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Art to Choke Hearts


Henry Rollins - 1989
    Selected poetry and prose from 1986.

What the Soul Doesn't Want


Lorna Crozier - 2017
    Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who — not unhappily — finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos


John Berger - 1984
    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems


Oscar Wilde - 1896
    As a writer, he produced The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the finest comedies in English, and other classic plays. His one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is still widely read, as is "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," a powerful poetic indictment of the degradation and inhumanity of prison life.This carefully edited volume focuses on Wilde's poetic legacy. In addition to the title poem, readers will find twenty-three other important works: "The Sphinx," "The Grave of Keats," "Requiescat," "Impression du Matin," "Panthea," "Silentium Amoris," "The Harlot's House," "To L. L." and others. While Wilde's fame rests mainly on his achievements as a dramatist and critic, these poems offer important clues to the themes and subjects that preoccupied him in his other works.

Life Class


Pat Barker - 2007
    The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks's studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army won't take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross just as he and fellow student Elinor Brooke admit their feelings for one another. Amidst the devastation in Ypres, Paul comes to see the world anew - but have his experiences changed him completely? 'Triumphant, shattering, inspiring' The Times 'Barker writes as brilliantly as ever . . . with great tenderness and insight she conveys a wartime world turned upside down'Independent on Sunday 'Vigorous, masterly, gripping' Penelope Lively, Independent 'Extraordinarily powerful' Sunday Telegraph

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

England: Poems from a School


Kate Clanchy - 2018
    In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in The Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group’), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary.In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of many voices.In England: Poems from a School, you will find poetry as easy to read as it is hard to forget, as fresh and bright as the young poets who produced it.

Have The Men Had Enough?


Margaret Forster - 1989
    That's women's work. This is a story of female courage, where black comedy turns to disturbing pathos revolving around the rights of an indomitable woman

Window Poems


Wendell Berry - 2007
    Often on these walks of meditation and reflection, he finds himself making notes for poems. Some years he has accomplished as many as fifteen or twenty poems from those walks, while in other years only half a dozen. The resultant work has been published in collections of Sabbath Poems, a precursor to which was The Window Poems.The Window Poems were composed while Berry looked out of the multi-paned window of his writing studio, “The Long-Legged House.” The house is near the renovated farmhouse where Berry and his wife raised their children and continue to live. These poems contemplate Berry's personal life as much as they ponder the seasons he witnesses through the window. This beautiful book was first designed, composed, and printed on a Washington handpress by Bob Barris, at the Press on Scroll Road, with wood engravings by Wesley Bates. Including an introduction by James Baker Hall, this early sequence of poems signals and celebrates the groundwork of Berry's life.

The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence


D.H. Lawrence - 1964
    This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctioned, his Collected Poems of 1928, the unexpurgated version of Pansies, and Nettles, adding to these volumes the contents of the two notebooks in which he was still writing poetry when he died in 1930.It therefore allows the reader to trace the development of Lawrence as a poet and appreciate the remarkable originality and distinctiveness of his achievement. Not all the poems reprinted here are masterpieces but there is more than enough quality to confirm Lawrence's status as one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century.

Love Poems and Sonnets


William Shakespeare - 1608
    The greatest sonnets ever written, by the greatest poet and playwright in the English language

Stone Hotel: Poems From Prison


Raegan Butcher - 2003
    All encased in the usual lavish, beautiful CrimethInc production.

Cider with Rosie


Laurie Lee - 1959
    She was Rose Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage.From the Paperback edition.

Japanese Haiku


Matsuo Bashō - 1955
    Beloved translator Peter Beilenson’s goal was twofold: to craft a book of haiku accessible to anyone, and to render his best guess at what the poets would have written in English. His translations preserve the sublime spirit of each verse, conjuring vivid visual and emotional impressions in spare words.Haiku icon Basho is represented amply here, as are imagery-virtuoso Buson and wry, warm, painfully human Issa. The verses of Shiki, Joso, Kyorai, Kikaku, Chora, Gyodai, Kakei, Izen, and others also appear, all illuminated by lovely woodblock prints. Ranging from exquisite (In the sea surf edge/Mingling with the bright small shells…/Bush-clover petals –Basho) to bittersweet (Dead my fine hopes/And dry my dreaming, but still…/Iris, blue each spring –Shushiki) to silly (Dim the grey cow comes/Mooing, mooing, and mooing/Out of the morning mist –Issa), this collection will stir your senses and your heart.

Natural History


Dan Chiasson - 2005
    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.