Devotions
by Mary Oliver | 
No Matter the Wreckage
by Sarah Kay | 
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost | 
Crush
by Richard Siken | 
A Year with Rumi
by Coleman Barks | 
In My Head
by J. M. Storm | 
Citizen
by Claudia Rankine | 
Thirst
by Mary Oliver | 
A Poet's Glossary
by Edward Hirsch | 
The Space Child's Mother Goose
by Frederick Winsor | 
Counting Descent
by Clint Smith | 
Dead Man's Float
by Jim Harrison | 
Adam Robison and Other Poems
by Adam Robinson | 
Alma, or The Dead Women
by Alice Notley | 
Darkness Spoken
by Ingeborg Bachmann | 
Gabriel
by Edward Hirsch | 
A Hero and a Great Man
by Francis Kruckvich | 
A Thousand Mornings
by Mary Oliver | 
The One-Strand River
by Richard Kenney | 
Ordinary Hazards
by Nikki Grimes |
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand up against a dominating and repressive society. Her poetry, novels, memoirs, and children's books reflect her Appalachian upbringing and feature her struggles with racially integrated schools and unwelcome authority figures. One of Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life," hooks has won wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. In Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks continues her work as an imagist of life's harsh realities in a collection of poems inspired by her childhood in the isolated hills and hidden hollows of Kentucky. At once meditative, confessional, and political, this poignant volume draws the reader deep into the experience of living in Appalachia. Touching on such topics as the marginalization of its people and the environmental degradation it has suffered over the years, hooks's poetry quietly elegizes the slow loss of an identity while also celebrating that which is constant, firmly rooted in a place that is no longer whole.