Book picks similar to
The Kindness Of Strangers: Poems, 1969-1974 by Philip Whalen
poetry
contemporary-poetry
poetry-20th-century
unipoetry
Mayakovsky's Revolver
Matthew Dickman - 2012
“Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), Dickman is a powerful poet whose new collection explores how to persevere in the wake of grief.
Sid James: A Biography
Cliff Goodwin - 1995
Covering Sid's early years in South Africa and life as a ladies' hairdresser, his obsession with gambling and women, his questioning by Scotland Yard in a murder case, Hancock's Half Hour and the Carry On films, and Sid's death on stage at the age of 63, Cliff Goodwin reveals the amazing truth behing the legend.
Bright Dead Things
Ada Limon - 2015
Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Stanzas in Meditation
Gertrude Stein - 1994
Toklas had rented in the Rhone Valley, Stanzas in Meditation is one of Stein's most abstract and complex works. It is almost as if Stanzas was conceived as a mirror opposite of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, penned in the same year. The latter, written in a more direct and normative language, brought Stein international acclaim and resulted in the attention she received from 1934 on, while the former remained unavailable until its publication, after her death, in 1956. To Stein readers and admirers, however, this is one of her most important works, a poetic achievement central to her canon. From John Ashbery's groundbreaking essay-review of Stanzas in 1957 to Richard Bridgman's 1970 publication, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, poets and critics have recognized the importance of this masterpiece.
Beyond Broken Pencils: A School Shooting Tale of Heartbreak and Healing
Julie C. Gilbert - 2018
If he carries through with the plan, his sister will die first. His ex will die next, and he will die last. In between, he’ll take out as many people as he can. Students. Security guards. Teachers. First responders. They are all fair game. Who will live, and who will die? How will those who live go on when their world is shattered by unthinkable tragedy? *** Contains scenes of graphic violence. Reader discretion advised.
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
Anna Moschovakis - 2011
Plato would have loved them."—Ann LauterbachIn a world where we find "everything helping itself / to everything else," Anna Moschovakis incorporates Craigslist ads, technobabble, twentieth-century ethics texts, scientific research, autobiographical detail, and historical anecdote to present an engaging lyric analysis of the way we live now. "It's your life," she tells the reader, "and we have come to celebrate it."
52 laws of love
Himanshu Goel - 2019
52 laws of love by Himanshu Goel (author of A Rational Boy in Love) is a journey of love in 52 poems through all its aspects, from the honeymoon, to the sacrifices, to the bitter end and forever after.
Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems
Christian Wiman - 2016
In his "daring and urgent" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks, "What is poetry's role when the world is burning?" Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems might be read as an answer to that question.From the taut forms of his first book to the darker, more jagged fluencies of his second, into the bold and pathbreaking poems of his last two collections, Hammer Is the Prayer bears the reckless, restless interrogations and the slashing lyric intensity that distinguish Wiman's verse. But it also reveals the dramatic and narrative abilities for which he has been widely praised--the junkyard man in "Five Houses Down" with his "wonder-cluttered porch" and "the eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars," or the tragicomic character in "Being Serious" who suffers "the world's idiocy / like a saint its pains."Hammer Is the Prayer brings together three decades of Wiman's acclaimed poetry. Selected by the author, these poems reveal the singular music and metaphysical urgency that have attracted so many readers to his work and firmly assert his place as one of the most essential poets of our time.
Healing Old Wounds With New Stitches
Meggie C. Royer - 2013
Healing Old Wounds With New Stitches is the second book of poetry by Meggie Royer, poet behind the blog "WritingsforWinter."This book is broken into two parts, the first about grief, loss, and pain, the second about recovery and survival.
Transfer Fat
Aase Berg - 2002
Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.
The Common Man
Maurice Manning - 2010
Playing off the book’s title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait—by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic—of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man’s accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning’s reputation as one of his generation’s most important and original voices.
Anatomy
Karina Vigil - 2020
This small collection of poems explores how time influences loving another, loving yourself and loving the life you own. This quick but fulfilling read, explores these topics in three sections: the head, the heart and the lungs.
Alive: New and Selected Poems
Elizabeth Willis - 2015
With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.
Isolato
Larissa Szporluk - 2000
This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.