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Sight Map
Brian Teare - 2009
Teare provides us with poems that insist on the simultaneous physical embodiment of tactile pleasure—that which is found in the textures of thought and language—as well as the action of syntax. Partly informed by an ecological imagination that leads him back to Emerson and Thoreau, Teare's method and fragmented style are nevertheless up to the moment. Remarkable in its range, Sight Map serves at once as a cross-country travelogue, a pilgrim's gnostic progress, an improvised field guide, and a postmodern "pillowbook," recording the erotic conflation of lover and beloved, deity and doubter.
Bright Dead Things
Ada Limon - 2015
Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
The Wilderness: Poems
Sandra Lim - 2014
“In its stern and quiet way Sandra Lim’s The Wilderness is one of the most thrilling books of poetry I have read in many years” (Louise Glück).From “Aubade”From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduringand emptiness has its place.Then, to wake each day to the world’s unwaveringlimits, you have to think about passion differently, again.
The Scarlet Ibis: Poems
Susan Hahn - 2007
The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role. All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.
Actual Air
David Berman - 1999
His poems chart a course through his own highly original American dreamscape in language that is fresh, accessible, and remarkably precise. This debut collection has received extraordinary acclaim from readers and reviewers alike and is quickly becoming a cult classic. As Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate said, "These poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. . . . It's a book for everyone."
Constance
Jane Kenyon - 1993
Kenyon's fourth collection is built around two perfectly orchestrated poem sequences. In the first, the speaker contrasts memories of her baby carriage with other images from her childhood, such as her parents' toiling away at low-paying jobs. She also recalls the present-day life of her aging, increasingly dependent mother. Melancholia, the subject of the second sequence and several poems surrounding it, has been played to death in modern poetry, but still Kenyon offers new insights and gives even the most depressing poems an uplifting lilt in their final lines. In her hands a list of the latest medications becomes fit material for poetry: "The coated ones smell sweet or have / no smell; the powdery ones smell / like the chemistry lab at school / that made me hold my breath." She writes, in addition to illness, of sleep, insomnia and death. She interacts with the insects, birds and flowers in her New Hampshire landscape, relying on their fragility to teach her of her own. Kenyon describes afterlife, or "the Other Side," with the same precise, hard-edged imagery that fills her other poems." from Publisher's Weekly
A Treatise on Stars
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - 2020
These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems
Deborah Digges - 2010
Here are poems that bring to life her rural Missouri childhood in a family with ten children (“Oh what a wedding train / of vagabonds we were who fell asleep just where we lay”); the love between men and women as well as the devastation of widowhood (“love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance / for his unpacked suitcases, . . . / . . . / his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief”); and the moods of nature, which schooled her (“A tree will take you in, flush riot of needles light burst, the white pine / grown through sycamore”). Throughout, touching all subjects, either implicitly or explicitly, is the call to poetry itself.The final work from one of our finest poets, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a uniquely intimate collection, a sustaining pleasure that will stand to remind us of Digges’s gift in decades to come.
Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems
Jim Carroll - 1993
Carroll initially made his reputation as a poet, and has won acclaim and comparisons to everyone from Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara for his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery.This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll's Living at the Movies, which was published in 1973 when he was twenty-two, and The Book of Nods, released in 1986. Fear of Dreaming also includes pieces previously unpublished in book form, including "Curtis's Charm," a vignette set in New York City's Central Park about a man convinced he is a victim of black magic, and poetic tributes to Robert Mapplethorpe and Ted Berrigan."His poems' urgent, obsessive metaphors pose tensely against their cool, streetwise surface voice, charging them with an electricity that's at once disturbing, sexual, religious, and psychological."--Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
What Is Amazing
Heather Christle - 2012
The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.
The Last Shift: Poems
Philip Levine - 2016
The poems in this wonderful collection touch all of the events and places that meant the most to Philip Levine. There are lyrical poems about his family and childhood, the magic of nighttime and the power of dreaming; tough poems about the heavy shift work at Detroit's auto plants, the Nazis, and bosses of all kinds; telling poems about his heroes--jazz players, artists, and working people of every description, even children. Other poems celebrate places and things he loved: the gifts of winter, dawn, a wall in Naples, an English hilltop, Andalusia. And he makes peace with Detroit: "Slow learner that I am, it took me one night/to discover that rain in New York City/is just like rain in Detroit. It gets you wet." It is a peace that comes to full fruition in a moving goodbye to his home town in the final poem in the collection, "The Last Shift."
The Living Fire
Edward Hirsch - 2010
Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.
Grace Notes: Poems
Rita Dove - 1990
The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.
Revolution on Canvas, Volume 2: Poetry from the Indie Music Scene
Rich Balling - 2007
'Revolution on Canvas' presents another collection of poetry from some of the country's most popular indie-rock bands, including Deftones, Fall Out Boy, Armor For Sleep, and Say Anything.
Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems
Cate Marvin - 2007
The brokenness and loss of the fragmented queen—seeming to rise up through centuries—is their tutelary spirit.