I am going to give you the straight skinny, because you are the biggest shitbird on the planet. Your job is to stand around and stop the bullet that might hit someone of importance. In Viet Nam nice guys do not finish at all and monsters live forever. We are teenaged Quasimodos for the bells of hell and we are as happy as pigs in shit because killing is our business and business is good. The only virtue of the stupid is that they don't live long. The Lord giveth and the M-79 taketh away. If you're lucky, you'll only get killed. There it is. Welcome to the world of zero slack.""We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead. Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves. The black trees are hung with limp windblown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells. Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves. The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood. In the poisonous fields of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants. We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach. The bullfrogs scurry for cover with clumsy and desperately frantic movements horrible to see, finally sinking into oozing slime inhabited by shadows that are alive and best never seen by human eyes. "There are a lot of stories about the Phantom Blooper. Below Phu Bai the Phantom Blooper is a black Marine Lieutenant who inspects defensive positions at bridge security compounds. The next night, they get hit. North of Hue City the Phantom Blooper is a salt and pepper team of snuffy grunts who guide the Marine patrols into L-shaped ambushes set by the Viet Cong. Force Recon claims a probable kill for shooting the Phantom Blooper in the Ashau Valley. The Phantom Blooper was a round-eye, tall and white, with blond hair, wearing black pajamas and a red headband, and armed with a folding-stock AK-47 assault rifle. Recon swears that—and this is no shit—the round-eyed Victor Charlie was the honcho, the leader, of the gook patrol. The Phantom Blooper has many names. The White Cong. Super-Charlie. The American VC. Moon Cusser. The Round-Eyed Victor Charlie. White Charlie. Americong. Yankee Avenger. But whatever name we use, we all know in our hearts the true identity of the Phantom Blooper. He is the dark spirit of our collective bad consciences made real and dangerous. “Go home,” the Phantom Blooper says, every night. And we want to go home, we really do, but we don’t know how. “Go home,” the Phantom Blooper says, without mercy, over and over, again and again, punctuating his sentences with explosions. "If there is a novel that illustrates the extremes to which the American soldier in Vietnam was driven, then Gustav Hasford has written it... (The Phantom Blooper) is a major contribution to our continuing examination of the Vietnam War." --John S. Nelson, professor of English at Saint Mary of the PlainsCollege"Taken individually, each is a brilliant & singular portrayal of the war. Taken together, we have a kind of Vietnam epic... If you can find The Phantom Blooper and The Short-Timers, read them both together." --Brian Siano, The Kubrick Site: Regarding 'Full Metal Jacket' This book was actually completed before Full Metal Jacket was released in 1987, but for some reason not published by Bantam until 1990, at which time Gus put out a press release, wildy attacking his editor. An excerpt of the novel was printed in the January 1990 issue of Playboy. It is a more powerful, more personal story than The Short-Timers, in its description of life among the Viet Cong and how that affects Private Joker. If The Short-Timers details the making of an American solider, this book shows the unmaking. In Hasford's original draft, Joker's conversion was so complete that he became an active VC, going out and killing his fellow Marines. As the inside cover says, "Here is another major novel of the Viet Nam experience from one of its most startlingly able chroniclers... Joker's personal odyssey exposes a searingly honest, tragic, and brutal truth about the war that damned a generation and the betrayal that scarred us all." This was supposed to be the second volume of Gus's Viet Nam trilogy, but the final novel was never finished. The Phantom Blooper is currently out of print, but you can download the entire text right here!

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Wonder at Medusa's potent venom, Circe's fierce sorcery and Athena rising up over Olympus, as Nikita Gill majestically explores the untold stories of the life bringers, warriors, creators, survivors and destroyers that shook the world - the great Greek Goddesses.Vividly re-imagined and beautifully illustrated, step into an ancient world transformed by modern feminist magic.'I watch Girl become Goddessand the metamorphosis is moremagnificent than anythingI have ever known.'

    This standard edition of his poems was edited and arranged by his great friend Geoffrey Keynes. It includes a considerable number of early pieces, among them two of his longest poems, "The Pyramids" and "The Bastille".

    The technique is controlled, not ostentatious, and one senses here a conscious link to the work of older poets such as Larkin and Levertov. Karr's strength lies in her delicate and meticulous control of detail. Characteristically, she describes a cat's nighttime prowl with humor and precision: `` . . . he pounced and rabbit-kicked my head. / I had to disentangle from my hair / all four sets of claws, then tossed him / out into the pyramid of boxes / we'd erected in the yard.'' Such loving attention to seemingly insignificant events is reminiscent of the early work of Adrienne Rich and the use of imagery is similarly evocative (``When the moon / clicked over the sun like a black lens / over a white eye. . . ''). Karr's work generally falls into clipped stanzas, the lines flowing over for an effect of ironic tension appropriate for much of the ``devilish'' material with which she is concerned. While the poet's unflinching consciousness stands out in this text, the poetic voice is not completely developed. (Apr.)

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

    

    The scope of his genius is indicated in this volume by the inclusion of the period’s most scintillating comedy – The Importance of Being Earnest; its most notorious novel – The Picture of Dorian Gray; and its most haunting elegy – The Ballad of Reading Gaol; together with a selection of his most acclaimed essays and stories. This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of De Profundis and Wilde’s teasing parable about Shakespeare, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.Introduction by Terry Eagleton

    'All for Love' is a collection of brief quotations by many hands, chosen and illustrated with exquisite wit by Laura Stoddart.Here the raptures of love are counter-balanced by the rueful, comic, and often rather crisply cynical observations of men and women who have been there before. Divided into sections on the nature of love, the pursuit of love, love and marriage and the love affair, the book ranges from the passionate to the severely practical. We can smile at the silliness of those blinded by love (Shakespeare), feel a pang of heartache for jilted lovers (Dorothy Parker) reflect with Byron that there is little to be said about a happy marriage, and take note of P G Wodehouse advising girls that chumps make the best husbands, while relishing snatches of great poetry about great loves, from Sappho, Marlowe, Wordsworth, John Clare and Thomas Hardy.'All for Love' is a rare treat for everyone who is in love, contemplating marriage, has a broken heart, or has put the whole business behind them, and wants to be cheered up by some brilliant insights and by Laura Stoddart's enchanting visual comments on them.

    Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of "BRIGGFLATTS", which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". Bunting called "BRIGGFLATTS" his 'autobiography'. It is a complex work, drawing on many elements of his life, experience and knowledge, and features the saint Cuthbert and the warrior king Eric Bloodaxe as two opposing aspects of the Northumbrian - and his - character. Its structural models include the sonata form (and Scarlatti's music in particular) and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels, while thematically it recalls Wordsworth's "Prelude". Bunting wrote that 'Poetry, like music, is to be heard.' His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This new edition includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of "BRIGGFLATTS" in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell's 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem, the book includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, "The Poet's Point of View" (1966). All his poetry is available in "Complet Poems" (Bloodaxe Books, 2000).

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.

    Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Longfellow, Yeats, Frost, Poe, etc. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

    . .Taking as its starting point the classic 'wheel of balance' life-coach model, this beautifully packaged collection of extracts and short poems gathers wisdom old and new in a perfect gift for anyone who needs comfort in this f**ked up world of ours.'This is not a poetry book as you know it, this is a life raft.' Emerald Street on Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.