Book picks similar to
Difficult Fruit by Lauren Alleyne


poetry
caribbean
the-read-the-world-project
north-america

Where a Nickel Costs a Dime


Willie Perdomo - 1996
    They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.

Postcolonial Love Poem


Natalie Díaz - 2020
    Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry


John Murillo - 2020
    A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets


Daniel Halpern - 1994
    No other version has so vividly expressed the horror, cruelty, beauty, and outrageous imaginative flight of Dante's original vision.

Prelude to Bruise


Saeed Jones - 2014
    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

Of Being Dispersed


Simone White - 2016
    African & African American Studies. "I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here. As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess. OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks." Eileen Myles "In Simone White's poetry the action is always multiple, palpable, sounding as thought, coming forward through this highly sensitized plane, sudden and hovering, exchanging centers, afflicted and added to by company. The continuous listening company demands company including imaginary self, receding boundaries, the horseman on the night's street, the live, the loved, the drunk, the words, the turnstile, the endless destructive projections people force and the rendering of that listening into irreducible depths of tone, wit, and perception constitute much of what makes OF BEING DISPERSED a masterful book. Buzzing word-love marking time beat by beat, being the ground inside and out, makes up the rest." Anselm Berrigan "Macaronic plenitude of language instantiates places and states of mind. If Edouard Glissant says that we write in the presence of all the world's languages, then we have in Simone White's OF BEING DISPERSED, an underground stream reaching the surface of the page in lines acrobatic and limber, fluent in code switch, mood shift and modes of inquiry. I read White's volume as a poetic lens on the specificities of the diaspora and the 'dispersed, ' written with baroque skepticism, feminist vision and attention to the complications of a Black yet to be storyed any/where." Erica Hunt"

Echoes in Death: Chapter 1


J.D. Robb - 2016
    Robb, is the perfect entry point into the compelling In Death police procedural series featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas.As NY Lt. Eve Dallas and her billionaire husband Roarke are driving home, a young woman—dazed, naked, and bloody—suddenly stumbles out in front of their car. Roarke slams on the brakes and Eve springs into action.Daphne Strazza is rushed to the ER, but it’s too late for her husband Dr. Anthony Strazza. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he now lies dead amid the wreckage of his obsessively organized town house, his three safes opened and emptied. Daphne would be a valuable witness, but in her terror and shock the only description of the perp she can offer is repeatedly calling him “the devil”...While it emerges that Dr. Strazza was cold, controlling, and widely disliked, this is one case where the evidence doesn’t point to the spouse. So Eve and her team must get started on the legwork, interviewing everyone from dinner-party guests to professional colleagues to caterers, in a desperate race to answer some crucial questions: What does the devil look like? And where will he show up next?

The History of Vegas


Jodi Angel - 2005
    From the first page of each of the edgy and unrelentingly intense stories in this debut collection, the teenaged characters are headed for big trouble. The adult world has mostly failed them, and they find themselves entering into highly charged situations where they make their own rules, with misguided understanding of the consequences. The stories burn hot and fast, providing searing insights into their world of sex, drugs, drinking, violence, and accidental grace, played out in small, tough towns. Written with raw directness and understanding that makes these nine stories impossible to forget, The History of Vegas announces an exciting, fresh talent with the impact of Mary Gaitskill, Mary Karr, and Jayne Anne Phillips.

Even This Page Is White


Vivek Shraya - 2016
    Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable.

Summer Lightning and Other Stories


Olive Senior - 1986
    Summer Lightning is her first collection of short stories. Her setting is rural Jamaica; her heroes are the naïve and the vulnerable, who bring to life with power and realism issues such as snobbery, ambition, jealousy, faith and love.Written in vivid, colourful detail, these rich compelling stories recreate with sensitivity and wit a whole range of emotions, from childhood hope to brooding melancholy. Each is told with an affectionate and poignant perception of you and I at our best and worst. Gently we are led, laughing, crying, but always enjoying.

The Best of Robert Service


Robert W. Service - 1907
    This new and revised edition of poems about the men and women of the North features the most loved ballads by Robert Service, and is illustrated with lively art by Marilen Van Nimwegen. While living in Whitehorse, Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee, and other well-known poems. He wrote and published into his mid-eighties. He was quoted as saying, I just go for a walk and come back with a poem in my pocket.

The Song of Hiawatha


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1855
    Once there, they've stayed to hear about the young brave with the magic moccasins, who talks with animals and uses his supernatural gifts to bring peace and enlightenment to his people. This 1855 masterpiece combines romance and idealism in an idyllic natural setting.

Unaccompanied


Javier Zamora - 2017
    These poems recall and are rooted in the experiences of a nine-year-old boy traveling alone for thousands of miles and confronting everywhere the realities of borderland politics, racism, and economic injustice. Calling into question the concept of the American Dream, Zamora reimagines home, fusing music and memory to address the quandaries that tear families apart and—if we’re lucky—inspire the building of lives anew.

Maya Angelou (Boxed Set)


Maya Angelou - 1979
    This set includes Singing And Swinging And Getting Merry, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou: Poems and Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now.

The Perseverance


Raymond Antrobus - 2018
    Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories.The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.