Book picks similar to
A Plate of Chicken by Matthew Rohrer
poetry
summer-twelve
favorite-contemporary
heartspasm
The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail
Gregory Sherl - 2012
Along the way, they fight dysentery, a racist Mel Gibson, syphilis, and consumption while learning that letting go is sometimes easier than starting over. Read the book, play the game, and never welcome the small pox welcome wagon. We have done bad things, and we will pay for them.
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon
Mary Jo Bang - 2004
Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.
Letters to a Stranger (Re/View)
Thomas James - 1973
I am not impatient—My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.I'll lie here till the world swims back again. —from "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh"Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger—originally published in 1973, shortly before James's suicide—has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James's poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.
I Love You Is Back
Derrick Brown - 2006
With a large worldwide cult following, Brown has delivered ..".a heart crushing and brilliant work of modern American classics." NYLON magazine. It contains such hits as "The Victory Explosions" and "All distortion, All the time." This collection of 49 poems sings with sincere revelations and ecstatic lust for wild, honest living.
Adult Head
Jeff Tweedy - 2004
In turns surreal and concrete, playful and serious, urgent and whimsical, Adult Head rewards readers with a unique prosody and deep wisdom. Culled from the same mind responsible for some of the best lyrics and music made in the past decade, this volume displays Tweedy's prodigious talent for poetry on the page. Jeff Tweedy has devoted the last twenty years of his life to songwriting and music making. As a member of the band Wilco and formerly of the band Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy and his band mates have garnered respect and praise from Rolling Stone, Spin, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Tweedy lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.
Fruits & Vegetables
Erica Jong - 1971
Here is the 25th anniversary edition of Jong's debut collection, a surrealistic, funny, gastronomic, erotic, serious book about being human and female and American. 96 pp.
Ivory Gleam
Priya Dolma Tamang - 2018
A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.
Bending the Bow: Poetry
Robert Duncan - 1968
With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.
Animal Eye
Paisley Rekdal - 2012
She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."
sticky notes
Indy Yelich - 2018
She currently lives independently as a 19 year old in New York City. This debut collection chronicles her experiences with love, travel, and self-discovery in a shifting physical and emotional geography.
City of Rivers
Zubair Ahmed - 2012
"Zubair Ahmed’s first poetry collection City of Rivers captures the reader’s heart from its first line to its last. These poems are reminders of poetry’s power to leave us breathless after immersing us in truths, both wonderful and painful." - ZYZZYVA"...his poems are brief and beautiful, with final lines (“The light source is somewhere beyond / The years of my life.”) that should be scratched onto padlocks locked to the Pont des Arts over the Seine.... City of Rivers is a treasure you would do well to read." - Artvoice"While I imagine one of the reasons readers might find themselves interested in City of Rivers will be due to Ahmed’s relatively young age, such readers will invariably find themselves more interested in exploring the range of his vision and the confidence he seems to have hammered into every one of his sharp, stoic lines.... Ahmed possesses a profound understanding of the nature all poets, young and old, share—he recognizes that the words are a dream, that they haunt the body, and their constant buzzing, their inability to give us solace, keep us moving." - The Rumpus"Honestly, I’ve not yet read a contemporary poet of his equal." - Chico News Review"...a startling first collection of poems..." - Shelf-Awareness"This unusually compact and consistent debut from an unusually young poet might get noticed first for that poet’s unusual migratory life... Such work looks back productively to the American Deep Image style of the 1960s, to James Wright and the young Robert Bly." - Publisher's Weekly"Any poet would hope for the kind of praise that glows from the back cover of Zubair Ahmed’s debut poetry collection, City of Rivers. “Bracingly original…ushered into being by a prodigious new voice in America poetry.” Add to that the fact that Ahmed is only twenty-five, that his first book was published by McSweeney’s, and you have a rising star certainly worth keeping an eye on. Because—high as the book jacket praise might be—Ahmed lives up to it." - Late Night LibraryWe used to play soccer in the monsoon rains.Through my windows, I can see acres of fields,Lying in the ruins of the wind.The poems in City of Rivers—the first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmed—are clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed’s spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it’s like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos—and also with joy, humor, and longing—with the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton
Alfred Starr Hamilton - 2013
Introduction by Geof Hewitt. Alfred Starr Hamilton (1914-2005) was an American poet from Montclair, New Jersey. Though Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the '60s, '70s and '80s; two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton's poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton's poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks."Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent in American English."—Ron Silliman"Alfred Starr Hamilton 'wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.' Consider this collection—assembled by two very dedicated allographers—an essential expansion on said letter. People who've encountered Hamilton's work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer."—Graham Foust"It is a hidden world, a hushabye place that Alfred Starr Hamilton occupies, a secluded place where he is free to summon daffodils and stars, chimes and angels, thread and old-fashioned spoons. There is Hungarian damage, blue revolutionary stars, a sedge hammer (which is not a typo). He is obsessively drawn to fine metals—bronze, silver and gold. He would be golden, but can never grasp the elusive sad: 'One cloud, one day / Came as a shadow in my life / And then left, and came back again; and stayed' like "Anything Remembered" which is the title of that poem. He is too removed to see things any other way but his own. It is a silver peepshow in the wonderbush, and there is always a moon to scrape from the bottom of his view."—C. D. Wright"We are living in the Badlands. Dorothy's ruby-slippers would get you across the Deadly Desert. So will these poems."—Jonathan Williams