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All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems
Charles Bernstein - 2010
Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein's characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry's sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America's most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.
The Silence of Mind: 40 Haikus inspired by Zen practice
Jennifer Hu - 2013
40 Haiku in English inspired by the practice of Zen Buddhism and Zazen (seated meditation) in particular.I hope you enjoy!
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.
Selected Poems
Sharon Olds - 2005
This rich selection - made by the author - exhibits those qualities in poem after poem, reflecting, moreover, an exciting experimentation with rhythm and language and a movement toward an embrace beyond the personal. Subjects are revisited - the pain of childhood, adolescent sexual stirrings, the fulfilment of marriage, the wonder of children - but each re-casting penetrates ever more deeply, enriched by new perceptions and conceits. A powerful distillation of the best work from one of America's most gifted and widely read poets, drawn from her seven published volumes, this is a testament to a remarkable writer's depth, range and continuing development.
The New Sentence
Ron Silliman - 1987
Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.
Other Kinds
Dylan Nice - 2012
They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.
Last Call in the City of Bridges
Salvatore Pane - 2012
Change is in the air and hope is running high. And for twenty-five-year-old, self-proclaimed cool man Michael Bishop, so is the alcohol and the bluster. Working a dead-end job proofing subtitles on third-rate videos, Michael has kept his future at bay through a stream of boozy nights or by blowing time in front of his Nintendo. That is, until he meets Ivy Chase, the smart, pretty pastor’s daughter whose innocent charm takes his breath away. But Ivy turns out to be much more than Michael bargained for, and in a moment that surprises even him, he makes the decision of his life.Smart, funny, poignant, and very, very timely, Last Call in the City of Bridges is a Bright Lights, Big City for the new millennium. With its memorable characters and unforgettable scenes, this insightful look into twenty-first-century America is a book you won’t want to put down.“Like the comic book heroes he obsesses over, Michael Bishop has an origin story, the story of the first wound that makes his powers necessary. In Last Call in the City of Bridges, Michael at last faces into that tragedy, resurfacing suddenly at the mid-point of his twenties, those years of snark and expectation spent proofreading DVD subtitles, drinking literature-themed cocktails, and pining over preacher’s daughters and college crushes. In this witty and charming debut, Salvatore Pane reminds us that while you can’t retcon your past, you can perhaps learn to live up to its responsibilities, by using your powers not necessarily to save the ones you love from loss, but to care for those left behind in its wake.”–Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby“Quite obviously, Salvatore Pane’s mind has been dunked in video games, social media, comic books, the WebNet, and everything else our august literary authorities believe promote illiteracy. I’d like to hand the authorities Pane’s novel–a funny, moving, melancholy, sad, and immensely literate book about what being young and confused feels like these days–and tell them, ‘See? Things are going to be fine!’”-Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives and Magic Hours“Last Call in the City of Bridges is Goodbye, Columbus 2.0, a poignant novel about looking for something real in a plastic world where Irony is Everything. This generational anthem is ultimately, despite all the 21st century detritus, an old-fashioned page turner, full of old verities and truths of the heart. Salvatore Pane’s voice is both new and necessary, one I know I’ll be reading for years to come.”–Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter and Comeback Season“Salvatore Pane is the acknowledged Hipster Prince of Pittsburgh, PA, which is the acknowledged Paris of Middle America. If his publishers had taken my advice they would have titled his groundbreaking first novel: A Hipster’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Book of Laughter and Longing. His very humorous novel is voice and character driven, a virtual page turner. Yet for all its humor, the novel has an underpinning of real humanity. I was laughing out loud while at the same time gritting my teeth in shared, profoundly recalled embarrassment.”-Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners and Last Mountain Dancer“Like his post po-mo Facebook generation, Michael Bishop, the manic narrator of Last Call in the City of Bridges, has reached the end of his irresponsible youth. Stuck and unsure, he looks back at those eight-bit Nintendo years with tender nostalgia while trying to feel his way forward. Like The Moviegoer, Salvatore Pane’s debut novel is a romantic ironist’s plea for authenticity in a fantastic age. It’s telling–and hilarious–that his hero’s model for male adulthood isn’t William Holden but Super Mario.”–Stewart O’Nan, author of The Odds: A Love Story and Snow Angels
Our Deathbeds Will Be Thirsty
Shane L. Koyczan - 2012
“The collection of poems speaks like a journey through each formative moment we’d forgotten we had: the monster under the bed and the intricate rules about how to overcome its powers; the ability to talk to girls or boys we liked; the fear of being bullied; our first experience with real anguish.” – Litlive.ca Please note: This is not a young adult title. Some works include language not suitable for some readers.
Hot Teen Slut
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz - 2010
Whether denouncing the corporate world ("To Whom It May Concern"), or lustily joining it ("New Millennial Bad Ass"), to celebrating love in the face of smut ("Let's Make Out!"), Aptowicz dramatizes the hopes, humor and ambitions of young poet first steps into a very surreal 'real world.' This expanded version nearly triples the length of the original with previously unpublished works, including "Sass Manifesto," which was used to win the 2004 National Forsenics Championship in Poetry Interpretation.
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
The Clerk's Tale: Poems
Spencer Reece - 2004
The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."
Illustrated Basho Haiku Poems (Little eBook Classics)
Gary Gauthier - 2011
The paintings are in brilliant color and each features the Japanese parasol.Matsuo Basho (1644 - 1694) was born Matsuo Kinsaku during the early Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Basho was recognized for his work in a poetic form that was a precursor to the haiku. Over the course of time, Basho became recognized as an unparalleled master of the haiku. His work is internationally renowned, and his poems are reproduced at many historical sites in Japan.
Young Americans
Jordan Castro - 2012
Then open up Young Americans, seems obvious what Jordan Castro is doing is revolutionary, he expressing emotions through poetry that have never been done before. The style, the way the subject matter is portrayed, even the meter, are new." - Noah Cicero (author of The Human War, The Insurgent, and more)“If you are a person who doesn’t really know what they are doing and you would like to read about another person who doesn’t really know what they are doing either, I recommend reading this poetry book. I enjoyed reading these poems. Or something.” - Chris Killen (author of The Bird Room)“I read these poems three times in one night, then put the duvet over my head and held my knees for a while. It’s good when something makes sense. I really really liked these poems.” - Ben Brooks (author of Grow Up)