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Space, in Chains
Laura Kasischke - 2011
Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. Andalso the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children's laughter.
Home Body
Rupi Kaur - 2020
home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.i dive into the well of my bodyand end up in another worldeverything i needalready exists in methere’s no needto look anywhere else– home
Whereas
Layli Long Soldier - 2017
What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.—from “WHEREAS Statements”WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Elizabeth Bishop - 1980
Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.
Erosion
Jorie Graham - 1983
It is this girlby Pierodella Francesca, unbuttoningher blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go intolabor. Come, we can go in.It is beforethe birth of god. No-onehas risen yetto the museums, to the assemblyline bodiesand wings to the open airmarket. This iswhat the living do: go in.It's a long way.And the dress keeps openingfrom eternityto privacy, quickening.Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present momentforever stillborn, but going in, each breathis a buttoncoming undone, something terriblynimble-fingeredfinding all of the stops.Jorie Graham grew up in Italy and now lives in northern California.She has received grants from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton, 1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award as the best first book of poems published in 1980.
Bestiary: Poems
Donika Kelly - 2016
Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.
3 Summers
Lisa Robertson - 2016
What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.
Tender Data
Monica McClure - 2015
Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through.
Book of Longing
Leonard Cohen - 2006
Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.
Rabbit
Sophie Robinson - 2018
These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Rabbit was chosen for the PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.
Collected Poems
Philip Larkin - 1988
Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.
Mortal Trash: Poems
Kim Addonizio - 2016
In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence. Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors. Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.From “Scrapbook”:We believe in the one-ton roseand the displaced toilet equally. Our bluesassume you understandnot much, and try to be alive, just as we do,and that it may be helpful to hold the handof someone as lost as you.
Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke - 1922
Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. One morning he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”
What We Buried
Caitlyn Siehl - 2014
The light draws you in where you will find Caitlyn there digging. When you get close enough, she'll lean in & whisper, Baby, buried things will surface no matter what, get to them before they get to you first. Her unbounded love will propel you to pick up a shovel & help- even though the only thing you want to do is kiss her lips, kiss her hands, kiss every one of her stretch marks & the fire that is raging in pit of her stomach. She'll see your eyes made of devour & sadness, she'll hug you & say, Baby, if you eat me alive, I will cut my way out of your stomach. Don't let this be your funeral. Teach yourself to navigate the wound.