Book picks similar to
Human Nature by Alice Anderson
poetry
poetry-essays-nonfiction
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Invisible Bride
Tony Tost - 2004
Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost's point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes, And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself), Surreal and surprising, Invisible Bride showcases the prose artistry of a new American talent.
A Brave and Startling Truth
Maya Angelou - 1995
First read by Maya Angelou at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, this wise and moving poem will inspire readers with its memorable message of hope for humanity.
Blood, Tin, Straw
Sharon Olds - 1999
These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with unexpected wordplay, sprung rhythms, and the disquieting revelations of ordinary life. Writing at the peak of her powers, this greatly admired poet gives us her finest collection.From the Hardcover edition.
The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Jenny Boully - 2007
What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo BangA book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection.Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay and [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.
Phantom Noise
Brian Turner - 2010
These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.
The Pedestrians
Rachel Zucker - 2014
Fables, written in prose form, shows the reader different settings (mountains, ocean, Paris) of Zucker's travels and meditations on place. The Pedestrians brings us back to her native New York and the daily frustrations of a woman torn by obligations.That Great DiasporaI'll never leave New York & when I doI too will be unbodied—what? youimagine I might transmogrify? I'm fromnowhere which means here & so wade outinto the briny dream of elsewheres likea released dybbyk but can't standthe soulessness now everyone who evermade sense to me has died & everyone I lovegrows from my body like limbs on a rootless treeRachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife, The Last Clear Narrative, Eating in the Underworld, and Annunciation.
Leaving Saturn
Major Jackson - 2002
Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community. Jackson also honors artists who have served as models of resistance and maintained their own faith in the belief of the imagination to alter lives. The title poem, a dramatic monologue in the voice of the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, details such a humane program and serves as an admirable tribute to the tradition of African American art. Throughout, Jackson unflinchingly portrays our most devastated landscapes, yet with a vividness and compassion that expose the depth of his imaginative powers.
Felt: Poems
Alice Fulton - 2001
Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of "feel." This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, and loneliness—as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named. Reticent and passionate, elliptical yet available, Fulton's poems consider flaws and failure, touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter's closeness to the canvas, the human kinship with animals, the fan's nearness to the star. Privacy, the opening and closing of doors, is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude-the meanings and feelings of virginity, the single-mindedness of fetishism, the tragedy of suicide. Rather than accept the world as given, Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge, in which the surprises of enlightenment can be cruel as well as kind. Felt, a deeply imagined work, at once visceral and cerebral, illuminates the possibilities of twenty-first century poetry.
Neck Deep and Other Predicaments: Essays
Ander Monson - 2007
He reflects on his outsider experience at an exclusive Detroit-area boarding school in the form of a criminal history and invents a new form as he meditates on snow.Outline toward a theory of the mine versus the mind and the Harvard outline --I have been thinking about snow --Cranbrook Schools : adventures in bourgeois topologies --Index for X and the origin of fires --Fragments : on dentistry --Subject to wave action : a there and a back (with orchestral accompaniment) --The long crush --Failure : a meditation, another iteration (with interruptions) --After form and formlessness : bodies, boats, and bathing --The big and sometimes colored foam : four annotated car washes --Afterword: Elegy for telegram and Starflight
Flies
Michael Dickman - 2011
Michael Dickman's poems bring us back to the wonder and violence of childhood, and the desire to connect with a power greater than ourselves.What you want to rememberof the earthand what you end uprememberingare often twodifferent thingsMichael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His first book of poems, The End of the West, appeared in 2009 and became the best-selling debut in the history of Copper Canyon Press. His poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, and he teaches poetry at Princeton University.
The Redshifting Web: New & Selected Poems
Arthur Sze - 1998
A comprehensive collection by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today.
Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway ... and More
Russell Simmons - 2003
Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.
Apocalyptic Swing
Gabrielle Calvocoressi - 2009
Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America—its lore, disappointments, and promise.
The Universe of Us
Lang Leav - 2016
Lang Leav presents a completely new collection of poetry with a celestial theme in The Universe of Us.Planets, stars, and constellations feature prominently in this beautiful, original poetry collection from Lang Leav. Inspired by the wonders of the universe, the best-selling poetess writes about love and loss, hope and hurt, being lost and found. Lang's poetry encompasses the breadth of emotions we all experience and evokes universal feelings with her skillfully crafted words.