An essential collection of James Tate's extraordinary poems that will captivate today's readers, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes Celebrating James Tate's work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, "No, you can't do that," Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the "poet of possibilities," and this collection records forays into possibilities for American poetry's future. With a new introduction by Terrance Hayes, it is sure to give readers, new and old, a lasting collection of favorites to be treasured for years to come.

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead Since the publication of his first collection, Muscular Music, in 1999, Terrance Hayes has been one of America's most exciting and innovative poets, winning acclaim for sly, twisting, jazzy poems that put "invincibly restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions" (The New York Times Book Review). A tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds, talking cats tell jokes in the Jim Crow South, and a father addresses his daughter in the lyric fables, folk sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas of So to Speak, Hayes's seventh collection. Bob Ross paints your portrait, green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and elegies for the late David Berman and George Floyd unfold amid the pandemic. These wondrous poems are lyric germinations of the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Hayes shapes language into figures of music and music into figures of language.

ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST-The New York Times and Washington Post A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality-here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman. Coleman was a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. Rejected by the elites during her lifetime, here's what people are saying now: -One of the year's best! "These poems are wildly fun and inventive . . . and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion."-New York Times -Winner, California Independent Bookseller Alliance 'Golden Poppy' Book Award 2020 -"Required Reading" Bustle -"One of the greatest poets ever to come out of L.A." The New Yorker -One of the year's best! "Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post -"Her work pushes us to confront injustice with as much candor as she did."-Poetry A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It's time for Coleman's courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry Over the last twenty-five years, Terrance Hayes has become one of our most exciting and innovative poets. He has also emerged as a perceptive and groundbreaking chronicler of contemporary poetry, with critical work appearing in publications ranging from Boston Review to The Baffler. His 2018 book on the poet Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. This collection of illustrated critical pieces maps Hayes's personal, lyrical imagining of poetry, deconstructs the traditional book review, and argues that drawing can and should be as multidimensional and hybrid-minded as poetry making. It includes pieces about basketball and poetry; an essay that relates Gwendolyn Brooks to Toi Derricotte; an introduction to the work of Wanda Coleman; a book review and epistolary prose-poem hybrid titled "Letter to Yusef"; illustrated "card deck prose poem" pieces, including an homage to the poet Tim Seibles; selections from an illustrated biographical dictionary of poets of the past hundred years; and a suite of graphic sonnets. It closes with "Questions for Reflection on a Century of American Poetry," Hayes's Academy of American Poets Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics. These astonishing essays, illustrated by Hayes himself, establish the roots of his own poetic influences and reconstruct modes of poetic engagement, demonstrating what makes a poem both move and be moving and illustrating how drawing itself can be a kind of critical, poetic discourse.

Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes. The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.

The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes. An array of writers-including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate-have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets. This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks's daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks's legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.

In 1997 Carcanet published the Selected Poems with which James Tate (1943–2015) won the Pulitzer Prize and his first British book. Hell, I love everybody: 52 Poems by James Tate re-introduces the poet, providing a poem for every week of the year, every mood and season. It includes work from his first publication, The Lost Pilot, a Yale Younger Poets selection (1967) and all his subsequent books. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming, absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. All Tate's poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate was described as a surrealist. If he is, that surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by candour. John Ashbery wrote of 'his genius: passionate, humane, funny, tragic, and always surprising and mind-delighting'.

THE SUNDAY TIMES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE The black poet would love to say his century began With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset Bridges & windows. In a second I'll tell you how little Writing rescues. So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over 70 poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good. American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and the whole human, even as it opens to the view the dividing lines of race, gender and political oppression which define the early 21st Century. It is compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, bewildered - and unstoppably, rhythmically compelling, as few books can hope to be.

'Essential reading' Roger Robinson 'Hateful and hilarious, heartbroke and hellbent' Mary Karr 'Sure, wise and devastating . . . a joy' Caleb Azumah Nelson 'Wanda Coleman is not just wickedly wise, she is transcendent' Washington Post Nobody wrote about police hassle like she did. Nobody wrote about making ends meet, about the history of the slave trade or the comedy of the daily grind, with the same breathtaking originality and brio; and few writers, before or since, have had the courage to write with such honesty about their everyday experience of life - and love - in an unjust world. This is the first ever UK publication of the poetry of Wanda Coleman: a beat-up, broke and Black woman who wrote with defiance, humour and clarity about her life on the margins, and who went overlooked by the establishment for decades - even as she was known colloquially as 'the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. Wicked Enchantment gathers 130 of Coleman's poems in a selection by Terrance Hayes. Funny, angry, endlessly alive and written with an immediacy and frankness that captivate, here is the essential work of a poet of fierce resistance and self-belief against the odds.

The third collection of poetry from the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes's resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry.

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and-most of all-love.

Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

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.