Helen Plum Library

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many...

A compilation of small observations and musings, filled with moments of reflection and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting with a complex, confounding, breathtaking...

"Like his mentors, Patricia Smith and Rigoberto Gonzalez, Saeed writes poems that are lyrical, playful, musical, and political. It troubles expectations and asks the reader to challenge their assumptions about Blackness, sexuality, and socioeconomics. Saeed is responding here to white supremacy, heteronormativity, respectability politics, and the murders of Black people. In the service of equity and peace, Saeed elevates the matters that keep him...

A collection of poetry from the 2020 winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Ocean Vuong

Es una obra cumbre de la poesía moderna. Sus composiciones rompen con el estilo convencional, en uso hasta entonces, y rejuvenecen la estructura del verso mediante el uso regular de encabalgamientos, rechazos y contrarrechazos. Esto renueva la forma rígida del soneto. Utiliza imágenes sugestivas mediante asociaciones a menudo inéditas, tales como el "Ángel cruel que azota los soles" (Le Voyage). Mezcla el lenguaje erudito con el discurso cotidiano....

In this novel the author explores how a middle-aged man, ripped apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances in their house, on the roadway, in the markets. Only Dorothy's unexpected appearances from the dead help him to live in the moment and to find some peace. Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron has spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken,...

Witness the complete collection of poems and haikus drawn from the mind of a recovering addict.Gritty, authentic, and deeply personal, this complete collection of Poetry of an Addict compiles over 250 poems and haikus that stretch back over 30 years, exploring the darkness of addiction and offering a mixture of musings, reflections, and thoughts captured from moments of author Brett C. Persson's life. Ranging from vivid wordplay written while sober...

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else -- life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem,...

"Promise me the rich can't sleep," Joseph Lease begs in The Body Ghost, offering poems as light on the page as nursery rhymes, and as powerful as prayer. Here, verse conjures up the body in pain, the body politic in collapse, and the tensile strength of the filaments that connect us.

The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central text in Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month", "I will...