Mary Oliver

New, mint, unread. Purchased this duplicate copy not remembering we already had a copy. Pet free, smoke free.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Massachusetts

Selected Essays

One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. “There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . .” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Uniting essays from Oliver’s previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet’s thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . .” —The New York Times “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

Upstream

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Dorianne Laux

Poems

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."—Philip Levine In her powerful fourth collection, Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time.

Facts about the Moon

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Clean, unmarked, odor and smoke free. Several dog-eared pages. 

Duende 

Cate Marvin

The second collection from the winner of Kate Tufts Award and 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

Fragment of the Head of a Queen

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Michael Lowenthal

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Novel

The Paternity Test

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Laurie Foos

The Blue Girl

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A witty and elegiac new collection from the author of "exhilarating, fierce [and] powerful” verse (Robert Pinsky, Washington Post). The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York's Staten Island, where they move through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts—of a dead lover, of a friend lost to suicide, of a dog with glistening eyes. Marvin's haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, of the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and of the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Oracle

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Cheryl Clarke

By My Precise Haircut

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Janet Pocorobba

A Memoir of Sensei and Me

The word sensei in Japanese literally means "one who came before," but that's not what Janet Pocorobba's teacher wanted to be called. She used her first name, Western-style. She wore a velour Beatles cap and leather jacket, and she taught foreigners, in English, the three-stringed shamisen, an instrument that fell out of tune as soon as you started to play it. Vexed by the music and Sensei's mission to upend an elite musical system, Pocorobba, on the cusp of thirty, gives up her return ticket home to become a lifelong student of her teacher. She is eventually featured in Japan Cosmo as one of the most accomplished gaijin, "outside people," to play the instrument. Part memoir, part biography of her Sensei, The Fourth String looks back on the initial few years of that apprenticeship, one that Janet's own female English students advised her was "wife training," steeped in obedience, loyalty, and duty. Even with her maverick teacher, Janet is challenged by group hierarchies, obscure traditions, and the tricky spaces of silence in Japanese life. Anmoku ryokai, Sensei says to explain: "We have to understand without saying." By the time Janet finds out this life might not be for her, she is more at home in the music than the Japanese will allow. For anyone who has had a special teacher, or has lost themselves in another world, Janet Pocorobba asks questions about culture, learning, tradition, and self. As Gish Jen has said of The Fourth String, "What does it mean to be taught? To be transformed?"

The Fourth String

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Betty Smith

Clean and unmarked, minor yellowing throughout. Odor and smoke free.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [75th Anniversary Ed]

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Zsuzsanna E. Budapest

Clean, unmarked, bent cover corners, smoke and odor free.

Lunar Magic in Our Lives--Spells, Rituals, Goddesses, Legends, and Emotions under the Moon

This spirited guide to the grandmother of time includes lunar lore, aspects of the goddess related to the moon, and diet and behaviour suggestions correlated with the moon's cycles. This book introduces the moon as an influence on both evolution and on individual sex lives. The author offers practical advice on how to make it through the moon's phases: waxing, waning and retrograde. The book is organized by the 13 lunations, exploring the moods, goddesses, rituals, and legends that are associated with each cycle.

Grandmother Moon

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Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Some formerly dog-eared pages. Clean, unmarked, odor and smoke free. 

20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales

This wide-ranging collection features the work of more than 100 poets. Here is the modern poets' response to classic Brothers Grimm stories, spanning the 20th century with passion, style, wit, and wonder.

The Poets' Grimm

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Jennifer Jean

Julie Shematz

A craft guide to accompany the book Object Lesson to help survivors or sex trafficking or any beginning poet to write poems.

Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry

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Terrance Hayes

One dog-eared page, near mint otherwise. Clean, odor free. 

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

How to Be Drawn

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle

A few pages are dog-eared. Clean, unmarked, odor and smoke free.

West : Fire : Archive is a poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” The first section focuses on mending the erasure of the life of Charmian Kittredge London, the wife of the famous author Jack London, a woman who broke gender norms, traveled the world, and wrote about it. The second section examines the act of autobiography (or what defines the author). In it, Dunkle writes through the complex grief of losing her mother and her community when it is devastated by wildfires and reflects on how these disasters echo the one that brought her family to California, the Dust Bowl. The final section questions the authenticity of the definition of recorded history as it relates to the American West.

