One of the most recognizable poets of the last century, Charles Bukowski is simultaneously a common man and an icon of urban depravity. He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski’s life.  With the overhang of failing health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more.

Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative – published posthumously, it’s completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski’s lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty.

We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.

 "Insights and Sensibilities" is a collection of poetry.  It is a collection of jotted down notes, done to gain respite from works and thoughts.  It has been commented that works of art do spring at moments of high strung emotions.  I guess such a comment applies to this work.  This admission, however, does not at once qualify this work as a work of art.  Whatever, he that can be comforted be comforted by these lines!  Perhaps, for some they may bring understanding or insights, clearing cobwebs that blur the mind.  Others may find in them consolation of the heart, wherein they may ease some heavy load of bottled emotions, real or unreal.  Still, others perhaps will read these lines and pass by with a smile, wondering of what gut this "crazy" author is made of.  When alone, smile again.  At least, these lines made you feel better, feeling you are better off than people like him.  Lastly, there may be those who recognize in these lines their capability for similar thoughts.  Not that by themselves, they were not so capable.  But rather, because they had not entertained them, escaping or ducking or camouflaging such existential realities of life, never really being happy, never really being sad,  To this last group ... Beware!  You may yet end up to be another like him.

Poetry of war and chaos as written by a combat veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. These poems evoke the troubling questions that veterans ask themselves after combat experiences.

Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most people even knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the English language’s most extraordinary anatomy of love in all its dimensions–desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration and disgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in the same breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the long narrative poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” and several other shorter works.

Incorporating definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works, this unique volume also includes an expanded Introduction by Jonathan Bate that places the poems in literary and historical context and illuminates their relationship to Shakespeare’s dramatic writing. Also featured are key facts about the individual selections; an index of the first lines of the sonnets; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and recommendations for further reading.

Ideal for students and general readers alike, this modern and accessible edition sets a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

This is a special book about special people.  People who have loved me, and whom I have loved.  People who have brought me joy beyond measure, and sometimes incredible pain.  People I have hurt, sometimes more than I can bear to think about.  People who have hurt me, sometimes more than they know.  Yet each of their gifts has been precious, each moment treasured, each face, each smile, each victory, each defeat woven into the fiber of my being.  In retrospect, all of it is beautiful, because we cared so much.  In essence, this book covers fifteen years of my life, and a handful of precious people who mean, and have meant everything to me.  This book is written for them.

With much love, d.s.


From the Paperback edition.

Returning to the range, structure, and lyric quality of the national bestseller Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair's new collection of poetry, Living on Fire, establishes more firmly than ever this writer's literary eminence. In clear, memorable poems--about love in its many variations, about music, about the American desert, about mortality, and about her own blindness--the poet speaks to her readers with a directness distinctly American, and with feeling enhanced and deepened by technical rigor. Of young love she writes, "Their arms bound them together like timbers/for a raft and they rocked a little, as if on water." Of her blindness: "Blind to abundance when I was not blind,/I breathe one rose and hold it in my mind." Of the Mojave she recalls "long purple robes trailing down the arroyos./As the sky dims into dusk."

All the poems in Living on Fire create their own small worlds. During a long-ago trip down the Mississippi, the author recalls, "Sometimes our waterways became narrow and dim, dark mirrors/under live-oak branches hung with Spanish moss and snakes." A new love affair brings "this nighttime madness/in the backseat of a roadster." Later, she remarks with almost as much wonder as sadness, "Sightless,/I have become a stranger to my own person." Together, these poems articulate a sensibility at once distinctive and universal. Virginia Hamilton Adair has taken the specificities of her own sometimes joyous, sometimes tragic life and transformed them into powerful celebrations and elegies whose beauty and profundity will affect everyone who reads them. Even in the midst of despair, this is a poet whose work, in its sustained passion, indeed lives on fire.


From the Hardcover edition.

“This book is a feast for the eye and ear. It celebrates the creative power of love and welcomes us to the banquet.”

- Wayne Martindale 

Professor of English, Wheaton College

This collection of poetry, paintings, and prose honors the most eternal of gifts: love given and love received. Drawing from timeless love poems from the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures, classical literature, the Renaissance, and the  Romantic and Victorian Eras, they transport the reader to a garden filled with the bliss of man and woman enraptured with one another’s love. 

Images of acclaimed paintings celebrating love, faithfulness, and marriage add to the volume’s visual beauty. Reproduced in full color, these paintings include William Oliver's “It's Best with the First Love,” Sir Frank Dicksee's “Romeo and Juliet,” Paris Bordone's “Allegory with Lovers,” Pierre Renoir's “Dance at the Fields,” John Henry Frederick Bacon's “The Wedding Morning,” and William Merritt Chase's “Spring Flowers.”

Enraptured with Love … in Words

St. Paul | Augustine | Virgil | Dante | Chaucer | Shakespeare | Milton | Wordsworth | Wagner & Others 

… and Images

Monet | Bordone | Dicksee | Bierstadt | Renoir & Others

First published in 1977, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a collection of Bukowski's poetry from the mid-seventies. A classic in the Bukowski canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.

“My heart is bursting with homage as I / head off to a hostile eternity,” writes Jane Mayhall, now eighty-five, who wrote most of these poems in an urgent outpouring over the last few years. From the decades-outdated subway token in the bottom of her shoulder bag, which calls forth earlier days in New York City, to the violin her father practiced among the pantry’s jam jars in her Kentucky childhood, Mayhall plucks small treasures that bespeak her fierce devotion to life, with its clutter of memories and imperfections. In her tightly knotted, beautifully turned short poems, she elegizes a world not quite gone, and brings us into contact with some of her contemporaries, from Lincoln Kirstein to Theodore Roethke.

Chief among her cherished memories is her long bohemian marriage, which she recalls in a series of ravishing love poems to her late husband. In lines saturated with feeling she describes how she accommodates her grief at losing him and, as throughout this exquisite volume, how we must continue to greet life, in all its gorgeous strangeness.

"Life has to have the plenitude of art," Edward Hirsch affirms in his fifth volume of poems, On Love, which further establishes him as a major artist. From its opening epigraph by Thomas Hardy and an initiating prayer for transformation, On Love takes up the subjects of separateness and fusion, autonomy and blur. The initial progression of fifteen shapely and passionate lyrics (including a sonnet about the poet at seven, a villanelle about the loneliness of a pioneer woman on the prairie, and an elegy for Amy Clampitt) opens out into a sequence of meditations about love. These arresting love poems are spoken by a gallery of historical figures from Denis Diderot, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Zora Neale Hurston, and Colette. Each anatomizes a different aspect of eros in poems uttered by a chorus of historical authorities that is also a lone lover's yearning voice. Personal, literary, On Love offers the most formally adept and moving poetry by the author Harold Bloom hails as utterly fresh, canonical, and necessary.


From the Hardcover edition.