Earth-shattering poems Book

Poetry helps us across the world's narrow bridges, but when we slip, it helps us not to be afraid. Here is a collection of some of the most intense poems ever written, to guide us, to lead us, to hold on to as we fall.

Poems are earth-shattering when, as Emily Dickinson put it, "I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off." Liz Rosenberg has selected poems of passion and yearning, of birth and death that do just that: they hurt, but they also heal. For, over and over, the poets return to love, the mysterious, perhaps limitless feeling that binds us to the earth and may lead us beyond.

As Galway Kinnell tells it, "The wages of dying is love." The reward of reading great poetry is a form of love, too, and this collection is a chance to feel that, again and again.

A collection of poems that capture intense experiences and emotions by such authors as Sappho, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, and J. E. Wei.