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.

Reasons for Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Not


Mark Strand - 1968
    An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets.Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist.

Bluets


Maggie Nelson - 2009
    With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.

Sonnets


Bernadette Mayer - 1989
    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

Half Past Autumn


Gordon Parks - 1997
    Photographer, filmmaker, novelist, poet, and composer, Gordon Parks is one of the most inspiring success stories of our time. Now in a trade paperback edition, Half Past Autumn gives us the first complete retrospective of his photographic career, along with his own account of his amazing life. Half Past Autumn chronicles Parks's remarkable documentary images for the Farm Security Administration, his hard-hitting work for Life magazine, elegant fashion photos for Vogue, insightful portraits of notables, and his more recent abstract color images. With engaging anecdotal text that gives us the stories behind the images, this is an inspiring memoir of Parks's life and his struggle against racism.

Understanding Poetry


Cleanth Brooks - 1938
    Keeping it teachable and flexible, the material allows for full and innocent immersion as well as raising inductive questions to develop critical and analytical skills. Students will be led to understand poetry as a means of imaginatively extending their own experience and indeed, probing the possibilities of the self. This latest incarnation of the landmark text facilitates a thorough study of poetry.

Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)


Pamela Lu - 1999
    "While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood close on her heels.... This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself"--Publishers Weekly.

Building Stories


Chris Ware - 2012
    Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason.

A Fine Romance: Falling in Love with the English Countryside


Susan Branch - 2013
    Join Susan as she recounts her lighthearted ramble of discovery through the historical homes and gardens of art and literary heroes, along ancient footpaths, through wildflower meadows and fields of lambs, into tea rooms, pubs and antique stores. This lovely hard-cover book includes hundreds of photographs and a red ribbon sewn-in book mark. A Fine Romance is a work of art, part love story, part travel guide and all dream come true.

Dream Work


Mary Oliver - 1986
    The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness-so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive-continue in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit-to accepting the truth about one's personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships. Whether by way of inheritance-as in her poem about the Holocaust-or through a painful glimpse into the present-as in "Acid," a poem about an injured boy begging in the streets of Indonesia-the events and tendencies of history take on a new importance also. More deeply than in her previous volumes, the sensibility behind these poems has merged with the world. Mary Oliver's willingness to be joyful continues, deepened by self-awareness, by experience, and by choice.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories


Tim Burton - 1997
    Now he gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children – misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds. His lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and the tragedy of these dark yet simple beings – hopeful, hapless heroes who appeal to the ugly outsider in all of us, and let us laugh at a world we have long left behind (mostly anyway).

Self-Help


Lorrie Moore - 1985
    Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.

Amygdalatropolis


B.R. Yeager - 2017
    Norburt Wiener's apocalyptic steersman leads directly here: a psychopathological cyberutopia heading straight into the lake of fire.Scott Wilson, author of Great Satan's rage: American negativity and rap/metal in the age of supercapitalismYeager's haphephobic protagonist /1404er/ has got over reality, family or the social and moved on - to a somewhat more tenable amnion of snuff porn, clickbait and casual online scapegoating. Amygdalatropolis inhabits our post-truth heterotopia like some virulent new literary life form, perfectly tooled for the death of worlds.David Roden, author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human

I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960–2014


Bill Knott - 2017
    Over his long career, he studiously avoided joining any one school of poetry, preferring instead to freewheel from French surrealism to the avant-garde and back again—experimenting relentlessly and refusing to embrace straightforward dialectics. Whether drawing from musings on romantic love or propaganda from the Vietnam War, Knott’s quintessential poems are alive with sensory activity, abiding by the pulse and impulse of a pure, restless emotion. This provocative, playful sensibility has ensured that his poems have a rare and unmistakable immediacy, effortlessly crystalizing thought in all its moods and tenses.An essential contribution to American letters, I am Flying into Myself gathers a selection of Knott’s previous volumes of poetry, published between 1960 and 2004, as well as verse circulated online from 2005 until a few days before his death in 2014. His work—ranging from surrealistic wordplay to the anti-poem, sonnets, sestinas, and haikus—all convenes in this inventive and brilliant book, arranged by his friend the poet Thomas Lux, to showcase our American Rimbaud, one of the true poetic innovators of the last century.I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014 celebrates one of poetry’s most determined outsiders, a vitally important American poet richly deserving of a wider audience.

Dictee


Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - 1982
    A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.