Lisa Russ Spaar has assembled a collection of poems about London to appeal to most anyone: the student abroad for a semester, the armchair traveler, or the most critical reader of poetry. The book conveys a sense that London, as both city and text, is a place of exile and transplantation, a protean site of history, projection, culture, and personal drama.

The collection includes poems written over a five-hundred-year period and represents nearly twenty different languages and cultures, resulting in a distinctive gathering that gives voice to the classic, the contemporary, and...

Thomas Jefferson was a figure both central and polarizing in his own time, and despite the passage of two centuries he remains so today. Author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, yet at the same time a slaveholder who likely fathered six children by one of his slaves, Jefferson has been seen as an embodiment of both the best and the worst in America's conception and in its history.

In Monticello in Mind, poet Lisa Russ Spaar collects fifty contemporary poems--most original to this anthology--that engage the complex legacy of...