Poetry Style

Legendary Black Veil Brides' founder and frontman Andy Biersack curated his favorite Edgar Allan Poe tales, presented here in their original language with supplemental materials.

A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts an entire cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the listener to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes, in the first powerfully elegiac section, a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the US border with Mexico. The poems of the third section - a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s - rise like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation.

One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.

One of the great innovators in American letters, Walt Whitman created a daringly new kind of poetry that became a major force in world literature. Leaves of Grass is his masterpiece, written in a pure, uninhibited style, combining sensual and mystical sensibilities. Its bold, joyous voice, its expansive optimism, and its transcendental vision made it uniquely American.

Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

Dante’s Purgatorio follows the pilgrim as he emerges from the grit and grime of Hell, and comes to the shores of sanctification, the mountain where souls are made holy and beautiful. Join Dante as he climbs the various terraces of the mountain; encounter with him the various trials and hardships that refine God’s redeemed, preparing them for glory; learn what it means to hunger for righteousness and to rest in mercy; join the communion of saints who rejoice in their light, momentary afflictions, and find solace in the trials, as they are conformed to the image of their Lord.

Hafiz's Little Book of Life is a lush collection of more than 250 selections from his lifework (his divan). Alongside a Quran, a copy of his divan can be found in average homes in Iran—where stars can be heard singing his poetry on the radio, and lines from his poems are quoted on the street. His poetry is sure to strike a chord in the hearts of readers everywhere. This vital collection of mystical poetry focuses on the issues we encounter in everyday life. Each brief poem may be savored as an oasis of clarity in the hurried literacy of our time, or the entire book enjoyed in one sitting.

In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around 40 common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back 20 of these lost words and the beings they name, from acorn to wren.

Dante's Divine Comedy is considered to be not only the most important epic poem in Italian literature, but also one of the greatest poems ever written. It consists of 100 cantos, and (after an introductory canto) they are divided into three sections. Each section is 33 cantos in length, and they describe how Dante and a guide travel through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Love Her Wild is a collection of new and beloved poems from Atticus, who has captured the hearts and minds of well over 300k followers on his Instagram account, @atticuspoetry, including superstars like Karlie Kloss and Shay Mitchell. With honesty, poignancy, and romantic flare, Love Her Wild captures what is both raw and relatable about the smallest and the grandest moments in life.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war, beauty, and so on) is as changeable as the beings that inhabit its chapters. The sustained thread is power and how it transforms us, both those of us who have it and those of us who do not.

Written after the death of his mother, Donte Collins' Autopsy establishes the poet as one of the most important voices in the next generation of American poetry. As the book unfolds, the listener journeys alongside the author through grief and healing.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history - Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story.

A continuation of Homer’s epic poem, Kazantzakis’s own Odyssey finds Odysseus once again leaving Ithaca on finding that the satisfactions of home and hearth are not as he remembered them. Following an encounter with the former Helen of Troy (now returned to her husband, the king of Sparta, after the ignominious defeat of the Trojans), Odysseus gradually wends his way to Egypt and southward, grappling all the while with questions about the nature of God.

Set in Pennsylvania's Amish country, The Revelation is the final chapter in the saga of Jonas Mast and Leah Ebersol's inspirational love story. Forces continue to try to keep them apart, but nothing can deny their love.

What does it mean to be a child of God? We are told in scripture that followers of Jesus Christ are a member of the royal priesthood. We are told that we have been adopted into God’s family. We are told that we are a joint heir with Jesus Christ. We are told that we are loved by God as he loves all of his family. Yet, we often, and even most often, are reluctant to fully accept our adoption. We accept our salvation. But we do not accept the intimate love of our Father in heaven.

Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts & Poems explores not only Madsen's remarkable life and experiences in and out of Hollywood, but also his familial influences that have participated in crafting and shaping him, including thoughts on his father; his mother and the rumor that he was born without a left hand; ghosts, whiskey, and payback; Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, and "sensitive sons of bitches"; the mentality of actors and growing up to be a man; his first audition; drunken behavior; epic drinkers; and much, much more.

When Brianna Pastor released her self-published poetry collection, Good Grief, she was blown away by the outpouring of support from people who reached out and said, “Yes. Me too.” For anyone who has struggled with questions of identity or coped with serious emotional issues, including grief, trauma, anxiety, and depression, this collection will help you find hope on the other side.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent and is a major text of Hinduism. Its discussion of human goals (artha or 'purpose', kama or 'pleasure', dharma or 'duty' and moksha or 'liberation') takes place in a long-standing tradition, attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'self') and the workings of karma.