Book picks similar to
The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996 by James McMichael
poetry
books-on-pause
contemporary-poetry
dnf
The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems
Gregory Orr - 2002
Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)"Love Poem"A black biplane crashes through the window of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down, removing his leather hood. He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring. No, it is two robin’s eggs and a telephone number: yours.from "Gathering the Bones Together"A father and his four sons run down a slope toward a deer they just killed. the father and two sons carry rifles. They laugh, jostle, and chatter together. A gun goes off and the youngest brother falls to the ground. A boy with a rifle stands beside him, screaming…"Orr’s is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."—The New York Times Book ReviewGregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.Also Available by Gregory Orr:Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 • CUSA
Stars of the Night Commute
Ana Bozicevic - 2009
"STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everythinga mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of languagethen render with lyrical immediacythe experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"Franz Wright.
When No One Is Watching
Linathi Makanda - 2020
It is a depiction of sides that people don't readily show, sides of vulnerability, insecurity and tiny amounts of hope. One could say it is the result of shedding light into a world of secrecy, escapism, an alternate reality belonging to an alternate version of an individual. When No One Is Watching is the truth in its purest form.
Emergency Brake
Ruth Madievsky - 2016
This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."- Matthew Dickman"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."- David St. John"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"- ZYZZYVA"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."- Columbia Journal"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”- Harpur Palate
Ozone Journal
Peter Balakian - 2015
We were never the same. The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.
In the Skin of a Jihadist: Free Sampler: Inside Islamic State’s Recruitment Networks
Anna Erelle - 2015
Bilel is the French right-hand man of the most dangerous militant in the world, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of Islamic State. He offers Mélodie a way to fill the boredom in her young life: he cares about her, offers beautiful things, spiritual purpose and, in less an idyllic life. Bilel’s seduction is honey-tongued and forceful – and all Mélodie must do is join him and ISIS in their Syrian jihad. Every day he gives more detail, telling her how he drives a jeep filled with guns and bottles of the chocolate milk he loves for hundreds of miles on murderous missions of execution. Every night he lures, seduces and manipulates this vulnerable young woman.A riveting page-turner In the Skin of a Jihadist is a shocking inquiry into how technology is spreading radicalism, the lure of ISIS propaganda, and the factors that motivate young people – including many British teenagers – to join extremist wars in Syria and elsewhere.
When Day Is Done
Elizabeth Gill - 2004
But Vinia is tragically already married to Dryden's employer, Joe, manager of the Black Prince coal pit. Joe's jealousy over the growing connection between his wife and Dryden, sends Dryden into the arms of the beautiful and fiery Roberta Grant. But can Dryden ever truly forget Vinia?
Yellow: The verses of hurting and healing
Urja Joshi - 2020
Mohi symbolises ""the hurting"" and Kabir is all about ""the healing"" that comes after it. A book written and illustrated by author,which is for everyone. for those who believe in love and compassion and for those who don't. Those who have healed and those who are still in process. Those who aren't able to move on and those who have successfully done it. It is for feminists, the activists, the believers, the gender norm shatterers.It is a gift, a book on its journey to make difference in it's reader's life.
Blush
CICI B - 2016
B is known for her amazing ability to make readers feel like they are walking beside her with every page that they turn, and this book, the follow up to the notorious "Letters To My Ex," is another testament to that. Fresh out of an intense break-up, and with her three closest friends by her side, Cici brings you with her as she learns what it means to take back control of her life, and to be her own woman. Completely raw and unfiltered, as always, she doesn't hold back. This is a story for the modern day grown woman. It will make you smile, laugh out loud, hold your breath, bite your bottom lip, and most importantly... Blush.
Indictus
Natalie Eilbert - 2018
Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.
Robinson Alone
Kathleen Rooney - 2012
Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member of the smart set—masking his desperation with urbane savoir-faire—and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.In ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus—New York, San Francisco, the highways between—and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor. The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are burnt down to ash.
Nets
Jen Bervin - 2003
"Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing" Paul Auster. In NETS, poet and artist Jen Bervin strips Shakespeare's sonnets "bare to the nets," chiseling away at the familiar lines to reveal surprising new poems, while pointing obliquely at the unavoidably intertextual ground of writing. Using visual compositional strategies as effectively as verbal ones, Bervin allows the discarded text to remain on the page as a ghostly presence, while she highlights the marginal line-numbers that allude to the sonnets' canonization."
this is how i knew
Kiana Azizian - 2018
Everything you need to hear, but already know.
Shut Up Shut Down
Mark Nowak - 2004
He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is active in the labor movement.