Book picks similar to
Presences: A Text for Marisol by Robert Creeley


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this is how i knew


Kiana Azizian - 2018
    Everything you need to hear, but already know.

How to Heal the Hurt by Hating


Anita Liberty - 1998
    . .so I could push you out of my loftbed while you were sleeping."Satirical and sharp, downtown New York City performance artist Anita Liberty reinvents self-help as she skewers her ex-boyfriend in this hilarious, hip, and audaciously candid collection of advice, poems, and diary entries. "I thought you were a gifted and tortured artist. I was wrong.About the gifted part.Oh.And the artist part."From romantic bliss to brutal breakup, from heartache to healing, this fierce, funny, and ultimately liberating homage to being "dumped" rips off the stiff upper lip in favor of a red-hot therapy of wit, wisdom, rage, and redemption. And now, a few words from Anita Liberty . . ."COMPROMISE--Lowering my standards.So you can meet them.""You're a bad habit.I want to kick you.Hard."Inclues free postcards to send to that special someone!

Smokes and Whiskey


Tejaswini Divya Naik - 2018
    I hope that this book makes everyone feel what I felt while writing it, and that love is a universal thing, and my story is not unique. And I hope that this makes them see that there is a beyond and that they can come out happy and clean. And, that this makes them braver than they already are, and gives them that little extra push and strength that they probably need

Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered


Catherine Bowman - 2003
    Introduced by “poetry DJ” Catherine Bowman, these popular short segments allowed listeners to experience poetry as a kind of verbal music, recalling its roots as a spoken art form. Word of Mouth, edited by Bowman, brings together the poems that have been featured on NPR, providing a window onto the dynamic contemporary poetry scene. A child playing with flashes of sunlight in the aisle of an airplane; a woman describing tropical fruit to someone in a faraway country; a man building a deck with his dead father’s hammer; the musings of a Barbie doll participating in a 12-step program: these poems powerfully and lyrically transform the stuff of every day life. A celebration of the poetic voice that includes 33 acclaimed writers, this vibrant anthology proves beyond any doubt that poetry is far more than just words on paper.Quincy Troupe • Czeslaw Milosz • Campbell McGrath • C.D. Wright • Jack Gilbert • Heather McHugh • David Lehman • Wang Ping • Joseph Brodsky • Paul Beatty • Lorna Dee Cervantes • Paul Muldoon • Lucille Clifton • Naomi Shihab Nye • Richard Blanco • Albert Goldbarth • Carrie Allen McCray • Belle Waring • Russell Edson • Kevin Young • Nuali Di Dhomhnaill • Charles Harper Webb • Denise Duhamel • Yusef Komunyakaa • Hal Sirowitz • Lucia Perillo • Amy Gerstler • Maura Stanton • Marilyn Chin • Philip Booth • Jane Cooper • Diane DiPrima • Elizabeth Spires

Rain on the River: Selected Poems and Short Prose


Jim Dodge - 2002
    After eighteen years of publishing anonymously and reading only to local crowds in the Pacific Northwest, he began to issue occasional limited-edition letterpress chapbooks with a small press, as well as occasional broadsides and, since 1987, a winter solstice poem or story, most given as gifts to friends. Rain on the River contains work collected here for the first time, as well as three dozen previously unpublished poems. Dodge's poems and short prose offer the same pleasures as his fiction -- a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel, all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace. "Like being at a nonstop party in celebration of everything that matters." -- Thomas Pynchon "A rollicking, frequently surprising adventure-cum-fairy tale. It also has a sweetness about it and an indigenous American optimism." -- The New York Times Book Review "Diverse, savvy, passionate.... Poetry should be a pleasure, and Jim Dodge's work is just that." -- Gary Snyder

Little Green Man


Simon Armitage - 2001
    Armitage's protagonist is the feckless Barney, thirtysomething, divorced, and alienated from his autistic son. His only passion are his mates, "the old friends, the ones you were brought up with, who go further back than you remember, who've been there since the beginning. You didn't choose them--they're like family. Like blood." When Barney unearths what turns out to be a priceless relic from his childhood days--the "little green man" of the novel's title--he gets back in touch with his old gang: Winkie, Pompus, Stubbs and Tony Football. Desperate to "turn back the clock" and relive their childhood escapades, Barney proposes a game of truth or dare. Each member of the gang "dares" another. Failure to complete a dare leads to disqualification. The winner walks away with the priceless little green man. As the stakes get higher, friendships begin to dissolve as hairy women are seduced, sheep are slaughtered and excrement eaten. In the process the gang reveal some of their deepest secrets, from abuse to impotence, and as the game begins to get out of hand, Barney himself has to confront the responsibilities of adulthood. The problem is that the novel's brutally frank portrayal of both Barney and his gang is so convincing that it becomes difficult to feel any sympathy for anyone. Little Green Man is a tough, uncompromising debut novel, but many fans of Armitage may feel it lacks the originality of his highly acclaimed poetry. --Jerry Brotton

