Book picks similar to
One Hand on the Wheel by Dan Bellm
poetry
grief
lgbt
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Madness
Sam Sax - 2017
These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet's personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax's innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
The Naked Mughals: Forbidden Tales of Harem and Butchery (Reviving Indian History Book 2)
Vashi Sharma - 2017
This book is an eye opener on Mughal history in India. Mughals have been glorified as great rulers in Indian history books despite being maniacs, incest-lovers, rapists and merciless invaders. The book is a compilation of all hidden facts. Straight from their authentic biographies. To make Indians realise, enough is enough. Do not glorify these filthy creatures in the name of preserving the secular fabric of India. Note: This is the latest edition of the book “Great Ruler of India” with different title and few additional chapters.
A Suffering Soul: Dark Love Poems (Dark Love Poetry Book 1)
Darren Heart - 2014
Containing a collection of poems by the author that, not only investigates the lighter side of love, but also dares to delve deeper, taking the reader on a journey into the darker aspects of love, such as indecision, rejection, fear, betrayal, loss and finally death. Inspired by his own love story, and subsequent bereavement, the author writes emotionally, and from the heart, often resulting in poems that bring a tear to the eye. For information on more chapbooks in Dark Love Poetry series, please visit the authors website located at www.darrenheart.com
City of a Hundred Fires
Richard Blanco - 1998
This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents—the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.
Smörgåsbord of Musings
Rathnakumar Raghunath - 2020
People living happy lives, some not-so-happy lives, people in love, hopeless romantics, people dealing with heartbreak, the ones who believe life is better with a bit of whimsy, this book, hopefully, has a little something that resonates with everybody, lets the reader find the silver lining when needed and discover the joie de vivre even when times are hard.
Let Her Go
M. Ocean - 2015
M. Ocean explores the depths of love deeply felt and violently lost. For those whose wounds are fresh and hearts still raw with ample emotion, Ocean portrays pain and suffering in apt and heart wrenching candour.
Doctors Orders (5 Book Bundle)
Preston Walker - 2018
Reese is a battered omega held tightly beneath the dominance of a psychotic alpha. When he becomes pregnant, terrified and penniless, he decides to take his chances on the street. Unfortunate circumstances land him in the hospital, where he lays eyes on an alpha worthy of the name. Connor has been a physician for longer than he’d like to admit. As many babies as he’s delivered, none of them have stolen his heart as much as Reese’s. Yet, while he loves the child like his own, he has to admit his eyes keep wandering to his patient. When Reese’s alpha hunts him down and threatens this budding family, Connor will have to do everything it takes to protect what’s rightfully his.Includes:Doctor's OrdersCome Rain or ShineBreeding RightsOmega for RentDrawn to You
Bathhouse Confessions 2: M/M Gay Erotica Bundle
Nathan Bay - 2019
Leave your hang-ups and inhibitions at the door because this is a place where anything goes.This sizzling boxed set includes three delicious tales set in California during the summer of 1955:“Fog City Temptation” (San Francisco)A mysterious soldier explores his forbidden passions with an adventurous young man.“Hollywood Heartthrob” (Los Angeles)A mild-mannered fella gets swept up in a whirlwind secret love affair with the hottest hunk in Tinseltown.“Deep Release” (Sacramento)A bearish British doctor with magic fingers unlocks the desires of an insatiable high school graduate.Each pulse-pounding tale of gay romance is just the right length for an exciting bedtime story. Grab a towel and join us in the steam room...
