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Selected Poems by Rita Dove


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Collected Poems


Philip Larkin - 1988
    Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984.This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

Soul on Ice


Eldridge Cleaver - 1968
    Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.

Collected Poems, 1951-1971


A.R. Ammons - 1972
    Author Biography: A. R. Ammons has been awarded the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

A Cool Million


Nathanael West - 1934
    Like many an Alger, Lemuel Pitkin leaves his home on the farm to seek his fortune in the Big City. By the time he is through, he has been robbed, bilked, thrown in jail, has lost his teeth, his eye, a leg, his scalp, and has witnessed a remarkable number of rapes and political riots. Others in the cast: an ex-president of the United States (just released from jail); Lem's childhood sweetheart (now working in a Mott Street bordello); an oil-rich Indian; a Western desperado; and assorted agents and thugs of the Communists, Fascists and International Bankers. Through the story of Lemuel Pitkin, the four-square, All-American hero, and his sad fate at the hands of rabble-rousers and charlatans, West etched a classic parable of America in the chaotic Thirties.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self


Danielle Evans - 2010
    In each of her stories, Danielle Evans explores the non-white American experience with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in their emotional immediacy, based in a world where inequality is a reality, but the insecurities of young adulthood and tensions within family are often the more complicating factors. One of the most lauded debuts of the year, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self announces a major new talent in Danielle Evans.

A Jest of God


Margaret Laurence - 1966
    Through her summer affair with Nick Kazlik, a schoolmate from earlier years, she learns at last to reach out to another person and to make herself vulnerable.A Jest of God won the Governor General’s Award for 1966 and was released as the successful film, Rachel, Rachel. The novel stands as a poignant and singularly enduring work by one of the world’s most distinguished authors.

The Living is Easy


Dorothy West - 1948
    "The Living Is Easy" is delightfully wry and ironic humor--even bitchiness--of the novel coexists with a challenging moral and social complexity. "A powerful work."--"Essence" "Dorothy West is a brisk storyteller with an eye for ironic detail...a deft stylist and writer of social satire."--"Ms." "Long beloved for its wry and ironic humor, this novel continues to delight and challenge readers."--"Feminist Bookstore News" * Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs * Suggested for course use in: African-American studies20th-century U.S. literature

The Selected Poetry


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1991
    Vincent Millay defined a generation with her passionate lyrics and intoxicating voice of liberation. Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, this Modern Library Paperback Classics collection captures the poet’s unique spirit in works like Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from This-tles, and Second April, as well as in “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. As Milford writes in her Introduction, “These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millay’s reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page.”

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories


Sandra Cisneros - 1991
    A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

Felon: Poems


Reginald Dwayne Betts - 2019
    Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

Playmaker


Thomas Keneally - 1987
    Advertising in New York Review of Books and Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Oreo


Fran Ross - 1974
    It is as fresh and outrageous today as when it was first published in 1974.Born of a Jewish father and black mother, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical group. Soon after puberty Oreo heads for New York to search for her father, but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes. Oreo's mission turns into a wickedly humorous picaresque quest, reminiscent of the ancient Greek myth of Theseus. This is an ambitious and playful narrative that challenges not only the accepted notions of race, ethnicity, and identity, but also those of the novelistic form itself.

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral


Jessie Redmon Fauset - 1929
    After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don't fade with the color of one's skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door


Sam Greenlee - 1969
    This book is both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 60s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.

Robinson: Selected Poems


Edwin Arlington Robinson - 1965
    At once dramatic and witty, his poems lay bare the loneliness and despair of life in genteel small towns ("Tilbury Down" and "The Mill"), the tyranny of love ("Eros Turrannos" and "The Unforgiven"), and unspoken, unnoticed suffering ("The Wandering Jew", and "Isaac and Archibald"). In addition, the fictional characters he created in "Reuben Bright", "Miniver Cheevy", "Richard Cory", and the historical figures he brought to life -- Lincoln in "The Master" and the great painter in "Rembrandt to Rembrandt" -- harbor demons and passions the world treats with indifference or cruelty. With an Introduction that sheds light on Robinson's influence on poets from Eliot and Pound to Frost and Berryman, this collection brings an unjustly neglected poet to new readers.