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City Lights Bookstore Poetry Selections

All items are available in the City Lights Bookstore (Map & Directions). You can also order these items directly from our web site, simply click on the "add to cart" button next to the book of your choice. All orders will be sent by DHL Ground service. For expedited shipping or international orders, please see our Ordering Information .

The Age of Huts/ Silliman
The Age of Huts
by Ron Silliman

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life.
$19.95
University of California Press

Averno: Poems
by Louise Gluck
Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s tenth collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time resisting their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resoltution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present.
$12.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Averno
Breathturn
Breathturn
by Paul Celan

Translated from the German by Pierre Joris-winner of the 2004 PEN Translation Award for Celan's Lightduress-the is the first of Celan's three major books of poetry before his death by suicide. Considered by many to be one of Celan's major writings, Breathturn brilliant reveals the "Wende" or turn of writing.
$12.95
Green Integer


The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden
by Stanley Kunitz, Marnie Crawford Samuelson, & Genine Lentine
Throughout his life (1905-2006) Stanley Kunitz created poetry and tended gardens. This book is the distillation of conversations, none previously published, that took place between 2002 and 2004. Beginning with the garden, that "work of the imagination," the explorations journey through personal recollections, the creative process, and the harmony of the life cycle. A bouquet of poems and a total of 26 full-color photographs accompany the various sections. The Wild Braid received a 2006 American Horticultural Society Book Award.
$17.95
W. W. Norton


The Wild Braid

Splay Anthem
Splay Anthem
by Nathaniel Mackey
Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections – "Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" – Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu."
$15.95
New Directions


The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose (2nd Ed.)
by T. S. Eliot

One of the twentieth century’s most powerful—and controversial—works, The Waste Land was published in the desolate wake of the First World War. This definitive edition of T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece presents a new and authoritative version of the poem, along with all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing The Waste Land, seven of them never before published in book form. The volume is enriched with period photographs and a London map of locations mentioned in the poem.
$17.00
Yale University Press

The Annotated Waste Land

Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future
by Patti Smith
Patti Smith is a writer, artist, and performer. Her books include Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Complete Lyrics. On July 10, 2005, she received the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest grade awarded by the French Republic to eminent artists and writers who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts throughout the world.
$25.95
Harper Perennial



Decreation
by Anne Carson
Simone Weil described “decreation” as “undoing the creature in us” – an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture.
$14.95
Vintage


Decreation

Second Space
Second Space:
New Poems
by Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses.
$13.95
HarperCollins


Open Closed Open: Poems
by Yehuda Amichai
"
Amichai, Israel's best-known poet, is now in his mid-70s, and he writes with the casual wisdom and generous humor of a master. The glide of his lines, translated so adeptly into English, usher the reader into the complexity of his thoughts and the shifting shadows and light of his emotions as surely as music cues a dancer. His imagery is vital and unexpected, and many poems possess the power of compassionate sermons." – Booklist
$14.00
Harvest Books


Open Closed Open: Poems

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
by Elizabeth Bishop
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies.
$15.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux


The Whispering Gallery
by William Logan
The poems here delve into what William Logan calls the "ill-lit kingdom of the past." The book is haunted by the dead but equally penitent toward the rich insinuations of the living: the lost floral paradise of the Florida outlands, the steamy Gatsby summers of a Long Island childhood, the frozen stones of a colonial burying ground. This new collection of seventy-two poems will allow readers to delight in the richness of Logan’s language and the boldness of his vision.
$16.00
Penguin



The Whispering Gallery

New and Selected Poems, Volume Two New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems–an entire volume in itself–along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.
$16.00
Beacon Press


District and Circle: Poems
by Seamus Heaney

District and Circle inhabits the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that “Anything can happen,” and other images from the dangerous present—a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier—are fraught with this same anxiety. B
$13.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

District and Circle

The Beautiful
The Beautiful
by Michelle Tea
Award-winning author Michelle Tea ran away to San Francisco's queer and literary scenes in the early '90s, finding a home on the stages of various open mic venues. She self-published a steady stream of very limited edition photocopied poetry chapbooks, all of which are available together in a single volume for the first time in The Beautiful. In these tender yet tough contemplations, Tea welcomes the reader to explore her innermost passions, devoid of pretense or assumption. Previously unpublished works, including the title poem, are also included in this stunning collection.
$13.95
Manic D Press



Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge
by Harryette Mullen
Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen’s career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.
$15.00
Graywolf Press


Recyclopedia

what is this thing called love
what is this thing called love
by Kim Addonizio
High heels and hangovers, horror movies and empty hotel rooms, regrets and resignation, elements all in Addonizio's articulation of lust, the quest for oblivion, and the body's unrelenting archiving of every pleasure and pain. For all their fleshiness, stiletto stylishness, and rock-and-roll swagger, Addonizio's finely crafted and irreverent poems are timeless in their inquiries into love and mortality, rife with mystery and ambivalence, and achingly eloquent in their study of the conflicted union of body and soul.
$13.95
W. W. Norton & Co.


