William Blake is the rebel par excellence of English poetry. The personal issues with which he wrestled seemed to him to be also the salient problems of human life. They include questions of the proper place of intellectual control in the personality, the place of impulse, the relations between authority and those it controls (and therefore between elders and children), the relations of the sexes, the folly of moral generalities (one law for the lion and the ox), the poison of jealousy, and the overwhelming importance of forgiveness. Characterized by an extraordinarily imaginative language and a forcefulness and suppleness of rhythms, Blake's poetry possesses a remarkable muscularity and exuberance. Even at its most difficult it excites, while never losing contact with the ordinary realities of life. This volume contains all Blake's poetry with full annotation and a glossary of proper names.

From "A Woman Under the Surface"
MOON AND EARTH
"Alicia Ostriker"

Of one substance, of one
Matter, they have cruelly
Broken apart. They never will touch

Each other again. The shining
Lovelier and younger
Turns away, a pitiful girl.

She is completely naked
And it hurts. The larger
Motherly one, breathlessly luminous

Emerald, and blue, and white
Traveling mists, suffers
Birth and death, birth

and death, and the shock
Of internal heat killed by external cold.
They are dancing through that blackness.

They press as if
To come closer.

Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman's. In her introduction, "Entering the Tents, " Ostriker defines the need to struggle against a tradition in which women have been silenced and disempowered - and to recover the female power buried beneath the surface of the biblical texts. In "The Garden, " she reinterprets the mythically complex stories of Creation. Then she considers the stories of "The Fathers, " from Abraham and Isaac to Moses, David, and Solomon - and their wives, mothers, and sisters. In "The Return of the Mothers, " she begins with a radical new interpretation of the book of Esther, includes a meditation on the silenced wife of Job and the idea of justice, and concludes with a fable on the death of God and a prayer to the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God. Ostriker refuses to dismiss the Bible as meaningless to women. Instead, in this angry, eloquent, visionary book, she attempts to recover what is genuinely sacred in these sacred texts.

Winner of the 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad's last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work, and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems.