Ruthie Swain, the bedridden daughter of a dead poet, tries to find her father through stories -- and through generations of family history in County Clare.

"Manuela Beltrán, a poet haunted by a troubled childhood, is bent on revenge for the wrongs she suffered at the hands of her mother's lover. Her vendetta will draw together a cast of enigmatic characters, the inhabitants of Gamboa's 'dark valley.' There is Tertullian, an Argentine who claims to be the Pope's son, ready to consort to extreme methods to create a harmonious society. There is Ferdinand Palacios, a Colombian priest with a dark paramilitary...

"A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum"-- Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work...

A fictionalized biography of the eighteenth-century African woman who, as a child, was brought to New England to be a slave, and after publishing her first poem when a teenager, gained renown throughout the colonies as an important black American poet.

After the death of her sister, Tara struggles to deal with her guilt through slam poetry

Writing poetry helps fifth-grader Harper Lee Morgan cope with her father's absence, being evicted, and having to skip school to care for her brother while their mother works, and things look even brighter after she befriends a mute girl and a kindly disabled woman.