The Compleat Purge


Trisha Low - 2013
    Poetry. Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Trisha Low is just another feminist, confessional writer trying to find a good way to deal with all her literary dads. She siphons the remix culture of social media into the binge and purge cycle of an engrossing read, with the emphasis on gross. She reads the diaries of teenage girls, their blog comments and love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself. She once surveyed the reactions of Catholic fathers to scripted confessionals she made regarding rough sex with men, secretly recorded the conversations, and transcribed the tapes. The results were anthologized by a major university press. Her first book, THE COMPLEAT PURGE, consists of the last will testament of one Trisha Low, who seems to commit suicide annually; the legal documents accumulate into a coming of age story. It goes on to chronicle the sexual fantasies of indie rock fangirls, who may or may not be exorcising the effects of abuse through their blithe avatars (the guy from The Strokes, etc.). Then Trisha Low finds herself trapped in an 18th century romance novel in the most punishing way, but for whom--we're not really sure. "How is Poetry complicit in the urge to falsely 'heal' societal wounds into the silent fixity of It Gets Better? What better place to look than the teen girl, whose cut wrist is an abject fuck-you; whose cute Band-Aid and its artificial 'healing' is really just your sentimental fantasy.

Coincidence of Memory


Viggo Mortensen - 2002
    In this beautifully illustrated book, the artist combines photographs, paintings, and poems that span his artistic output from 1978 to 2002.

Sonnets


Bernadette Mayer - 1989
    Edited by Lee Ann Brown. SONNETS, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground- breaking works of writing consciousness.

Sad Girl Poems


Christopher Soto - 2016
    Their first chapbook Sad Girl Poems delves into their relationship with domestic violence, queer youth homelessness, & the suicide of a close friend. Of the chapbook, Eileen Myles wrote "Sad Girl Poems are revolutionary and sad and finely wrought on the fly… I keep reading, needing to be living in the world of them.” CAConrad wrote “You are an asshole if you read this book and are not destroyed and renewed and see through the poet Loma a way to redemption for us all.” Christopher Soto is originally from the Los Angeles area but now lives in Brooklyn.

The Father Costume: Ben Marcus and Matthew Ritchie


Ben Marcus - 2002
    Witness a father who takes his two boys out to sea, in flight from some menace at home, thus launching their adventures in a strange and dangerous territory. Artist Matthew Ritchie's striking images blend scientific diagramming with vivid, colorful renderings of the apocalypse, while writer Ben Marcus's cold prose plumbs the inner workings of two boys caught out at sea with a father whose costumes grow increasingly menacing. In this collaborative work, Ritchie's and Marcus's shared obsessions of mythology, physics and ancient texts have produced a conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them.

The Lover's Dictionary


David Levithan - 2011
    And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover's face.How does one talk about love? Do we even have the right words to describe something that can be both utterly mundane and completely transcendent, pulling us out of our everyday lives and making us feel a part of something greater than ourselves? Taking a unique approach to this problem, the nameless narrator of David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary has constructed the story of his relationship as a dictionary. Through these short entries, he provides an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being within a couple, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time.

After the Witch Hunt


Megan Falley - 2012
    Demanding "if you really love a writer, bury her in all your awful and watch as she scrawls her way out," her book does exactly that. An incessant digging, a journey in building escape routes, armed with both humor and a brazen darkness, each poem in this book of bloodletting is another swing of the pick and axe in this young woman"s labor, insistent upon light.

Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar


Richard Brautigan - 1967
    Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways; In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate; and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.

Snowflake


Eileen Myles - 2012
    Snowflake finds the poet awash in an extended and distressed landscape mediated by technology and its distortion of time and space. In different streets, the poet returns home, to the familiar world of human connection. Two books meet as one: more Eileen Myles, more indelible connection, more fleeting ecstasy.

Rontel


Sam Pink - 2012
    Follow him as he attempts to go to his last day of work. Follow him through the subway as he considers stealing chips from a dancing baby. Find him being threatened by a homeless man holding board games. Take his hand as he considers building a hydraulic cocoon for his cat out of a complimentary duffel bag. Walk the streets of Uptown as a cop-killer takes hostages to the roof of an apartment building. Meet his friends. Just kidding! Follow him to his neighbor’s apartment where he gets paid in pumpkin pie to watch a baby. Follow him through through the dull pains of never quite becoming an adult. Sit back, laugh, smile, hold your breath, because not even he knows how it ends.“Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink’s Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.” – Joe Meno

I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems


Sonia Sanchez - 1979
    Includes "Black Magic: Blk Rhetoric" and "Blues."

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet


John Berryman - 1956
    It contains, besides the long title poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the major portion of Short Poems; a selection from The Dispossessed, which drew on two earlier collections; some poems from His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt; and one poem from Sonnets.

Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present


David Lehman - 2003
    But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words "prose poem" an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present. In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Lehman defines the prose poem, summarizes its French heritage, and outlines its history in the United States. Included here are important works from masters of American literature, as well as poems by contemporary mainstays and emerging talents who demonstrate why the form has become an irresistible option for the practicing poet today. Great American Prose Poems is a marvelous collection, a must-have for anyone interested in the current state of the art.

I Wished


Dennis Cooper - 2021
    In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.

The Fun We've Had


Michael J. Seidlinger - 2014
    Who are they? They are him and her. They are you and me. They are rowing to salvage what remains of themselves. They are rowing to remember the fun we’ve had."Michael Seidlinger is a homegrown Calvino, a humanist, and wise and darkly whimsical. His invisible cities are the spires of the sea where we all sail our coffins in search of our stories."--Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville“Melding the static, high-concept premise of two humans floating alone on a coffin in a sea devoid of all else with stark and meditative prose, The Fun We've Had evokes a highly unexpected experience, somewhere between Beckett's most hopeless solipsists and the mysterious energy of a child's Choose Your Own Adventure-era dream.”--Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year and Three Hundred Million“It is obvious that Michael J Seidlinger had a great deal of fun writing The Fun We've Had. What more could a reader ask for?”--Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray“The best poets are writing poetry no matter what they are writing, creating entirely new and weird spaces. There is no doubt Seidlinger has made one of the weirdest spaces we will ever inhabit. In The Fun We’ve Had, every visible thing is a love of disturbing tremors, keeping ahead of our ever-curious eyes, hoping to savor every line. What a magnificent book.”--CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank"Seidlinger’s imagination is a sea unto itself, the reader riding these rollicking waves. This book will have you clutching pages as though they’re life vests. Fans of Calvino and Shelley Jackson will dig the slow submerge into this crazy romp."--Joshua Mohr, author of Damascus"Michael J Seidlinger writes with the kind of weird, wonderful, joyful abandon that reminds the reader that world is still the great unknown. In The Fun We’ve Had, he examines the long blank space between life and death, fills it with love and loss and boats made of coffins, with people clinging to life and using the weight of the past as ballast. This is a fun read, true; but it's also a true read, and that's what makes it so beautifully sad."--Amber Sparks, author of The Desert Places and May We Shed These Human Bodies“Ready for an analogy? Here goes: When you need to give a dog a pill, you don’t just jam it down his throat, you wrap that pill in something yummy, like, say, ham. Michael J Seidlinger understands that this principle extends to people and books. So he’s got this pill he wants you to swallow, right? That pill is the truth about love and death and strife and, more generally, the messy mysterious business of being human, and also of being nothingness. Pretty heavy, right? Big old horse pill. But then Seidlinger, no fool, wraps it in the yummy slow-smoked maple goodness of his humor. He obviously had a fine time writing this book, which is precisely the reason you’ll have a fine time reading it.”–Ron Currie Jr., author of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles