Poetry

Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, from his seminal work Leaves of Grass, is a celebration of freedom and the joy of journeying.

In Whitman's classic poem, the road becomes a metaphor for life's journey, full of possibilities, adventures, and the promise of personal discovery. Song of the Open Road encapsulates the essence of American transcendentalism, advocating for self-reliance and a profound connection with nature. Whitman's language and verse mirrors the free spirit of the open road, where societal constraints dissolve and the individual becomes one with the world.

“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.”—Walt Whitman

The poetry of America's first published black poet was published before the Revolutionary War and recognized throughout the English-speaking world. Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa, sold as a slave in America, and became a celebrity in Europe. This volume also contains a short memoir of her life.

In his 1915 poem “Blueberries,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Frost makes the ordinary experience of picking wild blueberries into an extraordinary endeavor, where you can smell the morning damp, feel the sun on your head, and take delight in being the first to discover a blueberry patch ripe for picking. In the poem, Frost also introduces the reader to a poor neighbor family that needs the wild berries they pick to survive.  This short work is part of Applewood’s “American Roots,” series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America’s most famous writers.

A groundbreaking nonfiction collection about queer life in the Midwest. A marvelous ode to humanity and its passions.--Little Village

The middle of America―the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, the Upper South―is a queer place, and it always has been. The queer people of its cities, farms, and suburbs can't be reduced to just blue dots within red states. Every story about a kid from Iowa who steps off the bus in Manhattan, ready to finally live, is a story about a kid who was already living in Iowa. Sweeter Voices Still is a collection full of stories about that kid, written by people just like them.

This collection, edited by Ryan Schuessler (The St. Louis Anthology) and Kevin Whiteneir, Jr., features queer voices you might recognize―established and successful writers and thinkers like Aaron Foley and Jeffery Bean―and others you might not. You'll find sex, love, and heartbreak and all the other beings we meet along the way: trees, deer, cicadas, sturgeon. Most of all, you'll find real people.

Perfect for anyone looking for fully realized stories about the nuanced, joyous complexity of queer identity in the Midwest.

Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to the nation's capital at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman eventually served as a volunteer hospital missionary, making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wounded soldiers in the next three years. With the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman became poet laureate of the Civil War, aligning his legacy with that of Abraham Lincoln. He remained in Washington until 1873 as a federal clerk, engaging in a dazzling literary circle and fostering his longest romantic relationship, with Peter Doyle. Author Garrett Peck details the definitive account of Walt Whitman's decade in the nation's capital.

The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected Arkansas narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.

“I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: To-morrow is a day.” -Carl Sandburg, “Prairie”

Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Price in Poetry, Cornhuskers is an homage to America and the American midwest from one of the nation’s most acclaimed writers, Carl Sandburg. One hundred years after the book’s first publication, this 104-poem collection breathes life into our national past - honoring the prairie, the changing seasons, and the hard working people of the heartlands. 

Succinct and remarkably beautiful. These poems sing with a certain unencumbered honesty that both complicates and informs our understanding of the author’s midwestern wilderness. Sandburg, as the “poet of the people,” as he came to be so affectionately known, writes plainly and unpretentiously about the place that he had called home.