The Essential Neruda
This collection presents fifty of Neruda's most essential poems in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world's leading Neruda scholars. This is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth of Neruda's various styles, themes, and periods.
$16.95
City Lights


The Essential Neruda

Residence on Earth
Residence on Earth
by Pablo Neruda
Upon its publication in 1973, this bilingual publication instantly became "a revolution... a classic by which masterpieces are judged" (Review). "In Residence on Earth," wrote Amado Alonso, "the tornado of fury will no longer pass without lingering, because it will be identified with [Neruda's] heart."
$14.95
New Directions



The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
This landmark collection brings Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry together in a single authoritative volume for the first time. Edited by the poet Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons, The Collected Poems demonstrates the remarkable range, power, and importance of Berrigan's work.
$24.95

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Last Supper of the Senses
Way More West
by Edward Dorn

Edward Dorn was not only one of America’s finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn’s comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. This new volume brings together poems from Dorn’s entire career, including previously uncollected work.
$20.00
Penguin


Mi Revalueshanary Fren
by Linton Kwesi Johnson

Linton Kwesi Johnson is the author of five previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known worldwide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae. Much of his work is written in the street Creole of the Caribbean communities in which he grew up in England. Mi Revalueshanary Fren includes all of his best-known poems, which concern racism and politics, personal experience, philosophy, and the art of music, among other things.
Hardcover with CD
$18.00
Ausable Press

Mi Revalueshanary Fren

One Hidden Stuff
One Hidden Stuff
Barbara Ras
Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras’s poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what’s cherished to what’s lost, from culture to nature.
$16.00
Penguin



Facts About the Moon: Poems
by Dorianne Laux

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.
$14.95
W. W. Norton & Co.

Facts About the Moon: Poems

Hands Washing Water
Hands Washing Water
by Chris Abani
"This book holds the keys to the universe. Abani compresses space, time, language, matter, history and consciousness. From suffering to desire, from war to love. Each one a hinge toward enlightenment. Each one a tender mirror that turns into liquid sunlight in your hands." – Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Giraffe On Fire and Crash Boom Love
$15.00
Copper Canyon Press


Hoodlum Birds
by Eugene Gloria
The speaker of these poems examines his lapsed Roman Catholic identity and his past; Spain, and its long and varied influence on Filipino culture; and the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. These new poems build on what Gloria began in his first book by continuing this sense of collaboration with literary and cultural influence.
$17.00
Penguin


Hoodlum Birds

Essential Whitman
Essential Whitman
by Walt Whitman
From the introduction by Galway Kinnell: "My experience of [Whitman's] Leaves of Grass then was intense.... Soon I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymn-like, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to the creatures and things of our world.... Once again, as when I first began writing, it seemed it might be possible to say everything in poetry."
$9.95
Ecco



Essential Blake
by William Blake

From the introduction by Stanley Kunitz: "Blake speaks more directly to us, anticipating the issues, conflicts, and anxieties of the modern world, than any of his contemporaries. It could be argued that he dared, in fact, to be the first modern poet....Above all, Blake teaches us that the imagination is a portion of the divine principle, that "Energy is Eternal Delight," and that "everything that lives is Holy." Human liberty and imagination have never been better served."
$9.95
Ecco


Essential Blake

Hoodlum Birds
Everything Preserved 1955-2005: Poems
by Landis Everson
A friend of the poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, Everson became a significant figure of the Berkeley Renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s, which rebelled against the strictures of formalism to bring the poet’s unmediated mind onto the page. After the group disbanded, Everson stopped writing for more than four decades, but at the prompting of editor and poet Ben Mazer, he began writing the vivid, spontaneous, and marvelous poems of the last few years.
$15.00
Graywolf Press



The Trouble with Poetry And Other Poems
by Billy Collins

Like the present book’s title, Collins’s poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”–but also with quiet observation, intense wonder, and a reverence for the everyday: “The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows. / They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth–the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, / the American poets gazing out / at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.”
$12.00
Random House


The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison
What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison
by Camille Dungy

"Camille Dungy has a garden of verses that spring up with the sunshine or hide with you in the dusk. 'Cleaning' best sums up What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, an amazing poetry collection, when Dungy pens 'understanding clearly/what is fatal to the body./I only understand too late/what can be fatal to the heart.' Take an ice tea and sit on the veranda or take a glass of wine and prop up in bed but whatever way you like your poetry, this book is a must." – Nikki Giovanni, author of The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni and Black Feeling, Black Talk
$15.95
Red Hen Press


After: Poems
by Jane Hirshfield

An investigation into incarnation, transience, and our intimate connection with all existence, by one of the preeminent poets of her generation.
$14.95
Harper Perennial

After

Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
by William Blake

This beautiful, hardcover edition allows Blake to communicate with his readers as he intended, reproducing his illuminations and lettering from the finest existing example of the original. In this way readers can experience the mystery and beauty of Blake’s poems as he created them. This unique edition is essential for those who love Blake’s work, and also offers an ideal entrance into his visionary world for those encountering him for the first time.
$17.95
Tate Publishing


Outrider: Essays, Poems, Interviews
by Anne Waldman
This book gathers essays, poems and rants, an interview with her by Matthew Cooperman, and an interview by her with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in an attempt to further articulate a sense of this tradition from Walt Whitman to the present. Not a dry presentation, this book is a fierce and loving look at what poetry can be. Outrider is an invocation of "lineage" as a challenge toward examining the practice of poetry and the links of its history. This awareness of lineage encompasses both what has been inherited and what needs be passed on.
$18.00
La Alameda Press


Outrider

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
by Pablo Neruda

When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. W. S. Merwin’s incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text. Now in a black-spine Classics edition, this book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world.
$12.00
Penguin Classics


Only Dreaming Sky: Poems
by Jack Hirschman

In this unique collection of new and previously published work by San Francisco's Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman, a lighter, humorous side of the award-winning poet is revealed. Even in his most ardent political pieces, Hirschman's playful side shines through. Known for his commitment to social justice, Hirschman often frames ordinary urban moments with extraordinary clarity, gently guiding the reader to a new way of seeing.
$13.95
Manic D Press

Given

Selections from Les Fleurs du Mal
Selections from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire

For Baudelaire, love was the essence of the forbidden, and he saw the individual as a divided being, drawn equally towards good and evil, the ideal and the sensual. His originality sets him apart from the dominant literary schools of his time and his poetry is regarded as the last brilliant summation of Romanticism, the precursor of Symbolism, and the first expression of Modernity.
$12.00
Whale & Star




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