons; each must be pushed, one is a landmine. The way Booth makes hope: thirty-seven acres, Black Damon, Red Dog. Construct a pillar of fire in the Great Field and let it become unquenchable. The way Booth ends the Jack-in-the-Box charade: shoot the weasel in the neck and toss it to the buzzards. The way Booth thinks of salvation: God holding a broken abacus, colored beads falling away.

"To write today in English means using an idiom that is hegemonic, 'globalized,' no longer national. Vacated. A human, though, is necessarily sited, and here we find Mullen's Subject. Its movement open to both '(gone) and suture,' it grasps an anxiety in American speech too often covered over by Americans, though it's visible in the world. To cite Agamben: 'the ethical subject is a subject that bears witness to a desubjectivization.' Mullen's 'subject' is not one of triumphalism; it articulates the 'no-one,' ninguén, the 'not-even-who' that generates being's fibre, its viscosity, presence. In Mullen, 'Belonging to a body/To itself unrecognizable' is followed by 'Open the doors. Here.' Her 'here' is poetry that American English needs."—Erin Mouré

Read by the PoetOne Cassette, 1 hourThe second installment of our exclusive The Voice of the Poet series, comprised of rare archival recordings, some never before released, featuring Anne Sexton.This audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text to the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.