50 American Plays


Michael Dickman - 2012
    . . is strikingly different. Michael's poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence. Matthew's are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality." —The New YorkerIdentical twins Michael and Matthew Dickman once invented their own language. Now they have invented an exhilarating book of poem-plays about the fifty states. Pointed, comic, and surreal, these one-page vignettes feature unusual staging and an eclectic cast of characters—landforms, lobsters, and historical figures including Duke Ellington, Sacajawea, Judy Garland, and Kenneth Koch, the avant-garde spirit informing this book introduced by playwright John Guare."Lucky in Kansas"Judy Garland: This is always the worst partTin Man: The coming backJudy Garland: Yes, it fucking sucks, it's depressing as shitThe Lion: Well, we're lucky to still be employed at this farmStraw Man: I wouldn't call it luckyThe Lion: We were lucky to get backStraw Man: That's not really lucky either I don't think you know what lucky meansJudy Garland: It's funny what you missTin Man: The runningJudy Garland: The flyingTin Man: The flying monkeysJudy Garland: The beautiful flying monkeys above the endless emeralds the unbelievably green worldMichael Dickman and Matthew Dickman are identical twins who were born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Michael received the 2010 James Laughlin Award for his second collection Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Matthew won the prestigious APR/Honickman Award for his debut volume, All-American Poem.

Shall We Gather at the River


James Wright - 1968
    

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (City Lights Pocket Poets Number 17)


Malcolm Lowry - 1962
    First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Holding Company: Poems


Major Jackson - 2010
    In an effort to understand desire, beauty, and love as transient anodynes to metaphysical loneliness, he invokes Constantine Cavafy, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, and Dante Rossetti.from “Jewel-Tongued”   The stillness of a lover’s mouth   assaulted me. I never wearied of anecdotes   on the Commons, gesturing until I scattered   myself into a luminance, shining over a city   of women. Was I less human or more? I hear still   my breathing echoing off their pillows. So many   eyes like crushed flowers. Our fingers splayed   over a bed’s edge. We were blown away.

Invisible Bride


Tony Tost - 2004
    Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost's point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes, And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself), Surreal and surprising, Invisible Bride showcases the prose artistry of a new American talent.

Deviant Propulsion


C.A. Conrad - 2005
    The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society. This collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

Anatomy


Karina Vigil - 2020
    This small collection of poems explores how time influences loving another, loving yourself and loving the life you own. This quick but fulfilling read, explores these topics in three sections: the head, the heart and the lungs.

Tap Out: Poems


Edgar Kunz - 2019
    Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s debut collection, reckons with his working‑poor heritage. Within are poignant, troubling portraits of blue‑collar lives, mental health in contemporary America, and what is conveyed and passed on through touch and words―violent, or simply absent.   Yet Kunz’s verses are unsentimental, visceral, sprawling between oxys and Bitcoin, crossing the country restlessly. They grapple with the shame and guilt of choosing to leave the culture Kunz was born and raised in, the identity crises caused by class mobility. They pull the reader close, alternating fierce whispers and proud shouts about what working hands are capable of and the different ways a mind and body can leave a life they can no longer endure. This hungry new voice asks: after you make the choice to leave, what is left behind, what can you make of it, and at what cost?

Go Giants: Poems


Nick Laird - 2012
    Laird boldly engages with topics ranging from fatherhood and marriage to mass destruction and the cosmos. Go Giants is a brash, brave, and wildly imaginative new collection.From Go Giants:Go in peace to love and serve the.Go and get help. Go directly to jail.Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.Go into detail. Go for the throat.

The Grief Performance


Emily Kendal Frey - 2011
    This work is light, deft, dangerous. There are perfect poems here, such as “The End”, which enacts a simple, startling twist on the hoary injunction to “Walk towards the light.” See, everything you know is wrong. You really have to read this book. -Rae AmrantroutI've always found Kendal Frey's poems fascinating to the point of transfix—they make compelling reading: I've never started one I didn't finish, something I can say of very few other poets' work. Her first full-length collection surely places her among the most brilliant of today's young poets. The Grief Performance commands and rewards the mind's richest attendance.--Bill KnottEmily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.--Dorothea LaskyEmily Kendal Frey's poems are made of words that can fake out death, trick abandonment into a bed, turn love into hands. They are rich with sound, brave with secrets, funny (tragic), and open ( ). She will twist up your heart into your next heart. Settle in. There are three dead people in her.--Zachary Schomburg

52 laws of love


Himanshu Goel - 2019
    52 laws of love by Himanshu Goel (author of A Rational Boy in Love) is a journey of love in 52 poems through all its aspects, from the honeymoon, to the sacrifices, to the bitter end and forever after.

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast


Hannah Gamble - 2012
    They are truly delightful and robustly original—a poetic joy."—Tony HoaglandSelected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.Outside there's a world where every love-scenebegins with a man in a doorway;he walks over to the woman and says "Open your mouth."Hannah Gamble has received fellowships from Rice University, The University of Houston, and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She teaches literature and writing at Prairie State College and is the poet-in-residence at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners


John Wieners - 2015
    The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.

No Object


Natalie Shapero - 2013
    With sharp wit and relentless questioning, Shapero crafts poems a reader can, if not believe in, then trust--to level with us, to surprise us, and to stay with us long after we put the book down. No Object is a fast ride you will not easily forget.

the moon will shine for us too


Jennae Cecelia - 2021