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Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners
John Wieners - 2015
The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise LevertovSupplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.
Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry
Gary Mex Glazner - 2000
This groundbreaking anthology documents 10 years of poetry slams, with 100 poems from national slam champions and a dozen essays on how to run a slam, winning strategies, tips for memorizing poems, and more.
Gut Symmetries
Jeanette Winterson - 1997
Jonathan Lethem mined similar territory earlier this year in his delightful book, As She Climbed Across the Table, and now Winterson enters the lists with not one, but two physicists populating the pages of her equally wonderful book, Gut Symmetries. If you think about it, physics does make a good metaphor for love, encompassing as it does the principles of attraction, the exchange of energy, and unification. At the center of this meditation on "the intelligence of the universe" and "the stupidity of humankind" are Jove, a married physicist; Alice, a single physicist who becomes his mistress; and Stella, Jove's wife and later, Alice's lover. They meet on the QE2 and from there the three participants in the story take turns telling their versions of it. Gut Symmetries is a collage of memories, snippets of scientific theory, meditations on abstract concepts like truth, and the events surrounding Jove, Alice, and Stella's affair. This is a book that demands your attention, jumping as it does from one seemingly tangential topic to another; but whereas physics still seeks a grand unification theory (GUT) to explain how everything in the universe fits together, Winterson actually finds one of her own in this satisfyingly complete fictional world.
For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey
Richard Blanco - 2013
In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges behind the creation of the inaugural poem, “One Today,” as well as two other poems commissioned for the occasion (“Mother Country” and “What We Know of Country”), published here for the first time ever, alongside translations of all three of those poems into his native Spanish. Finally, Blanco reflects on his life-changing role as a public voice since the inauguration, his spiritual embrace of Americans everywhere, and his vision for poetry’s new role in our nation’s consciousness. Like the inaugural poem itself, For All of Us, One Today speaks to what makes this country and its people great, marking a historic moment of hope and promise in our evolving American landscape.
Collected Poems: 1974-2004
Rita Dove - 2016
poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).
The Smell of Good Mud
Lauren Zúñiga - 2012
Lauren Zuniga has made a name for herself for fearlessly confronting legislators and being an ambassador for the Heartland. This collection is the underbelly. No emotion is spared. No image is lost. It is a field guide to blisters and curtsies. It is a chronicle of women/children/animals coming together in a house named Clementine.
The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen - 1918
This is the definitive single-volume edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems, whose death in battle a few days before the Armistice was the most disastrous loss to English letters since Keats. Containing the texts of all the finished poems of Owen’s maturity and twelve important fragments and with extensive notes, it derives from Jon Stallworthy’s monumental edition of The Complete Poems and Fragments and is aimed at the student and general reader alike. ‘Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted or such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.’ Guardian
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.
Muted
Tami Charles - 2021
Get seen. Be Heard.For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown.So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean "Mercury" Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights -- plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the lies the girls have to tell are all worth it.Until they're not.Denver begins to realize that she's trapped in Merc's world, struggling to hold on to her own voice. As the dream turns into a nightmare, she must make a choice: lose her big break, or get broken.Inspired by true events, Muted is a fearless exploration of the dark side of the music industry, the business of exploitation, how a girl's dreams can be used against her -- and what it takes to fight back.
The Compleat Purge
Trisha Low - 2013
Poetry. Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Trisha Low is just another feminist, confessional writer trying to find a good way to deal with all her literary dads. She siphons the remix culture of social media into the binge and purge cycle of an engrossing read, with the emphasis on gross. She reads the diaries of teenage girls, their blog comments and love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself. She once surveyed the reactions of Catholic fathers to scripted confessionals she made regarding rough sex with men, secretly recorded the conversations, and transcribed the tapes. The results were anthologized by a major university press. Her first book, THE COMPLEAT PURGE, consists of the last will testament of one Trisha Low, who seems to commit suicide annually; the legal documents accumulate into a coming of age story. It goes on to chronicle the sexual fantasies of indie rock fangirls, who may or may not be exorcising the effects of abuse through their blithe avatars (the guy from The Strokes, etc.). Then Trisha Low finds herself trapped in an 18th century romance novel in the most punishing way, but for whom--we're not really sure. "How is Poetry complicit in the urge to falsely 'heal' societal wounds into the silent fixity of It Gets Better? What better place to look than the teen girl, whose cut wrist is an abject fuck-you; whose cute Band-Aid and its artificial 'healing' is really just your sentimental fantasy.
Death of Dreams
Shruti Agrawal
It is deep dive into emotions, empathy, acceptance, healing and insights into a different perspective towards life. The book embraces you in silence and stillness of thoughts. The book is an attempt to connect to souls, to reflect upon them, unbiased and together embrace a new beginning and a beautiful journey called life.
Ghost Machine
Ben Mirov - 2010
This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.
Sad Girl Poems
Christopher Soto - 2016
Their first chapbook Sad Girl Poems delves into their relationship with domestic violence, queer youth homelessness, & the suicide of a close friend. Of the chapbook, Eileen Myles wrote "Sad Girl Poems are revolutionary and sad and finely wrought on the fly… I keep reading, needing to be living in the world of them.” CAConrad wrote “You are an asshole if you read this book and are not destroyed and renewed and see through the poet Loma a way to redemption for us all.” Christopher Soto is originally from the Los Angeles area but now lives in Brooklyn.
Mosquito and Ant: Poems
Kimiko Hahn - 1999
Here in this exciting and totally original book of poems the narrator corresponds with L. about her hidden passions, her relationship with her husband and adolescent daughters, lost loves, and erotic fantasies. Kimiko Hahn's collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful. Borrowing from both Japanese and Chinese traditions, Hahn offers us an authentic and complex narrator struggling with the sorrows and pleasures of being a woman against the backdrop of her Japanese-American roots.
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night
Morgan Parker - 2015
Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing on what it means to be alive today when our phones autocorrect our texts and we’ve given into a kind of living that prioritizes work, money, and power over justice, equality, and happiness.