West : Fire : Archive

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Lynn Setzer

Good-excellent, clean, unmarked, smoke and odor free. Page corners and covers are somewhat bent.

An American Odyssey

Each spring, a group of people attempt a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Setzer follows these determined hikers from Georgia to Maine. In this new edition, hikers reveal five years later how their experiences on the Trail changed their lives.

A Season on the Trail

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Tracey Baptiste

The start of an exciting series filled with Caribbean folklore and daring adventure.

Corinne La Mer claims she isn't afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. They're just tricksters made up by parents to frighten their children. Then one night Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden forest, and shining yellow eyes follow her to the edge of the trees. They couldn't belong to a jumbie. Or could they?

When Corinne spots a beautiful stranger at the market the very next day, she knows something extraordinary is about to happen. When this same beauty, called Severine, turns up at Corinne's house, danger is in the air. Severine plans to claim the entire island for the jumbies. Corinne must call on her courage and her friends and learn to use ancient magic she didn't know she possessed to stop Severine and to save her island home.

The Jumbies

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Roxane Beth Johnson

A haunting collection of lyrically-intense persona poems, "Black Crow Dress" is at once about the emancipation of slaves in their myriad voices as well as a meditation on the self. The collection's lush imagery takes us from church yard to church, chanting the old spirituals, as Johnson seeks to embody the spirits of the dead: Clea, Caroline and Zebedee. Original.

Black Crow Dress

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Martha McCollough

A series of poems on objectification in America--most of which is based on interviews the author conducted with sex-trafficking survivors. A selection from that series which I've fashioned into a taut, provocative chapbook collection. I really hope this work resonates with you! Let me know if it does and if you're interested in publishing "OBJECT LESSON."

Object Lesson

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Natasha Trethewey

In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labour-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, and the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

Domestic Work

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Calyx Editorial Collective Staff

Minor yellowing, otherwise in great condition, unmarked, smoke and odor free. 

An Anthology by Women

First and best anthology to address ageism from a feminist perspective

Women and Aging

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Claudia Putnam

One dog-eared page. Clean, unmarked, smoke and odor free.

Winner of the 2020 Moon City Poetry Award The Land of Stone and River explores the wonder and terror of being human in a world both at its apex (in this period of between the earth's various traceable ends, anyway) and tipping at the brink of another major extinction event. People are small beings in a vast, ungraspable landscape of geography, time, and disaster--at the mercy of wind, tangled in history, caught in illness that can seem as inexorable as weather, tide, or geology. We persist. And the world with us.

The Land of Stone and River

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Daniel Goleman

Moderate yellowing throughout. Clean, unmarked, odor and smoke free. 

Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Based on studies in psychology and neuroscience, a report on the rational and emotional properties of the human mind explains how they shape everything from personal success to physical well-being

Emotional Intelligence

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J. D. McClatchy

2 pinpricks on front cover. Moderate yellowing. Some dog-eared pages. Unmarked. Odor and smoke free.

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

Browse by categories

Mary Oliver

Upstream

Dorianne Laux

Facts about the Moon

Tracy K. Smith

Duende

Cate Marvin

Fragment of the Head of a Queen

Michael Lowenthal

The Paternity Test

Laurie Foos

The Blue Girl

Cate Marvin

Oracle

Cheryl Clarke

By My Precise Haircut

Janet Pocorobba

The Fourth String

Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [75th Anniversary Ed]

Zsuzsanna E. Budapest

Grandmother Moon

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

The Poets' Grimm

Jennifer Jean; Julie Shematz

Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry

Terrance Hayes

How to Be Drawn

Iris Jamahl Dunkle

West : Fire : Archive

Lynn Setzer

A Season on the Trail

Tracey Baptiste

The Jumbies

Roxane Beth Johnson

Black Crow Dress

Jennifer Jean; Martha McCollough

Object Lesson

Natasha Trethewey

Domestic Work

Calyx Editorial Collective Staff

Women and Aging

Claudia Putnam

The Land of Stone and River

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence

J. D. McClatchy

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

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