In a powerful debut, rising star Sophia Thakur brings her spoken word performance to the page. Be with yourself for a moment. Be yourself for a moment. Airplane mode everything but yourself for a moment. From acclaimed performance poet Sophia Thakur comes a stirring collection of coming-of-age poems exploring issues of identity, difference, perseverance, relationships, fear, loss, and joy. From youth to school to family life to falling in love and falling back out again--the poems draw on the author's experience as a young mixed-race woman trying to make sense of a lonely and complicated world. With a strong narrative voice and emotional empathy, this is poetry that will resonate with all young people, whatever their background and whatever their dreams.

What the Heart Knows: Chants, Charms, and Blessings is a collection of poems to provide comfort, courage, and humor at difficult or daunting moments in life. It conjures forth laments, spells, invocations, chants, blessings, promises, songs, and charms. Here are pleas on how to repair a friendship, wishes to transform one's life or to slow down time, charms to face the shame of a disapproving crowd, invocations to ask for forgiveness, to understand the mysteries of happiness, and to bravely face a dark and different world. These words help usremember or grieve; they bolster courage and guard against evil; they help us celebrate and give thanks. This elegant gift book also includes a red ribbon for readers to mark their favorite poems. Poet extraordinaire Joyce Sidman won the Newbery Honor Medal for Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night and continues to write poetry for children that has been called fresh," "inspiring," and "accessible" to her young audience. She is intrigued by the idea of "words of power"-chants and charms that were once believed to have real influence in everyday life. Caldecott Honor-winning Pamela Zagarenski's beautiful art captures a world of emotion and the essence of Sidman's words. "

A debut poetry collection from Inuk writer Ashley Qilavaq-Savard. The importance of land, culture, and identity play key roles in these poems, and they also paint beautiful pictures of Arctic landscapes, love stories, and growth.

Commemorating twenty years, this deeply moving play, written by high school students who witnessed the tragedy unfold, remembers September 11, 2001. This edition features new cover art, an updated introduction from Annie Thoms, and a new foreword from New York Times bestselling author David Levithan. A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age "Profound." --Booklist "Moving." --Publishers Weekly "Rings with authenticity and resonates with power." --School Library Journal Tuesday, September 11, started off like any other day at Stuyvesant High School, located only a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. The semester was just beginning, and the students, faculty, and staff were ready to start a new year. But within a few hours on that Tuesday morning, they would share an experience that would transform their lives--and the lives of all Americans. This powerful play, written by students of Stuyvesant High School based on their interviews with the school community, remembers those who were lost and those who were forced to witness this tragedy. Here, in their own words, are the firsthand stories of a day we will never forget. This collection helped shape the HBO documentary In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuyvesant High on 9/11. For dramatic rights, please visit http: //permissions.harpercollins.com/.

The first work of 'living poetry' in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia Shortlisted for the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards) Internationally renowned poet Christian Bök has encoded a poem (called 'Orpheus') into the genome of a germ so that, in reply, the cell builds a protein that encodesyet another poem (called 'Eurydice'). After having illustrated this idea in E. coli, Bök is planning to insert his poem into a deathless bacterium (D. radiodurans), thereby writing a text able to outlive every apocalypse, enduring till the Sun itself expires. Book 1 of The Xenotext is an 'infernal grimoire' that introduces readers to the conceptual groundwork for this project. The book offers a primer in genetics, even as it revisits the pastoral heritage of poetry, updating the orphic idylls of Virgil for a new age of mythic danger - be it in the beauty of artful biogenesis, if not in the terror of global extinction. 'The cellular "rules" that govern this extraordinary text allow Bök to create one of the most beautiful poems of our time - a poem in which the georgics of Virgil join forces with the double helix of Watson and Crick.' - Marjorie Perloff 'If Human reverence was slanted more toward Nature and less toward the exaltation of gods, our scriptures might have looked something like The Xenotext.' - Peter Watts 'Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials.' - The Guardian