Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace.

" BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." --Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree

"This powe...
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Essex Clay rekindles, expands and gives a tragic resonance to subjects that have haunted the poet throughout his writing life. In the first part, he tells the story of his mother's riding accident, long u...
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"Ryan Adams writes with equal parts precision and recklessness; the blood he draws from the text is easily as unnerving as its unapologetic tenderness. He is proof that poetry will find its writer."--Mary-Louise Parker, actress ...
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Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called "Over the Bright and Darkened Lands," canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. "Except Thou Ravish Me," reimagines John Donne's famous "Batter my heart, Three-person'd God" as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears "a swarm of objects that call without being answered" hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, o...
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"Was it Jung who speculated that alcoholism might be an attempt at a material solution for a spiritual problem? Kaveh Akbar seems able to contain both--he's a demotic, as well as a spiritual, poet (the only type of either I trust). Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars." - Nick Flynn

"In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than th...
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The first career retrospective by the award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander, now available in paperback

We crave radiance in this austere world,
light in the spiritual darkness.
Learning is the one perfect religion,
its path correct, narrow, certain, straight.
--from "Allegiance"

Over twenty years, Elizabeth Alexander has become one of America's most exciting and important poets, and her selection as the inaugural poet by President Barack Obama confirmed her place as one of the indispensable voices of our time. Crave R...
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