Book picks similar to
We Can't Read This by Meg Day


poetry
chapbooks
literary
not-in-any-catalogue

Anchors & Vacancies


Kat Savage - 2016
    It's all the things we all hold onto, all the things we let anchor onto us, and all the things that leave us vacant.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love


Keith S. Wilson - 2019
    There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color


Christopher Soto - 2018
    Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sanchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew and Other Poems


Robert W. Service - 1980
    Includes "The Spell of the Yukon," "The Heart of the Sourdough," "While the Bannock Bakes," and "The Squaw Man."

Unmarked Treasure: Poems


Cyril Wong - 2004
    The poet wonders at his own existence and struggles between actual living and the desire to die."Cyril Wong continues to explore the nuances of relationships, in language that is lyrical, beautifully crafted, and erotically charged. There are several fine love poems that reach out to embrace a common humanity. Wong swims into the undercurrents of family tensions, hidden desires, and the meaning of a self... as well as questioning our understanding of both life and death."- Rebecca Edwards, author of Scar Country and Holiday Coast Medusa"Reading Cyril Wong is always to encounter risk, the painful suturing of art and life, trials of faith and baptisms of fire. I have only the deepest respect for someone who has razed the walls between the private and the public, and in doing so, carved more space for all of us."- Alfian Sa'at, author of One Fierce Hour and A History of Amnesia

All of it Singing: New and Selected Poems


Linda Gregg - 2008
     Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering,           just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present.                                                           —from “Arriving” Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

To the Man I Loved Too Much


Gabrielle G. - 2021
    depicts different love stories from the initial spark to the last heartbreak and writes in verses the heartache we've all been through. A poetry book to make your heart smile and weep at the same time.

Smoke Signals (burn this)


Ashley Dun - 2016
    But they’re real, they’re honest, and hopefully they’ll make you feel a little less alone." -Ashley Dun

Drunk by Noon


Jennifer L. Knox - 2007
    (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.

Never


Jorie Graham - 2002
    One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

Mappings


Vikram Seth - 1980
    More immediate if less polished than his later work, these poems enchant and impress with their classical learning, wit, perceptiveness and lyricism—all facets of Vikram Seth's now celebrated poetic achievement.

Smith Blue


Camille T. Dungy - 2011
    Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature. From a myriad of lenses, these poems examine the human capability for perseverance in the wake of heartbreak; the loss of beloved heroes and landscapes; and our determination in the face of everyday struggles. Dungy explores the dual nature of our presence on the planet, juxtaposing the devastation caused by human habitation with our own vulnerability to the capricious whims of our environment. In doing so, she reveals with fury and tenderness the countless ways in which we both create and are victims of catastrophe.This searing collection delves into the most intimate transformations wrought by our ever-shifting personal, cultural, and physical terrains, each fraught with both disillusionment and hope. In the end, Dungy demonstrates how we are all intertwined, regardless of race or species, living and loving as best we are able in the shadows of both man-made and natural follies. Flight It is the day after the leaves, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand pendulums, clock trees, and squirrels, fat in their winter fur, chuckle hours, chortle days.  It is the time for the parting of our ways.   You slid into the summer of my sleeping, crept into my lonely hours, ate the music of my dreams. You filled yourself with the treated sweet I offered, then shut your rolling eyes and stole my sleep.   Came morning and me awake.  Came morning. Awake, I walked twelve miles to the six-gun shop. On the way there I saw a bird-of-prayer all furled up by the river. I called to it.  It would not unfold.  On the way home I killed it.   It is the time of the waking cold, when buckeyes, like a thousand thousand metronomes, tock time, and you, fat on my summer sleep, titter toward me, walk away.  It is the time for the parting of our days.

Banana Palace


Dana Levin - 2016
    Observing the crisis of human appetite through the lenses of psychology and science fiction, she's disquieted at a world "ruled by a bi-polar father-god, unconscious, suicidal."The personal meets the collective in these poems: insane rants transform into contemporary oracular speech; a child who once hoarded candy grows into an adult who consumes a planet. Mutation, social media, eco-collapse, a dream of a survivable End Times: no less than the future of the body is at stake, bodies corporeal and political, ecological and spiritual. Was that the soul, wishingwe would invent the bodyout of existence,so many of us nowenthralled by doom...Dana Levin has published three books of poetry, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon), and her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence.

Ordinary Sun


Matthew Henriksen - 2011
    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

Selected Poems


James Schuyler - 1988
    One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.