Pastoral
Carl Phillips - 2002
Trained in classical Greek and Latin, Phillips seems to excavate as he forms words into lines, breaking images into tiny parts of thought as he digs for meaning and accuracy. As part of this excavation, Pastoral explores what flesh, wanting, and belief are made of. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips has produced four collections of accomplished verse in the past few years. In each book, the influence of classical syntax and rhythm can be heard. And with each book, Phillips refines his poetic voice, combining the prayerlike and the erotic, and often elegantly swooping from a whisper to a scream in the space of a few stanzas.This time, the poems fall along a wide range of tones, from italicized commands like "Let me" and "Now" in the poem "Lay Me Down" to a hesitant question, or a deepening well of self-doubt. Phillips is always original, and he's always remembering, even when a poem is firmly written in present tense. He is hyperaware not only of the ancient poets, but also of history, especially the great destructions.In the ominously titled "The Kill," he remembers a familiar daily scene. The speaker analyzes his own love for another in clinical detail that suddenly veers into longing. The way these lines break adds to the sense of tragic fragment, of an ache: The last time I gave my body up, to you, I was minded briefly what it is made of, what yours is, that I'd forgotten, the flesh which always I hold in plenty no little sorrow for because -- oh, do but think on its predicament, and weep.In just four stanzas, Phillips moves from an image of both love and surrender to a consideration of temporality -- the bald fact that his lover is mortal. This thought of "its predicament" makes him weep, even though death is not a stated issue here.In "The Kill," the last poem in the volume, the speaker anticipates the need to remember. The second poem in the book referred to Pompeii, and the shadow of Pompeii is still resonant as the speaker describes his lover's body, still current and alive despite the title's warning.He remembers a body he has felt before, and probably will feel again -- judging by the present tense of "what yours is." And yet, the speaker here feels the need to freeze that body in time, to memorialize it. The next stanza explains this strong urge to hold on: We cleave most entirely to what most we fear losing. We fear loss because we understand the fact of it, its largeness, its utter indifference to whether we do, or don't, ignore it. The "largeness" of loss is what these poems are loath to accept, even as they seek to understand. Each poem tries to break loss down into questions, confessions, prayers, or simple expressions of doubt. While the poems fight against death and inevitable loss, they also seem to seek moral guidance to help with these losses.Nowhere is the search for answers and guidance more apparent than at the endings of these poems, which are frequently questions. Phillips is fond of abrupt, mysterious dashes as conclusions. In his quest for a moral compass, he also quotes from "Lamentations" and draws on familiar Biblical stories. The wanderings of Cain, for example, seem to appear in the backgrounds of poems where man seeks. What's more, the epigraph is from George Herbert, the great poet of faith and the war between faith and flesh. The sense of struggle between opposing ideas is something Phillips incorporates and modernizes into a contemporary parable of carnal love and constant questioning of that love. There's a frequent seesawing in the book, a back-and-forth on the big questions that permeates even the simplest narrative. For example, in "Favor," the second section of a five-part poem called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips sees a man in the distance: Even from a distance, I can tell: a man, clearly. Gods cast no shadow. The struggle between man and God, between flesh and faith, is hinted at in the first stanza. Man, for Phillips, is an instrument of struggle, a tortured wanderer. The poem continues: Also, that he tires, stops to rest, looks like sleeping, or could use some. How long he has been, coming, how long it takes, just to cross it, the lush measure that -- all summer -- has been these well-groomed, well-fed grounds, the lake unswum and gleaming, the light catching, losing the useless extravagancePhillips basically forms the scene of a man walking into a discussion of man's temporality, the fact that man tires. While what God makes -- "the lake unswum and gleaming" -- needs to make no effort to be beautiful, man exhausts himself just surviving. By the last two stanzas, the speaker concludes that the body must make bets with itself: Always, the body wagering -- up, through itself -- Give. What he wants, he shall have.In Phillips's work, man -- though mortal -- still has great power. Man can demand, man can inspire love, and man can pray. In the struggle between man and God, in that constant "wagering," man sometimes wins.&3151;Aviya Kushner
Say Uncle
Eric Shaw Quinn - 1994
Reily, a gay man living contentedly in South Carolina, never expects to find himself raising a child. But when his sister and her husband die in an accident, their will makes him guardian of their infant son.
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg - 1956
This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
What Runs Over
Kayleb Rae Candrilli - 2017
Unfurling and unrelenting in its delivery, Candrilli has painted “the mountain” in excruciating detail. They show readers a world of Borax cured bear hides and canned peaches, of urine-filled Gatorade bottles and the syringe and all the syringe may carry. They show a violent world and its many personas. What Runs Over, too, is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest. The miracle of What Runs Over is that Candrilli has lived to write it at all."When Roethke said 'energy is the soul of poetry,' he might have been anticipating a book like What Runs Over, which is so full of energy it practically vibrates in your hand. Here, Candrilli’s speaker sticks their tongue 'into the heads / of venus fly traps just to feel the bite,' then later, burns holy books in the backyard and rolls around in the ashes until they become 'a painted god.' This is the verve of an urgent new poetic voice announcing itself to the world. As Candrilli writes: 'This is what I look like / when I’m trying to save myself.'"-Kaveh Akbar