NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR Books We Love Selection
Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times
44 Poems on Being with Each Other is a new volume that offers immersive reflections on the human connection. With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines friendship and its loss through Langston Hughes's I Loved My Friend, changing familial bonds in Rita Dove's Eurydice, Turning, the relationship with the past in Mary Oliver's The Uses of Sorrow, the power of declaration in Lucille Clifton's Won't You Celebrate with Me, and the necessity of connection to land in Joy Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other articulates the power of poetry itself. Through careful and incisive readings, it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly the ways we are inextricably linked to each other, and provides inspiration for grounded self-reflection. It is an anthology that will delight readers, just as Pádraig's podcast has done for millions around the world.
Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by Charles Baudelaire, Stevie Smith, Christopher Smart, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Muriel Spark, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and many others.
Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems is a collection of poetry that provides a refuge of quiet clarity very much needed in today's restless, chaotic world. Every reader will find favorites to share and to return to, again and again. The diverse group of contributing poets includes contemporary favorites such as Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Derek Walcott, as well as poets of the past such as Hafiz, Pablo Neruda, Li Po, and Rumi. Readers of the poems in this book will begin to find themselves becoming less stressed, more balanced, and more fully present in the world.
From the editor of the bestselling poetry anthologies How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, a collection of accessible, uplifting poetry celebrating the small wonders and peaceful moments of everyday life.
As James Crews writes in the introduction: Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet. The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets. Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives. A New England Book Award WinnerIn the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama's appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem's artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives.
Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother's body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience.
For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn't know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
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 Diné 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.
This follow-up volume to the immensely popular Poetry of Presence presents a feast of mindfulness poems. The poems are skillfully crafted and highly accessible. Its authors speak from a rich variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and life-paths. Most are contemporary or recent poets.
Many of the poems delve into relational or social mindfulness, exploring the tough stuff of living among others with presence. These poems invite us to face relational challenges without turning away from them. They encourage us to seek equanimity, and to address challenges with compassion, hope, courage, and humility.
The #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!
Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.Here are some of the most-loved poems in the English language, chosen not merely for their popularity, but for their literary quality as well. Dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, these splendid poems remain evergreen in their capacity to engage our minds and refresh our spirits.
Among them are Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love; Shakespeare: Sonnet XVIII (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?); Donne: Holy Sonnet X (Death, be not proud); Marvell: To His Coy Mistress; Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud; Shelley: Ode to the West Wind; Longfellow: The Children's Hour; Poe: The Raven; Tennyson: The Charge of the Light Brigade; Whitman: O Captain! My Captain!; Dickinson: This Is My Letter to the World; Yeats: When You Are Old; Frost: The Road Not Taken; Millay: First Fig.
Works by many other poets -- Milton, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Emerson, the Brownings, Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Pound, and Auden among them -- are included in this treasury, a perfect companion for quiet moments of reflection.