Monroe Free Library

Leaves of Grass, featuring beloved poems such as “Oh Captain! My Captain!” and “Song of Myself,” was met with both scathing criticism and glowing praise when it was originally published in 1855. Arguably the best historical commentator of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman continues to inspire readers today.

"For its twentieth anniversary, a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition of Mary Karr's pathbreaking, award-winning, mega-bestselling memoir, with a new foreword by Lena Dunham When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious...

Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and
Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award
In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context...

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author "gives us flesh and blood Whitman in this fine and sensitive biography" (The Boston Globe).
A moving, penetrating, sharply focused portrait of America's greatest poet—his genius, his passions, his androgynous sensibility—an exuberant life entwined with the turbulent history of mid-nineteenth century America. In vivid detail, Justin Kaplan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize...

"Enormous Smallness is a nonfiction picture book about the poet E. E. Cummings. Here E.E.'s life is presented in a way that will make children curious about him and will lead them to play with words and ask plenty of questions as well. Lively and informative, the book also presents some of Cummings's most wonderful poems, integrating them seamlessly into the story to give the reader the music of his voice and a spirited, sensitive introduction to...

A biography of a man who, from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance through the 1960s, wrote poems, stories, and books which celebrated his African American heritage.

Describes how the twentieth-century African American poet Langston Hughes affirms his vocation as a writer through the composition of his famous 1921 poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves...

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

"A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution"--