Book picks similar to
Letters: Poems 1953-56 by Robert Duncan


poetry
poetry-poetics
ref-d-by-michael-mcclure
setaside

Secrets We Told The City: Poems


J.R. Rogue - 2017
    Rogue & Kat Savage.

Fanny Says


Nickole Brown - 2015
    With hair teased to Jesus, mile-long false eyelashes, and a white Cadillac Eldorado with atomic-red leather seats, Fanny is not your typical granny rocking in a chair. Instead, think of a character that looks a lot like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but darkened with a shadow of Flannery O’Connor. A cross-genre collection that reads like a novel, this book is both a collection of oral history and a lyrical and moving biography that wrestles with the complexities of the South, including poverty, racism, and domestic violence.

Interrogations at Noon: Poems


Dana Gioia - 2001
    But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.

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.

Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides


Stephen Dobyns - 1999
    "The Himalayas Within Him" finds Heart worrying about the sound of his own heartbeat, wondering why it doesn't "blare like a quartet of trombones" as it reflects his "ardent complexity." In "Goodbye to the Hands That Have Touched Him" Heart, after suffering many sleepless nights, decides "that love exists at the root of his problems. Without love his path would be as smooth as a plate of glass and he'd sleep like a kitten." Dividing the Heart poems is the long "Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate, " a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people feeling similarly. Throughout Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides Dobyns has painstakingly sculpted straight-forward language into a distinct sound, creating an unforgettable collection of poems that offers readers unexpected revelations about the complexities of the heart.

The Words of a Madman


Caitlin Kelly - 2019
    

The Darwin Effect


Mark Lukens - 2016
    They are all suffering from short-term memory loss and they can't remember why or how they got on this ship. The onboard computer (MAC) tells them that it was programmed to wake them up early. They believe MAC woke them up by mistake. They can't re-enter suspended animation, there's only enough food for a few months, and they are too far away to return to Earth ... but even if they could return, MAC tells them that the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war. They realize that they are all going to die on this ship.Cromartie, the unelected leader of their group, tries his best to keep the others calm, but soon they are at each other's throats. After one of them is found murdered, Cromartie and Sanders form an alliance. Cromartie tells Sanders that pieces of his memories are beginning to come back to him in his dreams; he believes he's seeing clues to their survival.But after the next murder, Cromartie and Sanders must work fast to find the mind-blowing key to their survival and figure out which one of them is the killer before it's too late.

How to Move to Canada: A Discontented American's Guide to Canadian Relocation


André Du Broc - 2016
    If you or someone you know is discontented, distressed, or downright disturbed, maybe the Great White North is right for you, eh. But how much do you really know about Canada? Can you do a job that Canada needs (do you play hockey, drill for oil, or make poutine?)? Can you identify the best Canadian province for your lifestyle (lots of tundra or just some tundra?)? Can you master the proper pronunciation of "sorry"? What strange wizardry is the Canadian government? Is maple syrup acceptable substitution for currency? At long last, How to Move to Canada can help make your vague threat into a cold Canadian reality. This book is also full of activities such as: Color the flag of your new homeland Match the strange Canuck dialect with their local definitions And more! PLEASE NOTE: This is a humor book. It won't really help you emigrate. Rather, it's a subversive mix of real information on the Great White North plus a hilarious look at all the reasons why you won't like it there any better — and why they probably won't have you anyway.