Amy Lowell: Selected Poems


Amy Lowell - 2004
    But in the words of editor Honor Moore, what strikes the contemporary reader is not the sophistication of Lowell's feminist or antiwar stances, but the bald audacity of her eroticism. Her search for an imagist poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite, found its purest expression in sensual love poems that bristle with lyric intensity. This new selection explores Lowell's full formal range, including cadenced verse, polyphonic prose, narrative poetry, and adaptations from the Chinese, and gives a fresh sense of the passion and energy of her work.

The Purple Palace & other poems


Shayna Klee - 2021
    The semi-autobiographical book is divided into two parts and takes place between two countries; Part I, “is a cloud a living thing?”, takes place during the Author’s tumultueuse teen years with tropical Florida as a backdrop. Part II, “Inside my Shell”, explores themes of transformation as the Author creates a new life in Paris, France. ​The poems in this collection explore the surreal rollercoaster of youth, the performance of identity, being an outsider and the tension between romantic idealism and the dystopic world in which the author finds herself. Her approach to her work as a visual artist is mirrored in her poetry style, which is accompanied by all original illustrations by the Author.

Words You Will Never Read


Jessica Katoff - 2017
    Written as a catharsis in the months following the loss of her father in late 2016, Jessica has taken pen to page to say things he and others will never read, either because they can't, or just won't. Containing entirely new works, this is a can't miss release.

New Addresses


Kenneth Koch - 2000
    His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.From the Hardcover edition.

Glaring Through Oblivion


Serj Tankian - 2011
    For fans stirred by the cerebral lyrics of SOAD albums Hypnotize, Mesmerize, Steal This Album!, Toxicity, and their first, self-titled breakthrough—and for everyone enthusiastic about Serj’s solo album, Imperfect Harmonies—this essential, one-of-a-kind collection of Tankian’s innermost thoughts and feelings is a must-read. Unique illustrations punctuate nearly 70 poems—almost none of which have ever been published before. Glaring through Oblivion is an indispensable find for any true fan.

Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod


Traci Brimhall - 2020
    In this ambitious collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other—much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief. Like Eve thrust from Eden, Brimhall is tasked with finding meaning in a world defined by its cruelty. Unrelenting, incisive, and tender, these poems expose beauty in the grotesque and argue that the effort to be good always outweighs the desire to succumb to what is easy.

The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems


Olena Kalytiak Davis - 2014
    Its complex tones arise from the poet’s wanting equally to seduce and to repel a lover whose deepening silence only provokes rhetorical escalation. The effect can be like reading e-mails in someone’s drafts folder—but who wouldn’t want to read Davis’s drafts?"—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker“Davis’ first full collection in a decade should be stamped with the warning, ‘Buckle up!,’ because entering this writer’s mind is one wild ride of digression, mutation, and syntactical and typographical experimentation… Davis has clearly put the poetic rule book through a shredder, and there’s much to appreciate about that.”—Booklist"There is an eerie precision to her work—like the delicate discernment of a brain surgeon's scalpel—that renders each moment in both its absolute clarity and ultimate transitory fragility."—Rita DoveIn her first full collection in a decade, Olena Kalytiak Davis revivifies language and makes love offerings to her beloved reader. With a heightened post-confessional directness, she addresses lost love, sexual violence, and the confrontations of aging. In her characteristic syntactical play, sly slips of meaning, and all-out feminism, Davis hyperconsciously erases the rulebook in this memorable collection.From "The Poem She Didn't Write":beganwhen she stoppedbegan in winter and, like everything else, at first, just waited for springin spring noticed there were lilac branches, but no desire,no need to talk to any angel, to say: sky, dooryard, _______,when summer arrived there was more, but not muchnothing really worth notingand then it was winter again—nothing had changed: sky, dooryard, ________, white,frozen was the lake and the lagoon, some froze the ocean(now you erase that) (you cross that out)and so on and so forth . . . Olena Kalytiak Davis is a first-generation Ukrainian American who was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Educated at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan Law School, and Vermont College, she is the author of three books of poetry. She currently works as a lawyer in Anchorage, Alaska.

Torn Awake


Forrest Gander - 2001
    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

Haunted Falls


Ken Farmer - 2013
    Marshal Bass Reeves in their first book, entitled "The Nations". The story continues in "Haunted Falls", the story of Bass Reeves as he joins other U.S. Marshals in pursuit of the infamous Dalton gang. It is full of adventure, romance, some history, excitement and a unique paranormal twist. You will not want to miss this sequel.