Hello, the Roses


Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - 2013
    Her new collection of poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part contemplates the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly,deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization — a wild rose, a Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality “saturated with being” in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world.

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals


Patricia Lockwood - 2014
    The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell


Deborah Levy - 1990
    He, an accountant worn down by the day-to-day struggles of the nine to five, is dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. She attempts, with scornful wit, to shock him out of his commuter's habits and into an experience of ecstasy.Man Booker Prize shortlisted Deborah Levy whips up a storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this passionate work of dramatic poetry.Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her most recent novel, Swimming Home (2011 And Other Stories, UK publication, and 2012 Bloomsbury US publication), was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, while her most recent collection of short stories, Black Vodka: ten stories, was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and its title story "Black Vodka" shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award. An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell was first published in 1990 in the United Kingdom and appears now in a new edition, its first US edition.

Over the Anvil We Stretch


Anis Mojgani - 2008
    Mojgani's poems are the sound of the river and the stars burning above. He manages to capture the axe in the stump with blood still on the handle. Anis Mojgani has drawn a map of the country in the shape of his wild dreams. These are memories of a life, captured through the blue green filter of the bayou. Mojgani's latest poems are tinged with the sound of crickets spying on us in the darkness. They move forward honestly, brutally and sweetly. The reader will be led into briar patches as well as the moonlight just on the other side.

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation


Daisy Hay - 2010
    They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt’s botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances—as did their chaotic family arrangements, which often left the young women, despite their talents, facing the consequences of the men’s philosophies.In Young Romantics, Daisy Hay follows the group’s exploits, from its inception in Hunt’s prison cell in 1813 to its disintegration after Shelley’s premature death in 1822. It is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship, all of which were played out against a background of political turbulence and intense literary creativity.

Tennyson: Selected Poetry


Alfred Tennyson - 1985
    This edition of his selected poems includes classics like: - " The Lady of Shalott" - " Charge of the Light Brigade" - " Maud" - " Morte d'Arthur" - " Ulysses" - " The Lotus Eaters" Elegantly packaged with a ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library.

For the Confederate Dead


Kevin Young - 2007
    He opens with the beautiful “Elegy for Miss Brooks,” invoking Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, and who makes a perfect muse for the volume: “What the devil / are we without you?” he asks. “I tuck your voice, laced / tight, in these brown shoes.” In that spirit of intimate community, Young gives us a saucy ballad of Jim Crow, a poem about Lionel Hampton's last concert in Paris, an “African Elegy,” which addresses the tragic loss of a close friend in conjunction with the first anniversary of 9/11, and a series entitled “Americana,” in which we encounter a clutch of mythical southern towns, such as East Jesus (“The South knows ruin & likes it / thataway—the barns becoming / earth again, leaning in—”) and West Hell (“Sin, thy name is this / wait—this place— / a long ways from Here / to There”). For the Confederate Dead finds Young, more than ever before, in a poetic space that is at once public and personal. In the marvelous “Guernica,” Young’s account of a journey through Spain blends with the news of an American lynching, prompting him to ask, “Precious South, / must I save you, / or myself?” In this surprising book, the poet manages to do a bit of both, embracing the contradictions of our “Confederate” legacy and the troubled nation where that legacy still lingers.

Slouching Toward Nirvana


Charles Bukowski - 2005
    this is a short poem at the end of a long lifesitting here looking at you now then saying adios!

The Anatomy of Being


Shinji Moon - 2013
    Broken up into four chapters, she holds your hand and takes you inward with her, from skin to flesh, to flesh to bones, from bones to all that lies within. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, The Anatomy of Being marks a very distinct time in a young girl's life, and aches and aches to be heard and devoured. 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards Poetry Finalist

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry


Harold Bloom - 1973
    Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of criticism and post-structuralist literary theory. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotations, this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded - neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. A new introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past quarter of a century.

The Afflicted Girls


Nicole Cooley - 2004
    The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls, so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages--accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley's poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

Panenka


Ronan Hession - 2021
    Panenka has spent 25 years living with the disastrous mistakes of his past, which have made him an exile in his home town and cost him his dearest relationships. Now aged 50, Panenka begins to rebuild an improvised family life with his estranged daughter and her seven year old son.But at night, Panenka suffers crippling headaches that he calls his Iron Mask. Faced with losing everything, he meets Esther, a woman who has come to live in the town to escape her own disappointments. Together, they find resonance in each other’s experiences and learn new ways to let love into their broken lives.

The Infinity of Lists


Umberto Eco - 2009
    This infinity of lists is no coincidence: a culture prefers enclosed, stable forms when it is sure of its own identity, while when faced with a jumbled series of ill-defined phenomena, it starts making lists. The poetics of lists runs throughout the history of art and literature. We do not only see it at work in ancient bestiaries, the celestial hosts of angels or the naturalist collections of the 16th century. We also find it more obliquely from Homer to Joyce, from the treasures of Gothic cathedrals to the fantastic landscapes of Bosch and cabinets of curiosities, until we get to Andy Warhol and Arman in the 20th century. In this 5-colour illustrated edition, Umberto Eco reflects on how the idea of catalogues has changed over the centuries and how, from one period to another, it has expressed the spirit of the times. His essay is accompanied by a literary anthology and a wide selection of works of art illustrating and analysing the texts presented. This new illustrated essay is a companion volume to On Beauty and On Ugliness.

A Line Made by Walking


Sara Baume - 2017
    It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here-her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school-and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With "prose that makes sure we look and listen," Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.

Matters of Life & Death


Bernard MacLaverty - 2006
    It is the finest collection yet from a contemporary master of the form.Beginning with the sudden terror of a family caught up in shocking sectarian violence, and ending with the whiteout of an Iowa blizzard and the fear of losing your way very far from home, this collection is about bonds made and broken, secret and known. In the extraordinary story "Up the Coast," a landscape painter discovers a place that makes her, finally, feel whole, only to have that communion shattered by an arbitrary act of aggression that will resonate throughout her life.Written with effortless skill and empathy, these stories are hauntingly real. MacLaverty's perfect attention to every detail, every nuance of idiom and character, remakes the world for us here on the page.