The poems and stories in this book deal with everyday situations, and place them in a framework that transcends time. They highlight the special feelings and events of the life cycle: the birth of a child, the death of a parent, and all of the rites of passage that intervene. The focus is on commonalities: the shared feelings of human beings across the great divides of culture, continent, and time.

Facets are known in all lives, in our subtle thoughts that speak as a silent voice within, and yet they somehow have the amazing power to change courses and rewrite destinies. Some reflective, some striking a poignant nerve ever reminding us of our own humanity found in these truths felt from a paralleling universe of abstract experience. This is where the magic is found-in the unmined landscape of the artist's imagination. Facets is a journey through this reality of poetry and art. A collection of poems and writings designed to awaken the poet in all of us. Sometimes it takes a lonely walk somewhere to find that a vast and remote landscape is the perfect canvas for a soul to paint light with darkness, heaven with hell, and realize that in the center of all things is this human condition. A muse where had it not been this poetry surely would have lacked the poignant and reflective passion, the true depth of love, and all the deep madness of expression as we paint with hearts in our own statement of this truth. Here we are, from every heartbreak to reprieve and always just as human as we can possibly be.

A TIME Magazine Best Paperback of 2017 A Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Collection of Spring A Paris Review Staff Pick A Most Anticipated Book of 2017 at NPR.org, BuzzFeed, VICE, NYLON, and more "This is a marvelous book. See for yourself. Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star." —Terrance Hayes The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive. Morgan Parker stands at the intersections of vulnerability and performance, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence. Unrelentingly feminist, tender, ruthless, and sequined, these poems are an altar to the complexities of black American womanhood in an age of non-indictments and deja vu, and a time of wars over bodies and power. These poems celebrate and mourn. They are a chorus chanting: You’re gonna give us the love we need.

An age-old riddle poses the question; which came first, the chicken or the egg? Step into Pookie's poetic world and mysteries will unfold, ignorance explode, and truth will be told. You will realize that the egg is in the chicken and the chicken is in the egg, and that you cannot have one without the other. It will become self-evident that it doesn't matter which came first. Step into Pookie's poetic world where mysteries unfold, ignorance explodes, truth is told, and you will expand the horizon of your thought. - Babatunde Adewale Faola

These poems and writings by daughter and dad, covering 45 years, are time capsules of emotions and events. Topics of love, nature, faith and contemplation of life are common elements that connect us all. Times change, people change, and some of the attitudes expressed in several poems have changed. The poems remain in the book as they were a facet of my life. May you be encouraged to appreciate life in all of it's facets.

First-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studies—including the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic "I-voice." In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part by the "New Lyric Studies," I, the Poet will appeal not only to scholars of Latin literature but to readers across a range of literary studies who seek to understand the Roman contexts which shaped canonical poetic genres.

Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic achievement. Madeleine Callaghan explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their developing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.