"There wasn't one page of his poem that didn't delight me."—Donald Davie, New York Review of Books Sphere is the second of A. R. Ammons's long poems—following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage—that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons's wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.
There’s a new set of 3Rs for our kids—respect, responsibility, and resilience—to better prepare them for life in the real world. Once developed, these skills let kids take charge, and let parents step back, to the benefit of all. Casting hover mothers and helicopter parents aside, Vicki Hoefle encourages a different, counter-intuitive—yet much more effective—approach: for parents to sit on their hands, stay on the sidelines, even if duct tape is required, so that the kids step up. Duct Tape Parenting gives parents a new perspective on what it means to be effective, engaged parents and to enable kids to develop confidence through solving their own problems. This is not a book about the parenting strategy of the day—what the author calls “Post-It Note Parenting”—but rather a relationship-based guide to span all ages and stages of development. Witty, straight-shooting Hoefle addresses frustrated parents everywhere who are ready to raise confident, capable children to go out in the world.
I reject the North because it is not / my native ground, and I reject the / South because it rejected me, and I / reject European clutterment because / we fought to put that ocean between / us. I identify with no sort or kind: / I am by myself.
Forcefully demonstrating that brevity is the soul of wit, 160 short poems, spanning the career of one of America's most honored poets, range from mordantly funny paradoxes to compressed incidents of lyric perception
An acclaimed artist celebrates the creative possibilities of macramé and knots in this memoir and guide featuring projects and tutorials. Every day for a year, artist Windy Chien learned to tie a new kind of knot and then shared the results on Instagram—a project that both reinvented her life and revolutionized knot art. In The Year of Knots, Chien describes how knot-making led her on a path of discovery. She shares projects, tutorials, and transformative personal stories, all aimed at inspiring readers to make knotting—and creativity in general—part of a meditative daily practice. The knots in this book are gorgeously documented step-by-step. Knotted projects abound—from wall hangings to a necklace, a dog leash, a hanging light, and more. At the heart of the story is the simple, empowering idea that a single year is all the time you need to make a life-changing creative leap.
Meditative, comic, emotionally wrenching, steeped in both the natural world and the life of the mind, the poetry of A. R. Ammons is at once cosmic in scope and intimate in its moment-to-moment transformations. With his mastery of description and cadence, his roiling wit and fearless gaze, Ammons was a philosopher of the everyday who found surprise everywhere he looked. “He is often witty, sometimes bawdy,” writes editor David Lehman, “on a perpetual quest to find forms capacious enough for an imagination intent on finding a place for everything.” A compound, in editor David Lehman’s words, of “wisdom, pathos, humor, mortal longing, and intimations of immortality,” the work of A. R. Ammons is like nothing else in modern American poetry. Ammons’s tireless formal invention and restless curiosity about every aspect of nature and of the mind are embodied in poetry that is effortlessly accessible and generous in its impulses. Whether spreading out in the long forms of Tape for the Turn of the Year or Garbage, or honing his perceptions down to the extreme brevity of his shorter lyrics, he holds tight to his vision of the way “all day / life itself is bending, / weaving, changing, / adapting, failing, / succeeding.” This new selection covering the whole range of Ammons’s career offers a superb introduction to the pleasures and surprises of his work. His uncanny ability to balance wide-ranging abstract speculation with meticulous observation of natural phenomena, in poetry that encompasses moods of tragic pathos, low comedy, and seemingly casual profundity marks him as one of the preeminent figures in our recent literature. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