Boone's Crew: A Mafia Romance Box Set


Sofia Westlake - 2019
    Not just any man, but a naked man with severe injuries all over her body. She should have driven on, should have left him there. But how could she leave a man to die that way? She took him home, aware that it could be the biggest mistake she’d ever made. She was already on the run, already trying to live as much off the grid as possible. What was she going to do with an injured man? What if he died in her bed? What would she do then? Teaching Lincoln Janet Spence—Summer—is the daughter of the local district attorney who plays at being a thief, doing all she can to humiliate her mother. That is until she gets caught by a local football hero who kidnaps her and plans a dark sort of revenge. Just her luck that Lincoln happens to choose that day to break into the football star’s house and recover items that will just pay off his gambling debts to the Gabbana family. Lincoln shows no interest in the tied up girl at first, but when he learns who she really is, how could he resist collecting this bit of leverage against a district attorney who ran on the campaign promise that she would rid Tampa of Lincoln and his faction of criminals? Cason's Girl Cason Durst was once carefree and popular, the kind of college kid who thinks he knows everything. And then he was arrested and met Lincoln Steele. Lincoln saved him, fixed his problems, and offered him a job. Now Cason keeps to himself, learning all he can from the men who formed Boone’s crew. He’s learned that making friends, falling in love, all those things he once took for granted, are dangerous to him now. He’s learned to keep to himself. In fact, he’s become kind of awkward. Shy, even. Therefore, he’s the last one anyone could have expected Lincoln to send out on a mission to romance a pretty girl. Let It Raine Kara Tripp walks into Jett’s office one afternoon, begging him to forgive the debt of her lover, Harry. She’s willing to do anything, a fact that’s underscored when she begins to undress right there in his office. Jett has had a lot of offers over the years, and he’s never had the patience for it. But when he hears that Kara just happens to be a therapist who works with autistic children, he can’t pass up the opportunity to see if her skills can help improve Raine’s behavior. Jett and Kara make a deal in which she goes to work for him and Raine for six months, and he will forgive Harry’s debt. And it works, for four months, it works perfectly. But then a mole pops up in Boone’s Crew, and Jett finds himself questioning everything, and everyone, around him. Boone's End Titus betrayed his crew. In his world, betrayal was a crime punishable by death. He has two choices: embrace the very enemy that threatens to rip his world apart, or turn himself in to the very men who would like nothing more than to put a bullet in his brain. It’s not a simple choice. Titus has to decide where his loyalties really lay, and figure out who he can trust before it’s too late and an innocent pays for his mistakes. Jude Volz lost her brother to violence, and her father went to jail when she needed him the most. Determined to make someone pay, she trusted the wrong man, and now she’s caught up in something she can’t control. Locked in a car with a traitor, she has no choice but to trust Titus, to open up to him, and hope that together they can find a way out of an impossible situation. But now they’re running not just from his crew, but from hers as well.

3 Summers


Lisa Robertson - 2016
    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

Local Visitations


Stephen Dunn - 2003
    Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of his all-too-human hero, as well as the abrasions of ambivalence and choice, finally concluding that "here / and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible / with struggle or luck."In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevsky in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" (New York Times Book Review).

Raptus


Joanna Klink - 2010
    The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.

The Salt Ecstasies


James L. White - 1981
    White's The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned.The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

ShallCross


C.D. Wright - 2016
    Wright pushed the bounds of imagination as she explored desire, loss and physical sensation. Her posthumously published book, ShallCross features seven poem sequences that show her tremendous range in style and approach. As she considers, among other topics, some dark intuitions about human nature, she also nudges readers to question who is telling the story and where one’s thought can lead."—The Washington Post"Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything."—Publishers Weekly"Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."—New York Times Book Review"C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."—The Gettysburg ReviewIn a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.From "Obscurity and Elegance":Whether or not the park was safeshe was going in. A study concluded, for a parkto be successful there had to be women.The man next to the monument must have brokenaway from her. Perhaps yearsbefore. That the bond had been carnal is obvious.He said he was just out clearing his head…C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

A Handful of Stars


Ruby Dhal - 2018
    The book teaches that a person's softness is their biggest strength and that having a big heart is not always a bad thing and that a glimmer of light can be found in the darkest places.A Handful of Stars is raw and unapologetic, soft and kind, reflective and inspirational all at the same time. Some of Ruby's most loved poems are shared within the pages of this book, in hope that they will have the same effect on readers the second time as they did the first.