Everyone has his or her own idea of what poetry is. In Poets Unbound you have fifteen perspectives. Whether your taste runs to formal rhyming poems, imagistic depictions of feeling, or the no-frills language of the everyday, there is something here for you. There are poems celebrating life, poems of mourning, nature poems, city poems, poems about mythology and popular culture, animals, God, and mankind. This collection is as diverse as its authors, but whatever the differences, the poems are united by the shared value that poetry is not only important but necessary. Every poet in this book has handed copies of his/her poems around a table to half a dozen people with editing pens to ask, "how could this poem be better?" Every poet in this book has left a meeting feeling sorry that he/she asked, and come back the next week to hear more, trusting that a poem important enough to write, is important enough to craft. Poets Unbound contains many styles, subjects, and viewpoints. Most of all, it contains the distinct voices of people who believe poetry a vital way to communicate the individual world.

From dissonant hearts to drive-thru burgers, Poets Unbound: 10 Years into the Journey is a thematically organized anthology of poetry by the members of Poets Unbound, the Nashua, NH workshop group that's been meeting every Thursday since 1996. The first section, Dark Alleys, consists of poems that visit the darker places. Not a depressing look, rather the poems find beauty and hope in life's challenges. Stops Along the Way is a look into all the places we've traveled in life, the past. These poems provide insight into the things that shape who we are. Scenic Routes is a picturesque look at landscapes of all kinds, pastoral, urban, internal, and metaphorical. Love's Byways is about all kinds of love: mother-child, sibling and other family relationships, romantic relationships, requited and unrequited loves. Sign-Posts is a potpourri of perspectives on life. These perspectives include personal beliefs, spiritual beliefs, and other philosophies. Whether it's because these poets have spent time helping one another improve their craft, or synchronicity, the poems in this anthology have incredible flow. In each section you'll find that from one poem to the next, the poems inform and deepen one another. This anthology is a journey you'll want to revisit again and again.

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.

"Poems From The Cranberry Room" is the second collection of poetry from the Nashua, New Hampshire workshop group, Poets Unbound. Whether you're an avid reader of poetry or someone who hasn't read poetry in years, you will enjoy something in this book. The subjects of these poems are as diverse as divorce, death, Viet-Nam cuisine, oppressed women, family, and finding your place in the world, to name a few. These are poems are written by individuals who share a dedication to the craft of poetry. You will not find poems that fell from pen to paper, immediately perfect. These poems are the result of a group focus on improving every poem and the poet's use of these suggestions. Feedback offers the poet new perspectives into their own work. Sometimes poems become very different than the originals. Everyone in Poets Unbound has a unique style and voice. By spending time with these poems, you will feel like you've seen into each of their worlds.

Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer a compelling new reading of British Romanticism. Matthew Ward reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics.

This collection uses a transnational approach to study contemporary English-language poetry composed by poets of South Asian origin. The poetry contains themes, motifs, and critiques of social changes, and the contributors seek to encapsulate the continually changing environments that these contemporary poets write about. The contributors show that English-language poetry in South Asia is hybridized with imagery and figurative language adapted from the vernacular languages of South Asia. The chapters examine women’s issues, concerns of marginalized groups—such as the Dalit community and the people of Northeastern India—, social changes in Sri Lanka, the changing society of Pakistan, and the formation of the identity in the several nation states that resulted from the British colony of India.

It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.