Poems about the various stages of grief, with 150 selections from a variety of 20th-21st century poets.

One of America's most respected writers takes an epic journey across America, Airstream in tow, and asks everyday Americans what unites and divides a country as endlessly diverse as it is large. Standing on a wind-scoured island off the Alaskan coast, Philip Caputo marveled that its Inupiat Eskimo schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants in Key West, six thousand miles away. And a question began to take...

"A scintillating collection of essays, reportage and criticism by one of most provocative and widely read novelists of our time, with new commentary by the author. For decades now, Martin Amis has turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics--politics, sports, celebrity, America, and, of course, literature. ... Over twenty years' worth of these incomparable essays are gathered together here, ranging from Bellow...

Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even if its most destructive forms, love is the...

"What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?" Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult...

"In Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson's envelopes, Ezra Pound's wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost's letters, Philip Larkin's train station, and Mrs. Custer's volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken...

"Innovation, the sixth and final volume in Peter Ackroyd's magnificent History of England series, takes readers from the Boer War to the Millennium Dome almost a hundred years later. Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne...

"Some of the subjects considered in The Afterlife: Jane Austen, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Eliot, Mrs. Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, The Arts and Crafts Movement, The Poetry Bookshop, Edward Taylor, Charlotte Mew, Walter de la Mare, A.E. Housman, M.R. James, PUNCH, Ernest Shepard, William Butler, Yeats, Maud...

"This volume provides lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin. The list includes, among others, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and represents the tradition of English poetry at its best. Each contributor offers a new assessment of a single poet's achievement and importance, with readings of the most important...