Book picks similar to
Sleeping Preacher by Julia Kasdorf
poetry
ethnicity
absolute-favorites
religion-and-spirit
Half Pleasure Half Pain
Mohamed Ghazi - 2016
This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn
Alice Oswald - 2009
This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem, which was written for the 2009 festival of the Severn, aims to record what happens when the moon moves over us – its effect on water and its effect on voices.’ Alice Oswald A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a poem for several voices, set at night on the Severn Estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead - all based on real people from the Severn catchment - talk towards the moment of moonrise and are changed by it. Commissioned for the 2009 festival of the Severn, Alice Oswald's breathtakingly original new work aims to record what happens when the moon moves over the sublunary world: its effect on water and its effect on language.
Thinner Than Skin
Uzma Aslam Khan - 2012
It's also a love story: between a young Pakistani man trying to make his way as photographer in America, and the daughter of a Pakistani father and German mother brought up in the US, who wants to return to a country she's never seen. Together they make the trip to Pakistan, where a chance meeting with a young nomad changes their lives, and the lives of those around them, forever. The novel is also a love letter to the wilds of Northern Pakistan, to glaciers, to the old Silk Road, and to the nomadic life of the indigenous people in the Northern territories, where China encroaches and Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Russians, Chinese, and Afghans all come together to trade.
The Last American Valentine: Illustrated Poems to Seduce and Destroy
Derrick BrownCristin O'Keefe Aptowicz - 2008
The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.
Earth Apples: The Poetry of Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey - 1994
Brooding, iconoclastic, prophetic, Abbey was principally known as a prose writer, the author of such legendary works as The Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire, and The Brave Cowboy.Although Abbey rarely published his poetry, he was, unbeknownst to his loyal and often fanatical public, a passionate producer of verse, and these seventy-one original poems—never before published in any form (although several were rejected by the leading magazines of the nation)—offer an insightful and wrenching look into the mind of this great man known to some as "Cactus Ed." To read these poems, all written between 1952 and 1989, and culled from his Journals, is to feel the ineffable, irrefutable essence of Edward Abbey. The poems frequently alternate between the joy and pain that marked his life, and all brandish his immutable character and nonconformity.Whether writing about his love of wild doves, his unadulterated hatred of New York City, or his fondness for bawdy women, Abbey was unapologetically passionate—and these poems will only add to his literary reputation and mythic stature.Not bad for a spud-digging farm boy out of rural Pennsylvania.
Broken Wishbones and Empty Spaces
Pyrokardia - 2017
It is a book that understands and justifies the melancholy in love. Yet amidst this hurt, it still acknowledges love as a good thing, if only we could find it, give it, and take it the right way.“Broken Wishbones & Empty Spaces” heals a reader simply by acknowledgment. It skillfully teaches how to gracefully bear love’s forlorn.Pyrokardia's second collection of poetry couldn’t have been written in a better way and it is a perfect comrade and companion to his first collection titled
“A Beautiful Mess”.
There Is an Anger that Moves
Kei Miller - 2007
Using language full of unique beauty and charisma, Miller writes everything from love poems to biblical chronicles, exploring themes such as conflicting identity, home and family, and the spirit of his Jamaican ancestors.
Forest Primeval
Vievee Francis - 2015
Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work. Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color
The Italians At Cleat's Corner Store
Jo Riccioni - 2014
For seventeen-year-old Connie, however, the newcomers provide a tantalising glimpse of the wider world — a world beyond the gossip and petty concerns traded over the counter of Cleat’s Corner Store. As the Onorati brothers begin to cast an unexpected influence over Leyton, Connie realises that, like them, she must grapple with her ambitions and dreams for the future. But what can any of them hope to find in the ruins of all they’ve lost?
Dispatch from the Future: Poems
Leigh Stein - 2012
From online dating to beauty pageants, Greek mythology to road trips, Leigh Stein gives us resilient young women in longing and in love. Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives.
Last Psalm at Sea Level
Meg Day - 2014
Eloquence is only a grasping in the space of ineffable air. There are few words or phrases that do justice to the soul singing its own revelations. That place is where Last Psalm at Sea Level lives, where it is as solid as gold burning itself into light. --Afaa Michael Weaver
O Positive
Joe Dunthorne - 2019
Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the reader to darker places, exploring death and dread, failure and regret - the 'lounge of our suffering'. Often, he catches us off-guard: a 'whiplash' effect where poems shift from laughter to slaughter in a moment. Impertinent owls, an immersive theatre troupe, ancient men from the Great War and idiot balloonists - such characters dramatise our human fancies and foibles, joining the protagonist in scenarios both humorously bizarre and all-too-familiar. These performances serve to probe and unpeel the layers of the self - all the way down to the raw.
Notes on Thought and Vision
H.D. - 1982
(Hilda Doolittle) is an aphoristic meditation on how one works toward an ideal body-mind synthesis; a contemplation of the sources of imagination and the creative process; and a study of gender differences H.D. believed to be inherent in women's and men's consciousness. Here, too, is The Wise Sappho, a lyrical tribute to the great poet of Lesbos, for whom H.D. felt deep personal kinship.""Notes" is filled with dualisms that seem to split experience at all levels: body and spirit, womb and head, feeling and thought, the unconscious and ego consciousness, female and male, nature and divinity, classical and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, Sphinx and Centaur, Pan and Helios, Naiads and Athene, thistle and serpent. But the impulse behind "Notes" is to account for those mysterious moments in which the polarities seemed to fall away, or—more accurately—to find their contradictions lifted and subsumed into a gestalt that illuminated the cross-patch of the past and released her to the chances of the future." —Albert Gelpi, Introduction"H. D.'s Notes on Thought and Vision [is] such a unique, inspiring, exploration of her notion of the creative process, orchestrated through an array of fully female, not feminine, not feminist, female figures." —Paul Kameen, University of Pittsburgh, English DepartmentHilda "H.D." Doolittle (1886-1961) was a poet, novelist, and memoirist well-known for her role with the avant-gard Imagist group. Though born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, her publications took off in London and earned her a spot within the emerging Imagist movement. She is also known for being unapologetic about her sexuality and is an icon for LGBT rights and feminist movements.
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
Kevin Powers - 2014
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience.Just as The Yellow Birds was hailed as the "first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war," this collection will make its mark as a powerful, enduring work (Los Angeles Times).
The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education
Peter Coyote - 2015
For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission---acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.