Book picks similar to
The Glass Age by Cole Swensen
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Everything Else in the World: Poems
Stephen Dunn - 2006
In his fourteenth collection of poems, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn reveals his concerns, ranging from meditations on salvation and time to the difficulties and pleasures of loving in this "already brutal century." In language that Gerald Stern has called "unbearably fearless and beautiful," Dunn continues to probe the elusive in the lives we live.
The Daily Mirror
David Lehman - 2000
During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.
The Singing Knives (Poetry Series No 18)
Frank Stanford - 1979
THE SINGING KNIVES, originally published in 1971 by Broughton's Mill Mountain Press, is Frank Sanford's first collection of poetry. Reprinted by his own press, Lost Roads Publisher, after his death, THE SINGING KNIVES, debuts the work of a twenty-something year old boy way ahead of his time and in a state of unrest, capturing "poetry's more primal and mysterious possibilities"-David Clewell. "It is astonishing to me that I was not even aware of this superbly accomplished and moving poet. There is a great deal of pain in the poems, but it is a pain that makes sense, a tragic pain whose meaning rises from the way the poems are so firmly molded and formed from within"- James Wright.
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.
Science and Steepleflower: Poetry
Forrest Gander - 1998
With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science Steepleflower test this relationship with what Publisher's Weekly has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality", bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.
Bad Bad
Chelsey Minnis - 2007
. . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle Greenberg"Her poems take some getting used to."—Robert Strong"Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...—Cole Swensen
City Sticks
A.H. Sewell - 2015
It was a sample (and not even the correct file - it was an old rough draft that was saved under a new title), and Goodreads will not take it down. The Amazon link directs to the correct, and full, edition. "She is lost, but the world is too. It is a perfect circle.For life is, but a dream /// is not."- "Seeing Ghosts/A Perfect Circle" excerptA. H. SewellCopyright 2015
Ideal Cities
Erika Meitner - 2010
Good for poetry. Good for poetry lovers. Good for the rest of us, too.”— Nikki Giovanni Exploring themes of pregnancy, motherhood, ancestry, and life in the borderline slums of Washington, DC, the richly felt and adroit poetry of Erika Meitner’s Ideal Cities moves, mesmerizes, and delights. The work of an important emerging voice in contemporary American poetry—a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Prize as selected by Paul Guest—Ideal Cities gloriously perpetuates NPS’s long-standing tradition of promoting exceptional poetry from lesser-known poets.
Complete Minimal Poems
Aram Saroyan - 2007
Visual Poetry. Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram Saroyan's groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan's contribution, "Electric Poems," to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, "Short Poems," which hasn't appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Steve Reich, COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS confirms Aram Saroyan's place among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.
The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story
Rusty Morrison - 2008
Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with the linen texture of right silences. Rusty Morrison's THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book--Peter Gizzi.
For Love
Robert Creeley - 1962
He attended Harvard University where he published his first poems in magazines such as Harvard's Wake and Cid Corman's Origin. During the 1950s, after dropping out of Harvard, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was an editor of its innovative literary journal, the Black Mountain Review. He received his B.A. from Black Mountain College in 1955. Robert Creeley was one of the originators of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry, along with Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov. In 1962, he received his first widespread recognition with For Love: Poems 1950-1960 and he went on to teach at several universities across the country. In 1978 he was named David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, and presently he is their Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities. Creeley has received many awards for his work including the Levinson prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Robert Frost Medal, both from the Poetry Society of America, and The American Awards for Echoes. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987 and received a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship to serve as the Bicentennial chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, for 1988-89, and another Fulbright for the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1995. He served as New York State Poet from 1989-1991. In 1995 he was a winner of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. His most recent poetry books are Memory Gardens (1986), Windows (1990), Echoes (1994), So There: Poems 1976-83 (1998), and Life & Death (1998), all published by New Directions.
The French Exit
Elisa Gabbert - 2010
By turns moving and witty, sharp-eyed and impressionistic, Gabbert writes with technical sophistication and keen intelligence. This is a terrific book"--Kevin Prufer.
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Catherine Barnett - 2004
This series of elegies records the transit of grief, observing with an unflinching eye how a singular traumatic event can permanently alter our understanding of time, danger, the material world and family. Marked by clarity and restraint, these lyric poems narrate a suspenseful, wrenching story that explores the depths and limits of empathy.“Living Room Altar”Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean,except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt,except for her body, which once held their bodies,my sister wants everything back now—If there were a god who could out of empty shellscarried by waves to shoremake amends—If the ocean saved in a jarcould keep from turning to salt—She’s hearing things:bird calling to bird,cat outside the door,thorn of the blackberry against the trellis."These heart-breaking poems of an all-too-human life stay as absolute as the determined craft which made them. There is finally neither irony nor simple despair in what they record. Rather, it is the far deeper response of witness, of recognizing what must be acknowledged and of having the courage and the care to say so." —Robert Creeley
Muscular Music
Terrance Hayes - 1999
One cannot categorize these poems simply as confessional, narrative, or lyrical. They are all these things at once. They move beyond usual explorations of childhood or family to blend themes and influences that range from Neruda to Coltrane, Fat Albert to Orpheus, John Shaft to Gershwin. This book gives us an almost Whitmanesque account of an America, and an African American, replete with grace and imperfection. Moreover, it gives us a voice that does not sacrifice truth for music or music for accessibility. At the end of a poem that includes Bill Strayhorn, Andrew Carnegie, and Dante, Hayes says, "I know one of the rings of hell is reserved for men who refuse to weep. So I let it come. And it does not move from me." These lines reflect what is always at the core of Hayes's poetry: a faithfulness, not to traditional forms or themes, but to heart and honesty. It is a core bounded by and cradled by a passion for the music in all things.